The Identity in Amazonia: the non-obviously obvious

Abstract

The article develops the idea of the contemporarily widely-discussed trend called Perspectivism as realized by a tiny Indian tribe inhabiting the Venezuelan Amazonia. I argue that the idea of fanaticism does not need to address the sphere of beliefs or religious-magical convictions, but can be connected with the social sphere, kinship or personal identity as well. I present and analyze two kinds of fanaticism: (1) the people existing now conceived as replicas of those having existed previously; (2) the “characters inversed”, viz., the people related to others conceived as consisting of the same but rearranged elements of the latter.