The wasps that hunt with their teeth: multispecies artifacts, ritual, and human-nonhuman relations among among the Karitiana (Rondônia)

Abstract

At the intersection of Amazonian ethnology, the anthropology of human-animal relations and studies of artifacts, this article analyzes a male ritual among the Karitiana, a Tupi-Arikém-speaking people in the southwestern Brazilian Amazon. Osiipo consisted, above all, in the use of stings from a variety of wasps for the production of hunters. The available information suggests that the main agents of this constitution of the male person were these insects, replicating in men their own qualities as ferocious predators and warriors. In this process, the presence of monkey teeth belts, emblems of great hunters, and which are also carried by wasps, stood out. The analysis of this specific object - the rows of monkey teeth - makes it possible to understand how different other-than-human agencies interpenetrate in this ritual which was intended to make good hunters, the full version of which is no longer performed. Such multi-species artifacts thus become privileged material expressions for investigating the interactions of the Karitiana with many other non-human beings with which they share the world.

Keywords:
artifacts; ritual; multispecies relations; personhood; animals