2018FHAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 8 (1/2): 6–19

LECTURE

The devil and the hidden life of numbers

Translations and transformations in Amazonia1
The Inaugural Claude Lévi-Strauss lecture
Aparecida V I L A Ç A , Univerdade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

The notion of “aberrant derivations,” coined by Lévi-Strauss in The origin of table manners in his discussion of the strange sums
made by Native American peoples, take us to an usual starting point-mathematics, to explore the theme of the transformations
arising from the encounter between Amerindian peoples and whites in Amazonia, among them the conversion of Christianity.
Keywords: Wari’, science, mathematics, numbers, Christianity, interethnic contact, translation, transformation, perspectivism,
Amazonia, Lévi-Strauss

It is an immense honor for me to inaugurate this cycle
of Lévi-Strauss lectures. I hold an enormous admiration
for the scholar who was undoubtedly the greatest an-
thropologist of the twentieth century and whose influ-
ence was decisive for the development of anthropology
in Brazil, in particular for the line of research in which I
trained at the Museu Nacional of the Federal University
of Rio de Janeiro. His work placed South American in-
digenous peoples at the center of discussion, not in the
manner prevalent in the anthropology of his era in
which indigenous practices and thought were adapted
to anthropological categories, but, on the contrary, by
allowing these practices and this thought to stimulate
the creation of new categories and new concepts that
1. This text is a reworked version of the Inaugural Lévi-
Strauss Lecture, presented on October 13, 2017 at the
Collège de France, Paris. My thanks to Olivier Allard,
Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Carlos Fausto, and Stephen
Hugh-Jones for reading the manuscript and to Oiara
Bonilla for its translation into French. This English ver-
sion has been translated by David Rodgers. The French
version of this lecture has been published in L’Homme
(nr. 225, 2018, p. 149–170). The editor wishes to thank
the memorial lecture committee at L’Homme for orga-
nising the event and offering the lecture to HAU.
would come to revolutionize Americanist anthropol-
ogy. His intellectual enterprise also had important polit-
ical effects. By underlining the intelligence and sophis-
tication of indigenous peoples, his work contributed, in
Brazil, to ensuring that legal guarantees protecting their
lands and traditions, still under threat in my country to-
day, were written into the Constitution. Speaking about
the thought of these peoples in this institution which
saw the birth, via the voice of Lévi-Strauss, echoed today
by Philippe Descola, of the most important and revolu-
tionary reflection concerning them, is undoubtedly a
huge responsibility—bearable only because of my confi-
dence in the power of enchantment and seduction of this
original thought of which I am here one more spokes-
person.
Claude Lévi-Strauss taught us, especially through his
Mythologiques, that our point of departure matters lit-
tle, given that every analysis will eventually lead us,
via parallel pathways, to the structural properties of
the thought in question. So, in order to discuss the en-
counter between Indians and Whites—a theme on which
I have been working for at least twenty years, strongly
inspired by my reading of The story of lynx (Lévi-Strauss
1995)—and the process of Christianization of native
peoples in particular, I have chosen a fairly unusual
starting point: mathematics. Mindful that this was a do-

HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. Volume 8, number 1/2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/698303

© The Society for Ethnographic Theory. All rights reserved. 2575-1433/2018/0812-0002$10.00

This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
7 THE DEVIL AND
main dear to Lévi-Strauss, who made an original use of
algebraic formulas and expressions as explanatory tools,
my interest here resides in another mathematics, that of
native peoples, more especially some of its strange pecu-
liarities.
In western history, mathematics is the discipline that
incarnates scientific knowledge in its purest form. Due
to its professed capacity to objectively represent reality
without the noise generated by the frictions and humors
inherent to physics, biology or chemistry, mathematics
established itself as the paradigmatic language of the
West (Urton 1997: 16–17).2 I found myself compelled
to understand how the Indians with whom I have
worked for more than thirty years, the Wari’ of the
southwest of Brazilian Amazonia, make their own form
of quantifying the world interact with that of the Whites,
in commercial exchanges, in village schools, or, more
recently, on the intercultural university teacher training
courses.
Without doubt I could have chosen as my starting
point other contexts involving the interactions between
indigenous and white people, but what interests me, as
the master whom we honor here taught us, is to show
how different paths can lead us to the same destina-
tion—in this case, the peculiarities of Wari’ thought
vis-à-vis alterity, and their own modes of translation
and transformation. As the history of science shows us,
moreover, Christianity and mathematics are closer than
they might seem, considering that the advent of Chris-
tianity, in continuity with Greek philosophy, was deci-
sive in terms of constituting the notion of nature that
mathematics would later take on the role of describing.3
2. For Galileo, the “book of nature” was written in the lan-
guage of mathematics (in [1623] 1996). According to
Alexandre Koyré (1980: 61), for Plato, mathematics was
the science par excellence, while for the Aristotelians, na-
ture did not conform to mathematical exactitude: the na-
ture of physical being is qualitative and vague, always
more or less (ibid.: 42–43), a fact recognized, Koyré (ibid.:
47) asserts, by Galileo and Descartes. Thomas Crump, for
his part, argues that “mathematics is not so much a sci-
ence, but a ‘language for other sciences’” (1990: 4). See
also Paolo Rossi (2001: 356).
3. Friedrich Nietzsche, in a critique of Plato, describes the
latter as “so pre-existently Christian” (in [1888] 1978:
343). See, too, Robert Lenoble ([1968] 1990: 186–87 and
240–41), Bruno Latour ([1991] 1993: 33–34 and 127),
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004: 482), and Philippe
Descola (2005: 540).
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
“Aberrant derivations”4
As with other themes, it was Claude Lévi-Strauss who
first stirred my interest in indigenous mathematics, spe-
cifically through a brief observation, one he himself
would explore little, made in the chapter of The origin
of table manners entitled “Groups of ten” (Lévi-Strauss
1978: 327–75). In this chapter, where the quinary, dec-
imal and vigesimal systems of the peoples of North and
Central America are analyzed, Lévi-Strauss draws our
attention to the strange mechanisms of derivation found
among speakers of Eskimo, Athapaskan, and Penutian
languages of northwest North America. These peoples
use distinct terms for the numbers 1 to 6, “but strange
as it may seem, they form 7 by derivation from 6 1 2,
8 by derivation from 6 1 3, and 9 by derivation from
6 1 4” (ibid.: 337).
After reminding us that we need to understand “the
spirit of each [arithmetic] system” without imposing
our own categories, but linking the system instead to
the practices and beliefs of the peoples concerned, Lévi-
Strauss searches for an explanation for what he denom-
inates “aberrant derivations” in a series of myths from
other peoples on the same continent. These calculations
reveal that the number lacking from the sums cited above
is incarnated by a mediating figure that does not form
part of the combined sets. These myths unite or separate
two groups of men, one formed by five brothers and an-
other by two brothers, intermediated by a woman, sister
of one or the other fraternal group. The native deriva-
tions arise from the fact that in both the addition (5 1 2)
and the subtractions (7 – 5 or 7 – 2), a third term be-
comes necessary, which performs the role of an operator
(Lévi-Strauss 1978: 337).
