P Gow
Biographic Data
| ID | 13339 |
|---|---|
| NAME | P Gow |
| GIVEN NAMES | P |
| FAMILY NAME | Gow |
| SIGNATURE | GOW P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St Andrews |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3285-8856 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 56 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 494 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 56 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The white-lipped peccaries of neighbouring peoples: A Lévi-Straussian mythic ‘point of articulation’ among the Yine and Asháninka peoples of Peruvian Amazonia
This article examines two versions of an indigenous Amazonian oral history about white-lipped peccaries that was told twenty-seven years apart, the first time by a Yine man and the second time by an Asháninka man. The comparison engaged here is not between two languages or cultures as pre-existent separable objects, but rather towards the elucidation of one of their constitutive ‘points of articulation’.
« Qui sont ces Indiens sauvages ? » À propos de la politique étrangère de quelques peuples d’Amazonie en isolement volontaire
Cet article propose une réflexion sur le phénomène de l’isolement volontaire en Amazonie. Il questionne le rôle de l’anthropologie dans sa conceptualisation et ce que les anthropologues pourraient en dire en tant que phénomène concret. Malgré le peu de données ethnographiques et le maigre savoir disponible sur les populations volontairement isolées, la recherche anthropologique a produit des connaissances impressionnantes sur les formes sociales …
Quem são esses índios brabos: Sobre as políticas externas de alguns povos voluntariamente isolados na Amazônia
A História de Carolina. Um estudo de caso sobre a difusão de um mito no Sudoeste Amazônico
Um povo pode desaparecer, mas não uma história. Isso foi o que ocorreu com um mito kuniba, narrado a Nimuendaju por Carolina, em uma situação de remoção forçada promovida pelo Estado brasileiro no começo do século XX. O mito em questão falava da origem da lua, ocasionada pelo incesto de um irmão com uma irmã. Até o começo do século XX, povos vizinhos dos Kuniba, como os Cashinahua e os Kanamari, tinham narrativas muito distintas sobre a origem da…
Who Are These Wild Indians: On the Foreign Policies of Some Voluntarily Isolated Peoples in Amazonia
This paper is a reflection on the phenomenon of voluntary isolation in Amazonia, about anthropology’s implication in its formation as a concept, and what anthropologists might profitably say about it as a concrete phenomenon in the world. While knowledge based on ethnographic fieldwork might by minimal or even totally absent for people in voluntary isolation, anthropological research has produced a very impressive understanding of indigenous Amaz…
On jaguars and fish
Comment on Turner, Terence. 2017. "Beauty and the beast: The fearful symmetry of the jaguar and other natural beings in Kayapo ritual and myth." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 51-70
Steps towards an ethnographic theory of acculturation
Etnografia. Praktyki, Teorie, DoÅ wiadczenia » Numer 1/2015 » Steps towards an ethnographic theory of acculturation A A A
“Listen to me, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me . . .”: A brief commentary on The falling sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert
Comment on Kopenawa, Davi and Bruce Albert. 2013. The falling sky: Words of a Yanomami shaman. Translated by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Mitos e Mitopoiesis
Capítulo 3 da obra Um mito amazônico e sua história, de Peter Gow. Neste capítulo, Peter Gow inicia o esforço, delineado na Introdução de Um Mito Amazônico e sua História e perseguido ao longo do livro, de unir as tradições intelectuais de Malinowski e Lévi-Strauss, com vistas a uma melhor compreensão dos modos específicos de transformação da mitologia Piro (Yine), em especial da maneira como estes se transformam ao longo do ciclo de vida do narr…
Autodenominations: An Ethnographer's Account from Peruvian Amazonia
Is There Fortune in Greater Amazonia
In this article, the authors explore the meanings of fortune among two peoples of Greater Amazonia. Luck, chance, and destiny play little role in the ethnographic record of this extensive region, and it is worth asking why this should be so. Two ethnographic cases are presented—the Kuna of Panama and the indigenous people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia. The first describes what the ethnographer finds instead of elaborated discour…
The Piro canoe. A preliminary ethnographic account
The Piro canoe. A preliminary ethnographic account. The article provides a preliminary account of the canoes made and used by the Piro (Yine) people of the Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia, with a particular focus on the processes of construction, naming and crewing. The canoe, among these people, is a basic model of affinity, both male-female and male-male. The canoe and canoe journeys are a basic social model of space for these people, servi…
Me deixa em paz!' Um relato etnográfico preliminar sobre o isolamento voluntário dos Mashco
