Recreating Relatedness

In Amazonian social philosophies, proximity and relatedness have typically been created by common social acts that are conceived to produce similar bodies (McCallum 1996; Conklin and Morgan 1996; Vilaça 2002, 2005). This chapter looks at how relatedness is currently built between Manchineri villages, generations, urban and forest dwellers, and genders. First I look at community making through community practices and discourses and how this changes between the villages depicted in the drawings of young people in the reserve and the city. Here, I shall also shortly address the new relations of exchange. Broadening my view to other indigenous youths, the Cashinahua and Apurinã, I next examine how indigenousness is produced strategically in different encounters, while in the third section I turn to ritual practices in new environments. The ethnographic material shows how the sense of a shared past and present, as well as similar approaches in various social environments, produce similar “indigenous bodies” with a specific way of thinking—the idea of human agency with differing power and capacities.