Recalling in passing that this directly evokes the
theme of the triadic basis to dyadic structures, an in-
sight that yielded so much in Lévi-Strauss’s work, we
can now make an even bigger leap across the Americas,
pausing an instant, before arriving at the Wari’, in the
Xingu Indigenous Park, where the anthropologist Mari-
ana Ferreira observed the mathematical practice of the
Xinguano Indians in the 1980s. In her account, she re-
lates the reaction of a government employee who, having
planned to buy 7 arrows at 5 cruzeiros each, became in-
dignant by the aberrant amount eventually demanded
for them:
4. Expression taken from Claude Lévi-Strauss (1978: 337).
 Aparecida VILAÇA
Where on earth does 7 times 5 equal 125? [. . .] You lazy
Indians know nothing about money, about buying and
selling. It’s true what people say, that Indians are too
stupid to learn math. (Ferreira 1997: 133 and 2015: 32).
As Ferreira shows us in her article, suggestively entitled
“When 1 1 1 ≠ 2,” here, too, factors supposedly absent
have been included in the sum: these were the amounts
relating to six ceramic pots purchased by the employee,
along with the meat from a deer, transactions made
in the past but never paid for (1997: 138). The final
amount had been correct, even if the operators taken
into account to reach it were invisible. Another calcu-
lation observed by the same author, who also worked
as a teacher in the school in the Xingu Park, contains
the same inclusion of hidden elements. The problem
given to the students was as follows: “I caught 10 fish
last night and gave 3 of them to my brother. How many
fish do I have now?” “13” came the answer. Observing
the teacher’s surprise, the student explained to her that
his calculation took into account the principles of the
local exchange economy: “I ended up with 13 fish since,
whenever I give my brother anything, he pays me twice
as much back. Therefore, 3 1 3 5 6; 10 1 6 5 16; and
16 2 3 5 13” (Ferreira 1997: 141).5
While these calculations reveal an encompassing of
the market economy by the gift economy, and provide
ample proof, if any were needed, of the cognitive capac-
ity of these peoples, my interest here is to mark the pres-
ence of what we could call a morality of numbers (Ur-
ton 1997: 2). This morality makes numbers, as well as
the operations performed by them, unstable—precisely
those operations elected over our long history as the
most reliable translators of nature. According to Lévi-
Strauss, a third, hidden term imposes itself insistently,
destabilizing the precise relation between dividers and
dividends.
The title of the cited article, “When 1 1 1 ≠ 2” takes
us finally to the Wari’, to their small amount of numbers
and to their translations, which, among others, make
the number “1” equivalent to “minus 1” and also as-
sociate “2” with “many.” Before trying to identify the
hidden elements that enable these translations to be
comprehended, I begin with a brief presentation of the
Wari’.
5. One of the students, Wenhoron Suya, remarked: “I know
that you want me to use the minus sign here instead of
the plus sign, but I don’t understand why. Does giving
always mean less to you guys?” (Ferreira 1997: 141).
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
8
First contacts
The Wari’ population today totals around 3,000 people,
living in diverse villages located in the Brazilian state of
Rondônia, close to the border with Bolivia, not far from
the region travelled by Lévi-Strauss in the 1930s.
Until 1956, the moment when so-called “pacifica-
tion” began, contacts with Whites had only ever been
bellicose, so too the relations between the Wari’ and
the nearest other indigenous groups, the Karipuna and
the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau. From this date, though, expedi-
tions were organized by government agents, accompa-
nied by North American evangelical missionaries from
the recently created New Tribes Mission.6 As soon as
they managed to attract the Indians, the missionaries
settled among them and sought to learn their language
in order to begin their work of translating the Bible and
catechesis as quickly as possible. They started giving lit-
eracy classes, initially taught to adults, later switched to
children only, which gave rise to the first schools in the
Wari’ villages. The missionaries remained as teachers of
bilingual literacy until the 1990s, after which the new
Brazilian state educational project for indigenous peo-
ples was implemented in the region, modeled on cul-
tural relativism, which allowed native teachers to be
trained. In 2009, a university course based on differen-
tiated education was created, proposing an intercultural
teacher training degree composed of modules lasting
two months. During this time, the Wari’ students would
live in town and frequent the classrooms with students
from other indigenous groups in Rondônia. In this school
environment and, more specifically, following the intro-
duction of relativist intercultural education, the Wari’
were forced to adapt their quantifiers to our system of
numeration.
School and mathematics
Like many other peoples from the South American low-
lands, as Lévi-Strauss had already noted in the chapter
cited earlier from The origin of table manners (1978:
337), the Wari’ have a numerical system that some math-
ematicians would describe as rudimentary. Precise quan-
tities are limited to the unit, 1 (xika’pe, “alone”) and the
pair, 2 (tuku karakan, “one facing the other”). These are
6. A Catholic priest took part in one of these expeditions,
but the relation with the Catholic Church, limited to a
small contingent of the Wari’ population, will not be ex-
plored here (see Vilaça 2002, 2010, 2014, 2016a).
9 THE DEVIL AND
not used to derive the other numbers, as happens among
other peoples with a similar kind of binary system. Larger
quantities are relativized and named by quantifiers such
as “few” and “many.” For example, the capture of three
game animals might be called “a lot” when the hunter
lives alone with his family, or just “a little” when he be-
longs to a large village and is obliged to distribute the
meat.
As among many other peoples, the Wari’ use their
fingers to objectify sets,7 particularly the different peo-
ple cited in a narrative, with each finger corresponding
to one person. They switch from one hand to the other,
or may suddenly abandon such gestures, opting to use
one of the terms for “many” instead, designating large
quantities.8
With the arrival of the school and the discovery of
money, received from Whites in exchange for certain
services and spent on items bought from river traders
or, less frequently, in the town of Guajará-Mirim, the
Wari’ learned how to use numbers and how to count.
They had never felt poor in numbers until the non-
indigenous teachers on the intercultural course, keen
to stimulate the expression of native culture in their
classes, asked them to translate the cardinal numbers
into their own language. After “1” and “2,” the Wari’
7. See Jadran Mimica (1988) on the Iqwaye, and Gary Urton
(1997) on the Quechua.
8. In a collective work from the intercultural university of
Rondônia, Teias do conhecimento intercultural (Leite
2013), the author of the article, entitled “Forms of count-
ing” in Portuguese, translates the fact that the Wari’ knew
how to count as follows: “taxi nanain ka xat kaka 5 they
knew where to settle/stop (xat)” (OroAt 2013: 171–72). In
another article in the same work, the title in Portuguese,
“Traditional form of counting of the OroNao’ people,” is
translated into Wari’ as: “How the OroNao’ say how
many things there are in their true language.” Some draw-
ings of arrows represent the numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4. The
caption to the drawing in Portuguese, “Numerical terms
of the OroNao’ people,” is translated as “How the
OroNao’ say how many karawa there are [karawa 5 an-
imal/prey, non-human]” (Mauricio OroNao’ 2013: 119–
20). In Hymn 88 of the bilingual hymnbook, however,
it is stated in Wari’ that only God knows how to count
the stars, using the Portuguese verb contar. Finally, in
another hymn, 113, the term “count” in the Portu-
guese phrase “They were 100 sheep, but one afternoon,
on counting them all . . .” is translated into Wari’ as
to “see/search” (noro): “He searched and searched and
just one did not exist.”
