Territory and participation: Lévy-Bruhl in Karajá’s country

Abstract

The present article aims to extract from Lucien Lévy-Bruhl’s work a concept of “territory” that may be productive from the standpoint of the ethnological literature’s current state; to extract it and, in a second movement, to experiment with it in reading the Karajá’s  ethnographic data. After a brief treatment of some of the central aspects of the French author’s work, I explore the Karajá’s concept of hãwa – usually translated by the Indians as “territory” – as a “huddle of participations and exclusions”, according to Lévy-Bruhl’s phrasing. For a hãwa associated to a village contains within it several heterogeneous territories inhabited by Other, different beings; and between which there is no extensive division, but intensive superposition. To live in a hãwa thus requires a vivid perception of the relational modes this “huddle” implies as well as a careful evaluation of that which one can or cannot do taking into account the consequences or effects of one’s actions – a cosmopolitics of respect.