The Orphaned Past: Ache Autonomy and Relationality in Times of Change

Abstract

The concept of “ownership” has assumed some prominence in the recent anthropology of lowland South America (Fausto 2002; 2012; Bonilla 2005; Costa 2017). “Ownership,” as it is typically defined, is a hierarchical relation that gradually develops between an “owner” and a person owned (whether human or non-human) through continued acts of care and feeding. In this dissertation, I explore the notion of ownership through the history of settlement of one group of South American hunter-gatherers, the Ache of eastern Paraguay. Attending to ownership relations between kin, between the living and dead, between Ache and Paraguayans, and between humanity and the Christian God, I argue that hierarchical relations of ownership contain important moral presuppositions. I describe how relations are evaluated in these domains to show that an essential aspect of ownership is the evaluation of it, and the risks inherent in the relation are integral to the continuous feeding and care that sustains it.