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
students were only able to employ quantifiers in a ran-
dom fashion, save for the word for “a few” which most
of them used to translate “3.” Beyond this point, the
numbers 4 to 10 were designated through a variety of
terms signifying “many”—to which, in order to reach
higher numbers, they would add the adverb “very,”
for instance, or the qualifier “true,” generating expres-
sions of the type “truly a lot.”9
These unstable translations are transposed from the
secondary school and intercultural university class-
rooms, where the teachers are non-indigenous, to the
village schools through the mediation of the indigenous
teachers, who, over the course of their training, are en-
couraged to teach the children in their own language,
or, as they often say, in the terms of their own culture.
1 and 2
After this brief introduction to the Wari’ quantifiers, we
can turn to examine one of them more closely, which
presents a particular interest for my proposed analysis:
this is the term employed by the Wari’ to express our
number “1,” xika’pe. In their language, xika’pe means
“to be alone” and always has a negative value since it
is used in order to elicit pity and compassion. A wid-
ower says that he is alone, just like someone living far
from their relatives. Likewise, a hunter who has killed
just a solitary animal will apologize for the subsequently
meager, or virtually nonexistent, distribution of meat by
employing the same term. Nothing that is alone is good.
At the time when I was living alone in a house in the vil-
lage, my friends would sometimes take pity on me and
send their daughters to sleep in the house. For them, in
effect, a process of transformation is inevitably happen-
ing to anyone who tends to isolate themselves or who
seems to enjoy being alone, since it means that he or
she is establishing dangerous relations with the dead
or with animals. Furthermore, solitude and isolation are,
as for numerous indigenous groups, an indication of
a state linked to sorcery, since this attitude evinces
relations with other types of beings.
The negative value attributed to 1 is not solely a char-
acteristic of the Wari’, though. It is common to many
9. Daniel Everett and Barbara Kern translate the “quantifi-
ers” of the Wari’ language as follows: paric (“to be little”),
pije’ (“child, to be little”), tocwan (“to be many”), tamana
(“to be numerous, many”), iri’mijo (“to be many”), xam
(“to be complete, everything”), pi’pin (“to finish com-
pletely”) (1997: 349).
 Aparecida VILAÇA
lowland groups, as different among themselves as the
Ingarikó (Carib) of Roraima (Amaral, pers. com., 2017)
and the Parakanã (Tupi-Guarani) of Pará (Fausto, pers.
com., 2017).10 In a study of numerical concepts among
the Xavante, a Gê group of Central Brazil, Mariana
Ferreira, author of the article mentioned above on the
“aberrant” additions of the Xinguanos, also associate 1
with solitude, in contrast to the positive value accorded
to 2 and to even numbers in general:
By turning our attention to the mathematical philoso-
phy of dialectical societies, what we learn, from the very
beginning, is that unlike the Euclidian definition of a
unit as “that by virtue of which each of the things that
exist is called one”, among dialectical societies I would
suggest the following: each of the things that exist is
called two—maparané—a couple because it is neces-
sarily formed by a pair of ones—mitsi—a lonely self.
(Ferreira 2001, 91)11
10. Or also: “the Barasana distinguish between an animate,
lonely one (singü (m)/singo (f) and a morally/sentimen-
tally neutral one (koho/a) that also applies to animate
collectivities which, by definition cannot be lonely. Thus
one people is “koho masa.” Of many actions (both in dis-
tributing objects and also doing things), the Barasana of-
ten say, (only half ) jokingly, “make it a pair/pair it oth-
erwise the woodpecker will hit/make his hitting noise.”
This seems to express the idea that one-ness is incom-
plete/dangerous” (Stephen Hugh-Jones 2012; pers. com.,
2017). See, too, Anthony Seeger (1981: 61–62) on the
Suyá. Gary Urton, in his study of the ontology of Que-
chua numbers, writes that “the motivation for two is
the ‘loneliness’ (ch’ulla) of one” (1997: 78).
11. The solitary character of 1 is equally emphasized by
Ubiratan D’Ambrosio (2015) in the foreword to the
book by Mariana Ferreira (2015). It is also important
to mention here that the Greek philosophers did not
consider one to be a number, properly speaking. Ac-
cording to Thomas Crump (1990: 8, note 11), Plato
thought that since the capacity to be divided comprises
the essence of the number, that is, the fact of containing
a multiplicity within itself, then 1 would not be a num-
ber properly speaking. For Euclid, “a number is a mul-
titude composed of units,” meaning that one itself is not
a number, though it lies at the origin of all the numbers.
Crump adds that this idea was still around in the Mid-
dle Ages (ibid.). As we know, the question evokes an
enduring discussion on the status of numbers as multi-
plicities or singularities, originating in Euclid (Dens-
more 2017) before being taken up by Gottlob Frege
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
10
In his book Society against the state, Pierre Clastres
(1989) generalized this contrast in the chapter “Of the
one without the many,” based on the Guarani ethnogra-
phy. According to him, the negative value of 1 is op-
posed not to the many, but to 2 and the double: “Evil
is the One. Good is not the many, it is the dual, both
the one and its other” (1989: 173). Clastres attributes
this valorization to the importance of an anti-identity
principle among the Guarani.12
Long before Clastres, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl ([1910]
1985: 181–223), in How natives think, had devoted a
chapter to numeration, which prefigured various no-
tions, such as concrete mathematics and its relation to
the sensible world and the body, developed later in im-
portant ethnographic works on the counting systems of
non-western or minority peoples (Ascher and Ascher
1969; Carrier 1981; Biersack 1982; Mimica 1988; Ascher
1991, 2002; Urton 1997, 2003; Verran 2001).13 Com-
paring modern and so-called primitive peoples, Lévy-
Bruhl notes an inversion of values attributed to 1 and
2: while the majority of indigenous systems ignore 1
and begin their numerical system with the number 2
([1910] 1985: 192), for the modern peoples, in a context
strongly influenced by the monotheistic religions and
monist philosophies, 1 refers to good, order, perfection,
and happiness, while 2 acquires the negative character
of imperfection, evil, and disorder, referring in diverse
languages to duplicity, the double life (ibid.: 209).14. As
(in [1884] 2016), G. W. Leibniz (in [1919] 2005) and
Edmund Husserl (in 2003: chap. VIII). See, too, Geof-
frey Lloyd (2004).
12. This takes us to the theme of “dualism in perpetual dis-
equilibrium” formulated by Lévi-Strauss (1995) in The
story of lynx and prefigured in “Do dual organizations
exist?” (1956; republished in 1958: 147–82). For a reflec-
tion on the many in Clastres, see Lima (1996, 1999, 2008).