Este artigo procura oferecer uma discussão etnográfica sobre o significado do isolamento voluntário para o povo Mashco da Amazônia peruana. A natureza mesma do isolamento voluntário escapa à pesquisa etnográfica, baseada na observação participante. Na ausência de tal tipo de pesquisa, explora-se o que se sabe sobre esse povo por meio de fontes escritas e, especialmente (etnograficamente), por meio do que sabem os Piro (Yine), seus vizinhos e 'par…
Um peixe olhou para mim: O povo Yudjá e a perspectiva
The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss is one of the major thinkers of the modern age. Regarded as a crucial figure in the development of structuralism, his writings are studied across a wide range of disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy and literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Lévi-Strauss presents a major reassessment of his work and influence. The fifteen specially-commissioned essays in this volume engage with the controversies that have surr…
Answering Daima's Question: The Ontogeny of an Anthropological Epistemology in Eighteenth-Century Scotland
This article seeks to describe the social preconditions of the emergence of science in Scotland since the Enlightenment and what came to be unknown in the process. It addresses the way in which the geologist James Hutton generated a specific category of 'men of scientific observation' as opposed to 'men of common observation'. In doing so, he, like other Enlightenment thinkers, transformed an existing spatial ordering of social relations into a t…
Ropa como aculturación en la Amazonía peruana
Este artículo examina el significado de la ropa para los yine, un pueblo arawak del Bajo Urubamba, y de los cambios de estilos de vestir ocurridos en su historia durante los últimos siglos de contacto con la colonización. Este acercamiento histórico tiene dos consecuencias. Primero, sugiere que los yine piensan sobre la ropa como algo que señala la alteridad. Los yine continuamente toman la ropa de otros seres, ya sea pueblos vecinos, gente blanc…
Forgetting Conversion: The Summer Institute of Linguistics Mission in the Piro Lived World
Purús Song: Nationalization and Tribalization in Southwestern Amazonia
Starting from a statement about knowledge and power by a Piaroa informant of Joanna Overing, the article analyses two descriptions of a meal on the Purús river in the early twentieth century: a Piro song and a short essay by Euclides da Cunha. Contrasting these two pieces in the context of how the ancestors of the Piro people of today came to meet the famous Brazilian writer, I propose the concepts of “nationalization” and “tribalization” as mode…
Da Etnografia à História: Introdução" e "Conclusão" de Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazônia
Este trabalho e uma etnografia do povo na- tivo do rio Baixo Urubamba, no Peru oriental. As pessoas desta area da Amazonia peruana fre- quentemente dizem ser de sangre mezclada, "de sangue misturado". Ao fazer isto, elas parecem colocar em duvida a continuidade cultural en- tre elas mesmas e os ancestrais Piro, Campa e outras populacoes indigenas da regiao. Tal re- jeicao de continuidade cultural e penetrante em seu discurso. Quando discutem a or…
Canção Purús: Nacionalização e tribalização no sudoeste da Amazônia
Tomando como ponto de partida a fala de um informante piaroa de Joanna Overing, o artigo analisa duas descrições de uma refeição no rio Purús no começo do século XX: uma canção piro e um ensaio breve de Euclides da Cunha. Contrastando as duas peças, referindo-as ao contexto do encontro dos ancestrais dos Piro com o celebrado escritor brasileiro, proponho os conceitos de "nacionalização" e "tribalização" como modos de ação simbólica. Nacionalizaçã…
In Amazonia: A Natural History
O Uso Ritual Da Ayahuasca
Ex-cocama: Identidades em transformação na Amazônia peruana
Este artigo analisa a "aculturação", um conceito derivado da antropologia cultural, do ponto de vista da antropologia social. O termo "ex-Cocama" foi cunhado por antropólogos culturais para denotar a suposta perda ou recusa da identidade indígena pelos Cocama da Amazônia peruana, que pareceriam assim representar um caso clássico de "aculturação". Argumento, todavia, que este caso aparentemente clássico é melhor compreendido como mais um exemplo d…
Helpless - the affective preconditions of Piro social life
This chapter explores the dynamics of a particular experiential state, which I here term &s;helplessness&s;, among the Piro people of Peruvian Amazonia, to shed light on the specific Piro conception of the human condition, and of the place of humanity in the cosmos. It draws on and extends a larger body of work concerned to develop a phenomenological account of the lived world of these people (Gow 1989, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1995a, 1995b, 1997,…
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Peter Gow's *Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia* offers an ethnographic study of the Piro people of the Bajo Urubamba River region. Challenging conventional portrayals of Amazonian indigenous groups as passive victims of acculturation, Gow focuses on Piro claims of "mixed blood" and their engagement with institutions like schools and land reform laws. He argues that these claims, when understood within the context of Piro va…
