DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

Praying and Preying

Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia

Aparecida Vilaça author

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 cover

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