13. Also see Jean Lave (1988) for a western context.
14 According to Gary Urton, the Quechua consider that
“the condition of ‘one/odd’ represents a negative, prob-
lematic, and unfortunate state of affairs, whereas ‘two/
pair/even’ represents a positive, fortunate, and ultimately
productive state of affairs” (1997: 57; see also 58–61). As
an exception to this negative status of 1, Jadran Mimica
(1988: 46) shows that oneness is valorized among the
Iqwaye, who see totality qua indivisibility as positive:
“Two—or more accurately, the idea of twoness or dyad
in opposition to oneness—is the marked and derived cat-
egory, whereas oneness is the universal and original onto-
11
we know, this opposition is also explored by Lévi-
Strauss when, in The story of lynx, he analyses a set of
myths relating to twinhood, leading him to compare
twins in Indo-European mythology to those found in
the mythologies of the Americas: the former are per-
ceived as being identical, even when they have different
fathers, while a distinction always exists between the
latter (1995: 222–28).15
1 and 2 also allow us to approach the question of
Christianity. Undoubtedly, the most widely disseminated
and important of the monotheistic religions cited by
Lévy-Bruhl, Christianity, arrived among the Wari’ pre-
cisely through the intermediation of those who brought
them numbers. I wish to show how the work of the mis-
sionaries was aimed above all to transform the notion of
person among the Wari’, or, to take the terms that we
have been using here, to pass from 2 to 1.
Chronically unstable persons
The idea of “1” is central for the fundamentalist evan-
gelical missionaries who catechized the Wari’. In the Bi-
ble, which they take literally, they identify various pas-
sages that extol the value of 1 and unity, either directly,
or indirectly through a critique of duality, as appears in
the following verse from the Book of Proverbs (20:10),
virtually an explicit course in moral mathematics: “Dou-
ble measures and double standards are an abomination
to the Lord.”16
During their work of catechesis, the missionaries
placed the emphasis on the unity of the Holy Trinity,
on the idea of a unique truth contained in the Bible,
and on the existence of individualized persons, separate
logical category in the Iqwaye view of the cosmos.” Also
see Claude Lévi-Strauss apropos the association between
20 and the person (all the fingers and toes) in Mexico and
Central America, and its meaning of plenitude (1978: 370,
375).
15. While the chapter “Groups of ten” in The origin of table
manners (1978: 327–75) explores the arithmetic philos-
ophy of North American peoples, with their quinary,
decimal, and vigesimal systems, had The story of lynx
(1995) been translated into mathematical language, it
would be about the mythology of 1 and 2—that is,
the arithmetic philosophy of South American groups.
16. According to Alexandre Koyré, God created the world
“on number, weight and measure” (1980: 70).
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE DEVIL AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
from others, who possess a secret inner self, revealed
only to God. To understand the effects of this discourse
on the Wari’, we first need to know how they conceive
the person.
For the Wari’, as for many other Amazonian groups,
the characteristics of a particular person, what we might
call the personality, are found in the body. People say,
for example, that this person likes certain others, that
she is happy and intelligent because her body is so.
There is no notion of vital principle or a spirit attached
to the body, but rather the notion of a transformational
principle, called jamixi’, which may be activated de-
pending on the relational context. Rather than a “soul,”
this involves another, potential body, constitutive of ev-
ery human being, a body that is ideally eclipsed during
life. Its activation is reserved to shamans. When a trans-
formation of this kind affects ordinary people, it leads
to their sickness or death.
This transformative principle, which I would call
here the “double,” is the point of liaison between the
Wari’ and certain animal species. The animals con-
cerned see themselves as human and, just like the
Wari’, they have a double potential that can be activated
through relations. So just as a Wari’ can acquire a jaguar
body after entering into a relation with this animal, a
jaguar can also take the form of a Wari’ and penetrate
among them. Only a third point of view, always relative
and contextual, can determine whether one is face-to-
face with a body or a double. Let us take an example.
In a still recent past, abductions by jaguars were a
constant occurrence among the Wari’. The most fre-
quent cases involved a child who, wandering alone in
the vicinity of the village, suddenly found him or herself
face-to-face with a relative who would invite the child to
join them to gather fruits or go hunting. People nearby,
having noticed the child’s absence, would follow his or
her tracks and, observing the paw prints of a jaguar ap-
pear alongside, would realize that the child had been
kidnapped, keenly aware of the desire of jaguars to cap-
ture Wari’ children in order to turn them into members
of their own group. So, they would track the animal
while yelling out the name of the child and warning
the latter that the man or woman guiding him or her
through the forest was not a true person but a jaguar.
Hearing them approach, the latter would usually decide
to leave behind the child, who would subsequently be
found covered in fur and ticks (the jaguar’s lice). The
Wari’ said that the child had followed the jaguar’s dou-
ble because he or she saw it as kin, as a person, unlike
 Aparecida VILAÇA
the other Wari’ who saw the jaguar in its true body,
in its animal form (Vilaça 2016a, 2016b).
This comprises a paradigmatic example of what
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1996, 1998) called Amer-
indian perspectivism, according to which humans and
animals both conceive themselves to be persons and
share a common culture: they organize festivals, care
for their kin, and so on. The difference between them
is situated in their bodies, which constitute the seat of
their perspective of others and of the world. Like the
Wari’, jaguars regularly drink beer, including during
their festivals, but while for the Wari’ beer is made from
maize, for the jaguars it is made from blood. Hence any-
one abducted by a jaguar will tend to share its perspec-
tive and see blood as a drink, a sign that his or her body
is transforming.
Certainly, the Americanist literature (Seeger, Da
Matta, and Viveiros de Castro 1979; Conklin 1996;
McCallum 1996) has long explored the constant fab-
rication of Amerindian corporality through everyday
feeding, incisions, decorations, and other ritual proce-
dures, which are produced and differentiated as partic-
ular human bodies. Yet I do not think that it has suffi-
ciently emphasized the fact that this involves above
all—and here I use the words of Anne-Christine Taylor
(1998: 318)—“chronically unstable” bodies, continually
at risk of transformation, and which reveal themselves
sometimes as human, sometimes as animal (Viveiros de
Castro [1977] 1987).
These unstable bodies evoke the notion of the
dividual person, which has been developed primarily
by Melanesian ethnology through the works of Marilyn
Strathern (1988). Just as in the Amerindian context
described here, the dividual person potentially contains
its inverse: in Melanesia, the male and female; in the
universe of the Wari’ and other Amazonian peoples,
as Philippe Descola (2001: 108)17 observes, the human
and the animal. The definition of one of the poles of this
dividual person is always contextual since it depends on
the encounter with another person constituted in the
same way. Each of them adopts one of the sides of the
person and eclipses the opposite one, until it is actual-
ized at another moment. For numerous Amazonian
peoples, the forest encounters with animals constitute
the paradigmatic examples of this dynamic: both see
17. See, too, Marilyn Strathern (1999: 252–3) and Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro (2000: 45, note 39 and 2002: 444,
note 7).
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
12
themselves as human and see the other as prey; the
one who knows how to act as a predator will define
himself/herself as the human pole of the relational
pair, situating the other in the position of animal prey.
On another occasion, the situation may be reversed: the
animal acts as a predator and defines itself as human
(Vilaça 2011, 2015a).
The idea of the dividual person is indissociable from
notions of instability and transformation, widely ex-
plored in the œuvre of Lévi-Strauss and, more particu-
larly, in his analysis of myths. In Part Seven of The na-
ked man (1981: 537), entitled “The dawn of myths,” he
places particular emphasis on the role of “binary op-
erators” to which some animals, like the stingray and
butterfly, are particularly well suited, presenting two
radically distinct sides, depending on the perspective
one adopts to view them, which explains why they are
highlighted in mythology. In The story of lynx, the same
type of oscillation of perspective is analyzed through
its sociological expression, leading the author to pro-
pose the notion of a “dualism in perpetual disequilib-
rium,” a development of the notions of concentric du-
alism and ternarism presented by Lévi-Strauss many
years earlier (1958).