The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy
Peter Gow's article, "The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy" (1989), explores the Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon and their unique conceptualization of childhood and child development. Challenging Western developmental paradigms, Gow argues that Piro notions of personhood and desire are intricately linked to their subsistence practices and social organization. He examines how Piro children are perceived as having…
Piro Designs: Painting as Meaningful Action in an Amazonian Lived World
Starting from the problems of describing non-Western visual aesthetic systems ethnographically, this article provides a basic account of yonata, painting with design, among the Piro people of the Bajo Urubamba river in Eastern Peru. Yonata, and its product yonchi, `design', is the Piro variant of the Amazonian practice of painting surfaces with designs of `geometric' type. Placing this practice in the context of the Piro lived world, I argue that…
O parentesco como consciência humana: O Caso Dos Piro
Este artigo analisa o sistema de parentesco dos Piro da Amazônia peruana como um sistema autopoiético, isto é, como um sistema que gera suas próprias condições de existência. O postulado teórico central é que o parentesco é um sistema de subjetividade, pois as estruturas básicas da consciência humana envolvem necessariamente a consciência de um eu em meio aos outros. Um dos objetivos aqui perseguidos é o de contribuir para que a antropologia simb…
Gringos and Wild Indians Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures
Gow Peter. Gringos and Wild Indians Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. La remontée de l'Amazone. pp. 327-347
Could sangama read? The origin of writing among the Piro of Eastern Peru
Ex-cocama: Identidades em transformação na Amazônia peruana
Este artigo analisa a "aculturação", um conceito derivado da antropologia cultural, do ponto de vista da antropologia social. O termo "ex-Cocama" foi cunhado por antropólogos culturais para denotar a suposta perda ou recusa da identidade indígena pelos Cocama da Amazônia peruana, que pareceriam assim representar um caso clássico de "aculturação". Argumento, todavia, que este caso aparentemente clássico é melhor compreendido como mais um exemplo d…
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Steps towards an ethnographic theory of acculturation
Etnografia. Praktyki, Teorie, DoÅ wiadczenia » Numer 1/2015 » Steps towards an ethnographic theory of acculturation A A A
O Uso Ritual Da Ayahuasca
The Piro canoe. A preliminary ethnographic account
The Piro canoe. A preliminary ethnographic account. The article provides a preliminary account of the canoes made and used by the Piro (Yine) people of the Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia, with a particular focus on the processes of construction, naming and crewing. The canoe, among these people, is a basic model of affinity, both male-female and male-male. The canoe and canoe journeys are a basic social model of space for these people, servi…
Da Etnografia à História: Introdução" e "Conclusão" de Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazônia
Este trabalho e uma etnografia do povo na- tivo do rio Baixo Urubamba, no Peru oriental. As pessoas desta area da Amazonia peruana fre- quentemente dizem ser de sangre mezclada, "de sangue misturado". Ao fazer isto, elas parecem colocar em duvida a continuidade cultural en- tre elas mesmas e os ancestrais Piro, Campa e outras populacoes indigenas da regiao. Tal re- jeicao de continuidade cultural e penetrante em seu discurso. Quando discutem a or…
In the Eyes of the Beholder: Leadership and the Social Construction of Power and Dominance Among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon
Ropa como aculturación en la Amazonía peruana
Este artículo examina el significado de la ropa para los yine, un pueblo arawak del Bajo Urubamba, y de los cambios de estilos de vestir ocurridos en su historia durante los últimos siglos de contacto con la colonización. Este acercamiento histórico tiene dos consecuencias. Primero, sugiere que los yine piensan sobre la ropa como algo que señala la alteridad. Los yine continuamente toman la ropa de otros seres, ya sea pueblos vecinos, gente blanc…
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Who Are These Wild Indians: On the Foreign Policies of Some Voluntarily Isolated Peoples in Amazonia
This paper is a reflection on the phenomenon of voluntary isolation in Amazonia, about anthropology’s implication in its formation as a concept, and what anthropologists might profitably say about it as a concrete phenomenon in the world. While knowledge based on ethnographic fieldwork might by minimal or even totally absent for people in voluntary isolation, anthropological research has produced a very impressive understanding of indigenous Amaz…
Mitos e Mitopoiesis
Capítulo 3 da obra Um mito amazônico e sua história, de Peter Gow. Neste capítulo, Peter Gow inicia o esforço, delineado na Introdução de Um Mito Amazônico e sua História e perseguido ao longo do livro, de unir as tradições intelectuais de Malinowski e Lévi-Strauss, com vistas a uma melhor compreensão dos modos específicos de transformação da mitologia Piro (Yine), em especial da maneira como estes se transformam ao longo do ciclo de vida do narr…
