A POLITICS OF REGARD: ACTION AND INFLUENCE IN LOWLAND SOUTH AMERICA

Abstract

This chapter provides a sketch for thinking about forms of action and influence among Indigenous collectives in Lowland South America. 1 We show the pertinence of understanding relationships and actions as involving two interrelated characteristics: 1) the separation between a person who causes an act and the agent who executes it, and 2) persons always being the object of another’s regard. Our analysis is inspired by a variety of Amazonian ethnographies, as well as Marylin Strathern’s (1988) extensive analysis of personhood in Melanesia. This discussion of what we call a “politics of regard” returns and remains within the spirit of Pierre Clastres’s (1974) political anthropology of Lowland South America, but offers an ethnographically nuanced alternative to his opposition between coercive and non-coercive power. We also raise the questions of whether a “politics of regard” would provide a better comprehension of agency than its restriction to the operation of the master-pet relational schema allows for. 2. © 2025 selection and editorial matter, José Antonio Kelly and Marcos de Almeida Matos.