Ethnographically founded on the sociologies and
concepts of Amerindian peoples, especially those of
the Gê of Central Brazil, these formulations have had
a strong repercussion in the regional ethnology, both
on kinship studies and on those studies focused on
the processes involved in the constitution of the person.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2000, 2001) in particular,
while taking inspiration from The story of lynx, has ex-
tended the sociological dichotomies explored by Lévi-
Strauss to the Amerindian notion of the person, com-
posed of a body and a soul, the latter comprising its pole
of instability and duplication, which the author explic-
itly associates with the Melanesian dividual person.18
What matters for Amerindian peoples, as ethnogra-
phers are well aware, is the stabilization of the person,
something that is inevitably temporary. This is de-
scribed in diverse ethnographies as a process of fixing
the soul to the body and typifies shamanic intervention
in the case of sicknesses associated with soul loss. This
stabilization of the person’s human aspect—that is, as
a kinsperson among a given kingroup—can only be
18. For an inclusion of the Deleuzian concept of multiplic-
ity in this discussion, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(2009: chapter VI).
13
achieved by observing certain rules, such as following a
diet respectful of alimentary taboos in order to avoid the
animals taking revenge, or maintaining a generous con-
viviality with one’s own people, while paying special at-
tention to any sign of transformation. As I observed ear-
lier, a solitary, isolated person, or someone without
appetite, is signaling the establishment of social bonds
with other types of beings—in this case, with animals.
Since nobody ever ceases to have an appetite, the refusal
of food offered by kin signifies that the person does not
perceive this food as legitimate, since he or she is actu-
ally eating in the company of other beings, who drink
blood, for example, as though it were chicha (maize
beer) (Vilaça 2002, 2005).19
Encounter with Christianity
While the missionaries were looking among the Wari’
for an inner self in order to establish communication
with God, they came up against a sort of outer self, a self
constituted from the outside, through the gaze of the
other. At the start this antagonism exasperated them.
Then, having identified the jamixi’, the double, and its
role in the fragmentation of the person, they decided
to ban it definitively. In the Bible translations into the
Wari’ language, therefore, the person appears to be com-
posed of a body and a soul, the latter morally superior
and thus becoming the seat of the personality. The body
is no more than an envelope, a skin, which covers the
true self, located in the heart associated with the soul,
visible only to God.20
This work of unifying the person (before him/herself
and before God) is effected by the missionaries through
a series of rituals, including the church services during
which prayers are addressed directly to God, but above
all through confession, a “technique of the self,” to uti-
lize a Foucauldian concept, crucial to the production of
the interiorized self. In parallel to this production of
the self, and indissociable from it, as already pointed out
19. For another ethnographic context, see Signe Howell
(1996: 134) on the Chewong.
20. In the pre-Christian world, the heart, part of the body,
was the seat of cognition and feelings. It had to be ex-
posed, visible, always in the attitudes and declarations
so that everyone could be assured of the person’s hu-
manity (Robbins, Schieffelin, and Vilaça 2014; Vilaça
2014).
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE DEVIL AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
by Marcel Mauss ([1950] 1999),21 Maurice Leenhardt
([1947] 1971), Philippe Descola (2005), and Bruno Latour
([1991] 1993), an idea of nature separate from the hu-
man is also established, which, in the case of the Wari’,
equally includes the objectification of animals—that is
to say, the loss of their double (Vilaça 2009, 2013, 2015b).
Over the course of this process, the translation of the
first book of Genesis into the Wari’ language proved
fundamental. The Wari’ immediately fell under the spell
of this text, given their interest in stabilization of their
body. This explains why excerpts from Genesis figure
not only in the catechism books, but also on the walls
of the church, and are constantly mentioned in the
prayers addressed to God. Below I cite two as they were
translated into the Wari’ language:
He [God] said, satisfied: “be fecund, reproduce a lot
and multiply [. . .]. Disperse across all the other lands.
Be leaders. Be the leaders of fish, birds and all the an-
imals [. . .] (Genesis 1:28)
[. . .] Eat all the animals, all the birds, all the strange
animals that crawl over the earth too” (Genesis 1:30,
also see Genesis 9:2–3)
Accepting the fact of Creation implies sharing the per-
spective of the Creator, God, who made humans the
masters of animals—that is to say, predators. This is
what an elder Wari’ man, Paletó, explains to us:
When we did not believe in God, we did not eat coati,
because it made children crazy. Now, beasts are beasts.
We are no longer afraid of animals. Their doubles have
vanished.
Once nature is created, a gap is opened up that allows
the idea of a single truth to become established, that
which coincides with the word of God transcribed in
the Bible—especially important in the case of funda-
mentalist Protestant missionaries, who insist on the
truth of Biblical events, taken literally, as shown in this
extract from the catechism manual of a missionary from
the New Tribes Mission: “What we announce is simply
that which literally happened in time and space. It is
real, a fact, history” (McIlwain 2003: 39). Nothing is
closer to the foundations of our science and the mathe-
matics associated with it and, at the same time, nothing
21. See the fifth part of this work, “A category of the human
mind: the notion of person, the notion of self ” (332–
62).
 Aparecida VILAÇA
is more profoundly distant from the relational shamanic
science, with its multiple versions of events, always de-
pendent on the diverse experience of each shaman.22
The devil and the return of the “2”
Although they now call themselves Christian, go to
church, pray to God, and confess, the Wari’ have clearly
found it difficult to accept the notions of a unified per-
son and a dehumanized nature. It so happens that
Christianity itself offers them a means to express their
resistance to these notions in the person of the devil.
This trickster from Christian mythology was, in effect,
rapidly assimilated by diverse cultures converted to this
religion (Meyer 1999). In the case of the Wari’, the devil,
in occult fashion, long allowed them to perpetuate their
“aberrant” operations: interspecific transformations,
shamanism, and multiple versions of the world. Until
recently, the Wari’ said that the devil, in order to lure
them to himself, would enter the bodies of animals
and gave them back their subjectivity, making them
act like humans, abducting people, and causing sickness
and death. The humanity of the animals simultaneously
restored the dividual character of the Wari’ person, who
again faced the risk of transforming into an animal.
Today, when prayers and the Christian life have ren-
dered the Wari’ more capable of sharing God’s view of
Creation, the devil has his sights set on the universe of
persons per se. While the Wari’ seek, with Christianity,
to build a community of brothers and sisters, the devil
makes affinity reemerge and all the evils associated
with it. The dividual person is reconstituted, transiting
through a narrower band of the continuum that ex-
presses the different sides of humanity: no longer be-
tween the human and the animal, but between consan-
guine and affine. This is an important transformation
that I have already explored elsewhere (Vilaça 2013),
yet preserves the composite character of the dividual
person in the face of the oneness of the individual
preached by the missionaries.
The Wari’ also express their aversion to the individ-
ual in their conception of heaven, the only place where
the unified person is stabilized definitively, free at last of
affinity. There above, all people are brothers and sisters.