Cinema da floresta
This essay is a phenomenological ethnography or cinema as meaningful lived experience in the Alto Ucayali. It also explores the analogy between films and hallucinogen ayahuasca called "cinema of the forest" that renders the normally-invisihle powerful beings in visible form . If film and ayahuasca are similar, both experiences differ from dreaming
Canção Purús: Nacionalização e tribalização no sudoeste da Amazônia
Tomando como ponto de partida a fala de um informante piaroa de Joanna Overing, o artigo analisa duas descrições de uma refeição no rio Purús no começo do século XX: uma canção piro e um ensaio breve de Euclides da Cunha. Contrastando as duas peças, referindo-as ao contexto do encontro dos ancestrais dos Piro com o celebrado escritor brasileiro, proponho os conceitos de "nacionalização" e "tribalização" como modos de ação simbólica. Nacionalizaçã…
The white-lipped peccaries of neighbouring peoples: A Lévi-Straussian mythic ‘point of articulation’ among the Yine and Asháninka peoples of Peruvian Amazonia
This article examines two versions of an indigenous Amazonian oral history about white-lipped peccaries that was told twenty-seven years apart, the first time by a Yine man and the second time by an Asháninka man. The comparison engaged here is not between two languages or cultures as pre-existent separable objects, but rather towards the elucidation of one of their constitutive ‘points of articulation’.
A História de Carolina. Um estudo de caso sobre a difusão de um mito no Sudoeste Amazônico
Um povo pode desaparecer, mas não uma história. Isso foi o que ocorreu com um mito kuniba, narrado a Nimuendaju por Carolina, em uma situação de remoção forçada promovida pelo Estado brasileiro no começo do século XX. O mito em questão falava da origem da lua, ocasionada pelo incesto de um irmão com uma irmã. Até o começo do século XX, povos vizinhos dos Kuniba, como os Cashinahua e os Kanamari, tinham narrativas muito distintas sobre a origem da…
Me deixa em paz!' Um relato etnográfico preliminar sobre o isolamento voluntário dos Mashco
Este artigo procura oferecer uma discussão etnográfica sobre o significado do isolamento voluntário para o povo Mashco da Amazônia peruana. A natureza mesma do isolamento voluntário escapa à pesquisa etnográfica, baseada na observação participante. Na ausência de tal tipo de pesquisa, explora-se o que se sabe sobre esse povo por meio de fontes escritas e, especialmente (etnograficamente), por meio do que sabem os Piro (Yine), seus vizinhos e 'par…
In Amazonia: A Natural History
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
The British Museum's Representation of Amazonian Indians
Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing
Tobacco and Shamanism in South America
The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy
Peter Gow's article, "The Perverse Child: Desire in a Native Amazonian Subsistence Economy" (1989), explores the Piro people of the Peruvian Amazon and their unique conceptualization of childhood and child development. Challenging Western developmental paradigms, Gow argues that Piro notions of personhood and desire are intricately linked to their subsistence practices and social organization. He examines how Piro children are perceived as having…
In the Eyes of the Beholder: Leadership and the Social Construction of Power and Dominance Among the Matsigenka of the Peruvian Amazon
Could sangama read? The origin of writing among the Piro of Eastern Peru
Glossary
Subject Social and Cultural Anthropology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Living and Dying
There is an extensive literature on residence patterns in Amazonia, including considerable discussion of cases in which, like the case of the native communities of the Bajo Urubamba, there is no other residence rule than the injunction that people should live with all their kin. Riviere and Overing have discussed societies in the Guianas where the only residence “rule” is the injunction to reside with all one’s kin. Both writers have provided sta…
Conclusion: A Comparison of Native Amazonian Kinship Systems
Many of the themes of the kinship system outlined in the chapter of Part II are found in other areas of Amazonia, although not in quite this form. Thus the marriage pattern based on ‘marrying at a distance’ is similar to that of the Machiguenga, while the stress on marriage between different ‘kinds of people’ is similar to that of the North-West Amazon. The model of the community as composed of a set of people who are all kin to each other is com…
The Comunidad Nativa
At the level of space, there is nothing which turns one of an infinity of possible sites along the course of the Bajo Urubamba river into a village site in preference to any other. Nor is there any moral discourse which turns one set of people related as kin, affines, or compadres into a community in preference to any other possible set. As noted in Part II, on the Bajo Urubamba, the relations between people and land and the relations they have w…
From Ethnography To History
Subject Social and Cultural Anthropology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
