Abstract
This is the second part of our discussion of José Kelly and Marcos Matos’s “politics of regard” and its relation to our theories of mastery. In the first part, published in the previous issue of this journal, we analysed the authors’ premisses and reinterpreted the ethnographic data that they use to support it. In this second part, we reclaim the central place of the relational schema of mastery in lowland South American anthropology, and trace its pertinence in different ethnographic contexts. We then shift the middle course of the Juruá and Purus rivers, and the Arawá and Katukina speaking people that inhabit it, to provide a different analysis of the purported ‘alteration’ and ‘mutuality’ that would characterise the region according to politics of regard. Finally, we consider the political importance of the figure of ‘master’ or ‘owner’ in the relations that Indigenous peoples sustain with the nation states in which they live.
Key words:
Amazonia; mastery; filiation; agency; kinship; Indigenous politics