Surprisingly, it is a place of little interest to them: the ac-
tions producing kinship are suppressed, people remain
22. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2004) and Roy Wag-
ner (1975) on the idea of differentiation.
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
14
isolated, each living on their own, and they pass their
time transcribing the word of God, drinking water
and eating bread. Heaven is accepted merely insofar
as it is the only alternative to hell, where, by contrast,
they become perpetual prey, cooked on a wooden grill
for eternity.23
It is as if, when they become fully human, the Wari’
can no longer see themselves as such—as if humanity,
for them, depends on the capacity to lose this position.
Such is the sense of jamixi’, the “double,” this principle
of transformation that characterizes humanity. Those
animals without a double, like the spider monkey, are
not perceived as potentially human: they were already
simply prey, animals, even before the advent of the Bib-
lical Genesis (Vilaça [1992] 2017).
It needs to be specified, however, that this “resis-
tance” to Christianity is no culturalist vision imbued
with the notion of authenticity and the rejection of the
Other. On the contrary, the Wari’, like so many South
American peoples, amply illustrate the Lévi-Straussian
idea of an “opening to the Other” (Lévi-Strauss 1995:
xvii). They are interested in new people, their ideas, rit-
uals, objects. They call themselves Christian and effec-
tively they are. The question is that they are not just
Christian—or, more precisely, their resistance involves
the problem of the 1, one of the pillars of the Christian
religion to which they were introduced. Like many other
Christianized groups, the Wari’ could not—and certainly
did not want to—rid themselves of their world. Instead,
they composed these two universes not in a hybrid form,
which would suppose a somewhat random blend of
Christian and Wari’ conceptions (Robbins 2004: 332–
33), but in the typically Amazonian mode of alterna-
tion. This is evident both in the fact that they alternated
between Christian and non-Christian phases over time,
and also, more subtly, in the translational choices that
the Wari’ men make in their translations work as assis-
tants to the missionaries.
As the latter knew well and indeed feared, use of the
indigenous language in both the Christian and school
translations is an important anti-conventional instru-
ment (Wagner 1975), which thus makes possible the al-
ternation of perspectives (Rafael 1993). For the evangel-
ical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, however,
there is no other option, since the divine message can
only touch people when it is translated into what they
23. For the Krahó (Gê language), the world of the dead is
also characterized by immobility and the lack of ex-
change and alliance (Carneiro da Cunha 1978: 145).
15
call “the language of their heart” (Schieffelin 2007: 144;
Handman 2015: 19, 64–89).24 An interesting example is
the translation, made by the missionaries with the help
of indigenous translators, of the verb “to love” by “not
dislike,” the only equivalent Wari’ term. Several pas-
sages from the Bible in the Wari’ language thus state
that “God does not dislike you” instead of “God loves
you.”25 While, in a way, not disliking is the same as lov-
ing, the Wari’ term makes explicit that the starting point
of relations is enmity, itself linked to dislike. Love is
thus something to be constructed through human agency.
The primordial world is composed of others, which only
acts of kinship can extract from their condition of al-
terity. Kin are fabricated out of others (Vilaça 2002). This
comprises an important difference between the Christian
and Wari’ worlds.
In addition, in the translation of Christian teachings
into the Wari’ language, the body remains the seat of
the personality, since there is no way, in this language,
of speaking of a person other than by the expression
“her/his body is [made] thus.” This translation is even
employed in the descriptions of God and his power:
“The body of God is thus, he is strong” (although, a
few lines above, the same translated text announces that
God has no body, just as the missionaries teach). As re-
gards the term jamixi’ (double), not only is it preserved
in everyday vocabulary, outside the church, it is also
present in the Biblical translations, albeit associated
with the activities of the devil who enters people and an-
imals and makes them act in the strange way of a dou-
ble. Pronounced in dialogues and cited in texts during
church services, jamixi’ makes present the world of
multiplicity and transformations.
The question of translations takes us, finally, back to
numbers again. As we have seen, the Wari’ have equated
the term “alone” (xika’pe) with our number 1. Nonethe-
less, it is significant that this equivalence does not imply
the substitution of one term by the other. Put otherwise,
24. Also see Andrew Orta (2004) and Alan Durston (2007)
for other examples of missionary translations.
25. Among other examples, in Hymn 40 of the bilingual
hymnbook, the verse in Portuguese “I have a friend
[Christ] who loves me” is translated into Wari’ as “I have
a compatriot who does not dislike me.” Or again, in
Hymn 52, the phrase in Portuguese “I love Christ, he
is my master” is translated into Wari’ as “I do not dislike
Christ. I have made him kin.” In school essays, I also
found the phrase “I do not dislike the place where I live.”
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE DEVIL AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
the Wari’ do not employ “1” (um) in Portuguese but
continue to use “alone” (see also Everett and Kern 1997:
347). It would seem that they cannot escape the fact that
the absence of the Other remains, for them, the most
important characteristic of 1. The word “alone” thus
becomes the bridge between the mathematics of the
Whites and the moral mathematics of the Wari’. It once
again implies, as in the example of Lévi-Strauss, the in-
visible presence of an operator, here the Other, to form
a pair. In sum, the recourse to translations also raises
the interesting question of duality, which takes us back
precisely to the intrinsic opening of 2, on which Lévi-
Strauss so insisted. Unlike 1, the Wari’ tend, in everyday
life, to employ 2 directly in Portuguese. When they are
incited by the ethnologist to translate the term, the ex-
pression that they usually choose is tuku karakan (“one
facing the other”). In other contexts, however, especially
in the comments made by elderly people, every quantity
over one, including two, is associated with “many,” like
tokwan, which means “together” but also “many.”26
Through the translation choices made by indigenous
interpreters, the Wari’ are thus able to reintroduce the
multiplicity of perspectives into adverse contexts, those
of Christianity and science. Their concepts, in the form
of words, produce crossovers that, as Lévi-Strauss wrote,
light up “with a brief phosphorescence” (1995: 239)
amid the strange world in which they have become im-
mersed.
References
Ascher, Marcia. 1991. Ethnomathematics: A multicultural
view of mathematical ideas. Pacific Grove, CA: Brooks/
Cole Publ. Co.
———. 2002. Mathematics elsewhere: An exploration of
ideas across cultures. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Ascher, Marcia, and Robert Ascher. 1969. “Code of ancient
Peruvian knotted cords (Quipus).” Nature 222: 529–33.
26. Daniel Everett and Barbara Kern provide “to be several 5
tocwan” (1997: 349) and “to be not many 5 ca’ om
tokwan wa [om5 negative]” (ibid.: 454). In a collective
university work dedicated to how the Wari’ count, the
Wari’ translation of the text in Portuguese states: “if they
were once more numbers [this term appears in Portu-
guese] to be said in the language of the OroNao’, [now]
there are only two [also in Portuguese]: xika’pe (1) [the
number follows the Wari’ term], tokwan (2), that’s it”
(OroNao’, Saul 2013: 154–55).
 Aparecida VILAÇA
Biersack, Aletta. 1982. “The logic of misplaced concreteness:
Paiela body counting and the nature of the primitive
mind.” American Anthropologist (new ser.) 84 (4): 811–29.
Carneiro da Cunha, Manuela. 1978. Os mortos e os outros.
Uma análise do sistema funerário e da noção de pessoa
entre os índios Krahó. São Paulo: HUCITEC.