A Geographical History of the Bajo Urubamba
The Baja Urubamba is that area drained by the Urubamba river from its confluence with the Camisea downstream to where it joins the Tambo (Map 1). Like its western neighbour the Tambo-Ene Apurimac, the Urubamba river rises in the southern Andes of Peru. The two rivers flow northwards, then converge just below Atalaya to form the Ucayali, which continues north to join the Maranan, forming the Amazon mainstream. In terms of relief and vegetation cov…
Parents and Children
It is children who transform a married couple into fully adult producers, and so the present chapter explores child-raising. The activities of raising a child form the core idioms of relations between kin, defining the category familia legitima, ‘real kin’. Native people see child-raising as a process in which adult care giving evokes the love of the child, which endures into adulthood as the memory of care given. This memory, developed in the ch…
Bosses and Workers: The System of Habilitación
The commercial economy of the Bajo Urubamba is an extractive-mercantile economy dominated, at the time of my research, by lumbering. The present chapter analyses the local socio-economic system in terms of how, through the system of credit and debt known as habilitación, the local entrepreneurs use a largely native labour force. The native workers mobilize subsistence security independently of their bosses, but rely on the economy of habilitación…
Conclusion: The Bajo Urubamba 1n Amazonian Perspective
Overing has argued that underlying all the dissimilar social structures of Lowland South America is a single philosophy of society: ‘the universe exists, life exists, society exists only insofar as there is contact and proper mixing among things that are different from one another’ (Overing Kaplan 1981: 161). Her argument is persuasive, and its echoes ring around Amazonian cultures, with their deep concern with duality, reciprocity, and safe self…
Husband and Wife
The house and the garden establish the human space of settlement. Both are transformed forest, and both must be constantly maintained in the face of forest regeneration. The house is the locus of most human activity, the place in which meals are prepared and eaten and in which people sleep. The meals are prepared in the kitchen and eaten in the open section of the house, while the enclosed room is used for storing possessions and for sleeping and…
Epigraph
Subject Social and Cultural Anthropology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
The School and the Shaman
In native people’s narratives of history, schools play an important role. Leaving the haciendas, native people moved to communities with schools, so that their children could be educated. The school is today central to the definition of a native community as a caserio legitimo, ‘real village’. As an institution the school unites two powerful themes for native people: knowledge and children. This chapter investigates the meaning of the schools for…
The Time and Space of Civilization
‘Ya somos gente civilizada’ (‘Now we are civilized people’). This is a statement constantly made by native people on the Bajo Urubamba. It seems, to the hearer, to be a statement of separation from the past, and of the irrelevance of older generations’ experience. But, in the speech of native people, it calls up a multiplicity of associations which extend out across time and space to locate them within a larger spatial and temporal system. To und…
Genealogies
Subject Social and Cultural Anthropology Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online
Mixed People
The native people of the Bajo Urubamba frequently assert that they are ‘mixed people’ (gente mezclada) or ‘of mixed blood’ (de sangre mezclada). The idiom of ‘mixing’ refers to the collapse of pure ‘kinds of people’ existing at the beginning of history through intermarriage, and that of ‘mixed people’ asserts that kinship is a historical product. This intermarriage is productive of new settlements and hence of new generations, which differ catego…
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Peter Gow's *Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia* offers an ethnographic study of the Piro people of the Bajo Urubamba River region. Challenging conventional portrayals of Amazonian indigenous groups as passive victims of acculturation, Gow focuses on Piro claims of "mixed blood" and their engagement with institutions like schools and land reform laws. He argues that these claims, when understood within the context of Piro va…
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Gringos and Wild Indians Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures
Gow Peter. Gringos and Wild Indians Images of History in Western Amazonian Cultures. In: L'Homme, 1993, tome 33 n°126-128. La remontée de l'Amazone. pp. 327-347
Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Peruvian Amazonia
Sociology (30 works) · Geography (25 works) · History (25 works) · Amazon rainforest (23 works) · Anthropology (20 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (17 works) · Archaeology (17 works) · Biology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Art (14 works)