Praying and Preying
Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia
Format:Hardback
Publisher:University of California Press
Published:10th May '16
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari', inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vilaca turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic and mythological material related to both the Wari' and missionaries perspectives and the author's own ethnographic field notes from her more than 30-year involvement with the Wari' community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the Anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.
"Praying and Preying is a remarkably original and important study." Anthropology Review Database
ISBN: 9780520289130
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 25mm
Weight: unknown
330 pages