Carrier, Achsah. 1981. “Counting and calculation on Ponam
Island.” Journal of the Polynesian Society 90 (4): 465–79.
Clastres, Pierre. 1989. Society against the state: Essays in po-
litical anthropology. Translated by Robert Hurley and Abe
Stein. New York: Zone Books.
Conklin, Beth A. 1996. “Reflections on Amazonian anthro-
pologies of the body.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly
(new ser.) 10 (3): 373–75.
Crump, Thomas. 1990. The anthropology of numbers (Cam-
bridge Studies in Social Anthropology 70). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
D’Ambrosio, Ubiratan. 2015. “Foreword.” In Mapping time,
space and the body: Indigenous knowledge and mathemat-
ical thinking in Brazil, by Mariana Leal Ferreira, XI–XIV.
Rotterdam: Sense Publishers.
Densmore, Dana, ed. 2017. Euclid’s Elements. All thirteen
books complete in one volume: The Thomas L. Heath
translation. Santa Fe, NM: Green Lyon Press.
Descola, Philippe. 2001. “The genres of gender: Local models
and global paradigms in the comparison of Amazonia and
Melanesia.” In Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An ex-
ploration of the comparative method, edited by Thomas A.
Gregor and Donald Tuzin, 91–114. Berkeley: University of
California Press.
———. 2005. Par-delà nature et culture. Paris: Gallimard.
Durston, Alan. 2007. Pastoral Quechua: The history of Chris-
tian translation in colonial Peru, 1550–1650. Notre Dame,
IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
Everett, Daniel L., and Barbara Kern. 1997. Wari’. The Pacaas
Novos language of western Brazil. New York: Routledge.
Ferreira, Mariana Leal. 1997. “When 1 1 1 ≠ 2: Making math-
ematics in central Brazil.” American Ethnologist 24 (1):
132–47.
———. 2001. “People of my side, people of the other side:
Socionumerical systems in central Brazil.” ZDM. Mathe-
matics Education 33 (3): 89–94.
———. 2015. Mapping time, space and the body: Indigenous
knowledge and mathematical thinking in Brazil (New Di-
rections in Mathematics and Science Education 29). Rot-
terdam: Sense Publishers.
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
16
Frege, Gottlob. (1884) 2016. Foundations of arithmetic: A logical-
mathematical investigation into the concept of number.
Translated by Dale Jacquette. New York: Routledge.
Galileo Galilei. (1623) 1996. O Ensaiador. São Paulo: Ed. Nova
Cultural.
Handman, Courtney. 2015. Critical Christianity: Translation
and denominational conflict in Papua New Guinea (The
Anthropology of Christianity 16). Oakland: University
of California Press.
Howell, Signe. 1996. “Nature in culture or culture in na-
ture? Chewong ideas of ‘humans’ and other species.”
In Nature and society: Anthropological perspectives, edited
by Philippe Descola and G. Pálsson, 127–44. London: Rout-
ledge.
Hugh-Jones, Stephen. 2012. “Escrever na pedra, escrever no
papel.” In Rotas de criação e transformação: Narrativas
de origem dos povos indígenas do rio Negro, edited by
Geraldo Andrello, 138–67. São Gabriel da Cachoeira:
FOIRN/São Paulo: ISA.
Husserl, Edmund. 2003. Philosophy of arithmetic: Psycholog-
ical and logical investigations with supplementary texts
from 1887–1901 (Husserliana: Edmund Husserl – Col-
lected Works 10). Translated by Dallas Willard. Dor-
drecht: Springer.
Koyré, Alexandre. 1980. Galileu e Platão, e Do Mundo do
‘mais ou menos’ ao Universo da Precisão. Translated by
José Trindade Santos. Lisbon: Gradiva.
Latour, Bruno. (1991) 1993. We have never been modern.
Translated by Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Lave, Jean. 1988. Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and
culture in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Leenhardt, Maurice. (1947) 1971. Do Kamo, la personne et le
mythe dans le monde mélanésien. Foreword by Maria
Isaura Pereira de Queiroz. Paris: Gallimard.
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. (1919) 2005. The early mathe-
matical manuscripts of Leibniz. Translated by J. M. Child.
Mineola, NY: Dover.
Leite, Kécio, ed. 2013. Teia de conhecimentos interculturais.
Departamento de Educação intercultural, Campus de Ji-
Paraná, Universidade federal de Rondônia.
Lenoble, Robert. (1968) 1990. História da idéia de natureza.
Translated by Teresa Louro Pérez. Lisbon: Ed. 70.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1956. “Les organisations dualistes existent-
elles?” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Landen Volkenkunde 112
(2): 99–128.
17
———. 1958. “Les organisations dualistes existent-elles?” In
Anthropologie structural, 147–82. Paris: Plon.
———. 1978 The origin of table manners. Translated by John
and Doreen Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
———. 1981. The naked man. Translated by John and Doreen
Weightman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
———. 1995. The story of lynx. Translated by Catherine
Tihanyi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lévy-Bruhl, Lucien. (1910) 1985. How natives think [Les
Fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieures]. Translated
by Lilian A. Clare. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Lima, Tânia S. 1996. “O dois e seu múltiplo: Reflexões sobre
o perspectivismo em uma cosmologia tupi.” Mana: Es-
tudos de antropologia social 2 (2): 21–47. http://www
.scielo.br/scielo.php?scriptpsci_arttext&pidpS0104
-93131996000200002.
———. 1999. “The two and its many: Reflections on perspec-
tivism in a Tupi cosmology.” Ethnos 64 (1): 107–31.
———. 2008. “Uma história do dois, do uno e do terceiro.” In
Lévi-Strauss: Leituras brasileiras, edited by Ruben Caixeta
de Queiroz and Renarde Freire Nobre, 209–63. Belo Hori-
zonte: Ed. UFMG.
Lloyd, Geoffrey. 2004. Ancient worlds, modern reflections:
Philosophical perspectives on Greek and Chinese science
and culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
McCallum, Cecilia. 1996. “The body that knows: From Cashi-
nahua epistemology to a medical anthropology of lowland
South America.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10 (3):
347–72.
McIlwain, Trevor with Nancy Everson. 2003. Alicerces Firmes.
Da criação até Cristo. Translated by Adriana Melgarejo.
Anápolis: Missão Novas Tribos do Brasil.
Mauss, Marcel. (1950) 1999. Sociologie et anthropologie.
Paris: Presses universitaires de France.
Meyer, Birgit. 1999. Translating the devil: Religion and mo-
dernity among the Ewe in Ghana. London: Edinburgh
University Press, for the International African Institute.
Mimica, Jadran. 1988. Intimations of infinity: The mytho-
poeia of the Iqwaye counting system and number. After-
word by Roy Wagner. Oxford: Berg.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1888) 1978. “Crepúsculo dos ídolos.”
In Obras incompletas. São Paulo: Abril Cultural.
OroAt, Zebedeu. 2013. “Contagem do povo OroAt.” In Teia
de conhecimentos interculturais, edited by Kécio Leite,
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
THE DEVIL AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS
171–72. Departamento de Educação intercultural, Cam-
pus de Ji-Paraná, Universidade federal de Rondônia.
