Urarina

Fabiano, Emanuele (2017). Dos corazones: etnofisiología y procesos de pensamiento /
memoria entre los Urarina de la Amazonía peruana, In: A. Cancellier, A. Cassani, E. Dal Maso (eds.), "El corazón es centro. Narraciones, representaciones y metáforas del corazón en el mundo hispánico", Linceo-o. Saperi Nomadi 3, Padova: cluep. ISBN: 9788867876907

"At a moment when academic publishing teeters on the edge of the abyss, it is gratifying to note the appearance of an old-school Amazonian ethnography: sprawling, comprehensive, and theoretically rich. In Urarina Society, Cosmology, and History in Peruvian Amazonia, Bartholomew Dean manages to both document the lifeways of one of Peru's least known indigenous societies and offer a master class in the major themes of contemporary Amazonian research." "Dean adds a phenomenological dimension to the project by emphasizing the Urarina's own understandings of exchange and how these articulate --or fail to articulate-- with those of the region’s nonindigenous population." "Readers more interested in theory and historical synthesis than in ethnographic detail will admire the author’s command of a vast bibliography and his nuanced assessment of a range of interpretive strategies." "When Dean pushes theory into the background and lets the Urarina speak in their own words, their predicament is laid bare in ways that can be profoundly moving." Journal of Anthropological Research vol. 66 "A lucid intervention into a series of debates that have occupied the anthropological imagination for quite some time… a fascinating account of the ambivalent ways and means by which the Uranina - a stereotypically "isolated Amazonian people - articulate their local sense of self with social actors of broader reach and greater power" American Anthropologist "A thought provoking ethnography that returns our attention to he quotidian realities of indigenous social, cultural, and political-economic reproduction in the context of ongoing colonial violences…In addition to its rich ethnographic work, the book offers for specialist and student alike a survey of the central theoretical debates of the field." Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

This article aims to analyze the experience of the Urarina of the Peruvian Amazon experience with Summer Institute of Linguistics’ (SIL) missionaries and, in particular, the effects today of the evangelization which took place in the beginning of the 1960s. Among the Urarina, the principles of evangelical predication required —among other characteristics— a larger indigenous participation and the encouragement of free market economy. However, this experience was marked by the failure of Urarina’s evangelical aspirations. This article also demonstrates how the limited impact of the missionaries’ predication provoked a paradoxical overlapping of evangelical principles not so much with “traditional” religious values, but with the system of patronal exploitation known as “habilitación”. With the passage of time, this model influenced Urarina’s economic, political and social life. Finally, the article focuses on the Urarina perceptions about becoming “good Christians” and how these perceptions —revealing the ambiguity of the evangelical message— are linked to potential instability for both their physical bodies as well as their way of thinking and remembering.
http://journals.openedition.org/bifea/9965

Los Urarina del río Chambira (Amazonía peruana), al igual que otros grupos y comunidades indígenas de la región, enfrentan nuevamente un evento epidémico potencialmente catastrófico. A pesar de la falta de conocimiento sobre los efectos o la forma de propagación de la nueva enfermedad y valiéndose de la poca información disponible, respondieron con prontitud frente a la propagación del COVID-19 disponiendo el cierre de acceso a la cuenca y adoptando medidas de auto aislamiento. El presente artículo es una reflexión sobre la experiencia de estos últimos meses, y nace a raíz de varias conversaciones que tuvieron lugar entre los dos autores a lo largo de todo el periodo de cuarentena. El texto plantea una discusión sobre el coronavirus (kurunabirus), su origen y propagación, valiéndose para ello de un mito urarina inédito que relata la creación de las enfermedades. Finalmente, se resalta cómo el discurso mítico, al contradecir las interpretaciones meramente biológicas, confiere un origen social a las enfermedades infecciosas, cuya vacuna se vuelve efectiva a través de la autonomía y la organización, únicas estrategias virtuosas para enfrentar la emergencia actual.