OroNao’, Mauricio. 2013. “Forma tradicional de contagem do
povo OroNao.” In Teia de conhecimentos interculturais, ed-
ited by Kécio Leite, 119–20. Departamento de Educação inter-
cultural, Campus de Ji-Paraná, Universidade federal de
Rondônia.
OroNao’, Saul. 2013. “A comunidade de Deolinda.” In Teia
de conhecimentos interculturais, edited by Kécio Leite,
154–5. Departamento de Educação intercultural, Campus
de Ji-Paraná, Universidade federal de Rondônia.
Orta, Andrew. 2004. Catechizing culture: Missionaries, Ay-
mara, and the “new evangelization.” New York: Columbia
University Press.
Rafael, Vicente L. 1993. Contracting colonialism: Translation
and Christian conversion in Tagalog society under early
Spanish rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral
torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press.
Robbins, Joel, Bambi B. Schieffelin, and Aparecida Vilaça.
2014. “Evangelical conversion and the transformation
of the self in Amazonia and Melanesia: Christianity and
the revival of anthropological comparison.” Compara-
tive Studies in Society and History 56 (3): 559–90.
Rossi, Paolo. 2001. O Nascimento da ciência moderna na Eu-
ropa. Translated by Antonio Angonese. Bauru: Edusc.
Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2007. “Found in translating: Reflexive
language across time and texts in Bosavi, Papua New
Guinea.” In Consequences of contact: Language ideologies
and sociocultural transformations in Pacific societies, ed-
ited by Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Schieffelin, 140–65.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Seeger, Anthony. 1981. Nature and society in central Brazil:
The Suya Indians of Mato Grosso. Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press.
Seeger, Anthony, Roberto Da Matta, and Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro. 1979. “A construção da pessoa nas sociedades indí-
genas brasileiras.” Boletim do Museu nacional 32: 2–19.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with
women and problems with society in Melanesia (Studies in
Melanesian Anthropology 6). Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press.
———. 1999. “The ethnographic effect II: Perspectivism.”
In Property, substance and effect: Anthropological essays
on persons and things, 248–60. London: Athlone.
 Aparecida VILAÇA
Taylor, Anne-Christine. 1998. “Corps immortels, devoir d’oubli:
formes humaines et trajectoires de vie chez les Achuar.”
In La Production du corps: Approches anthropologiques
et historiques, edited by Maurice Godelier and Michel
Panoff, 317–38. Amsterdam: Éd. des Archives contem-
poraines.
Urton, Gary. 1997. The social life of numbers: A Quechua on-
tology of numbers and philosophy of arithmetic. Austin:
University of Texas Press.
———. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary coding in the
Andean knotted-string records. Austin: University of Texas
Press.
Verran, Helen. 2001. Science and an African logic. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Vilaça, Aparecida. 2002. “Making kin out of others in Ama-
zonia.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 8
(2): 347–65.
———. 2005. “Chronically unstable bodies: Reflections on
Amazonian corporalities.” Journal of the Royal Anthropo-
logical Institute 11 (3): 445–64.
———. 2009. “Conversion, predation and perspective.” In
Native Christians: Modes and effects of Christianity among
indigenous peoples of the Americas, edited by Aparecida
Vilaça and Robin M. Wright, 147–66. Burlington, VT:
Ashgate.
———. 2010. Strange enemies: Indigenous agency and scenes
of encounters in Amazonia. Translated by David Rodgers.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———. 2011. “Dividuality in Amazonia: God, the devil, and
the constitution of personhood in Wari’ Christianity.”
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 17 (2):
243–62.
———. 2013. “Reconfiguring humanity in Amazonia:
Christianity and change.” In A companion to the anthro-
pology of religion, edited by Janice Boddy and Michael
Lambek, 363–86. Chichester: Wiley.
———. 2014. “Culture and self: The different ‘gifts’ Amer-
indians receive from Catholics and Evangelicals,” Current
Anthropology 55 (S10): S322–32.
———. 2015a. “Dividualism and individualism in indige-
nous Christianity: A debate seen from Amazonia.” HAU:
Journal of Ethnographic Theory 5 (1): 45–73. https://www
.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/article/view/hau5.1.010.
This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM
All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).
18
———. 2015b. “Do animists become naturalists when con-
verting to Christianity? Discussing an ontological turn.”
Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 33 (2): 3–19.
———. 2016a. Praying and preying: Christianity in indige-
nous Amazonia. Translated by David Rodgers. Oakland:
University of California Press.
———. 2016b. “Versions versus bodies: Translations in the
missionary encounter in Amazonia,” Vibrant 13 (2): 1–
14. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?scriptpsci_arttext
&pidpS1809-43412016000200001.
———. (1992) 2017. Comendo como gente: Formas do cani-
balismo wari’ (Pakaa Nova). Rio de Janeiro: Mauad.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. (1977) 1987. “A fabricação do
corpo na sociedade Xinguana.” In Sociedades indígenas e
indigenismo no Brasil, edited by J. Pacheco Oliveira Filho,
31–41. Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ-Marco Zero.
———. 1996. “Os pronomes cosmológicos e o perspectivismo
ameríndio.” Mana: Estudos de antropologia social 2 (2):
115–43. http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?scriptpsci_arttext
&pidpS0104-93131996000200005.
———. 1998. “Cosmological deixis and Amerindian per-
spectivism.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
4 (3): 469–88.
———. 2000. “Atualização e contra-efetuação do virtual na
socialidade amazônica: o processo de parentesco.” Ilha 2
(1): 5–46.
———. 2001. “Gut feelings about Amazonia: Potential affin-
ity and the construction of sociality.” In Beyond the visible
and the material: The Amerindianization of society in the
work of Peter Rivière, edited by Laura Rival and Neil
Whitehead, 19–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2002. A inconstância da alma selvagem e outros
ensaios de antropologia. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify.
———. 2004. “Exchanging perspectives: The transforma-
tion of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies.”
Common Knowledge 10 (3): 463–84.
———. 2009. Métaphysiques cannibales. Lignes d’anthropologie
post-structurale. Translated by Oiara Bonilla. Paris: Presses
universitaires de France.
Wagner, Roy. 1975. The invention of culture. Englewood
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
19 THE DEVIL AND THE HIDDEN LIFE OF NUMBERS

Aparecida VILAÇA is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology for the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology,
Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. She has worked with the Wari’ indigenous people in
Southwestern Amazonia, Brazil, since 1986. Fieldwork among the Wari’ was financed by CNPq, Faperj, the Wenner-
Gren Foundation and John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. She is the author of Comendo como gente: Formas do
canibalismo wari’ (second edition, Mauad Editora, 2017), Quem somos nós: Os Wari’ encontram os brancos (UFRJ
editora, 2006), Strange enemies: Indigenous agency and scenes of encounters in Amazonia (Duke, 2010), Praying and
preying: Christianity in indigenous Amazonia (California, 2016) and co-editor of Native Christians: Modes and effects
of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas (Ashgate, 2009).
Aparecida Vilaça
Univerdade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
Museu Nacional, Rio de Janeiro (Brazil)
aparecida.vilaca@terra.com.br

This content downloaded from 152.168.110.045 on August 03, 2019 06:46:56 AM

All use subject to University of Chicago Press Terms and Conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c).