Chapter 1 Performative objects: Konduri iconography as a window into precolonial Amazonian ontologies

The ethnological study of perception and other modes of figuration

To analyse the Konduri images, we departed from a naturalistic conception of the anthropomorphic and zoomorphic concepts, compatible with the nature–culture dichotomy, to arrive at their problematisation as a methodological equivocation.¹⁰ Thus, the same categories – human, animal, artefact – that initially helped us to recognise patterns also showed us their insufficiency. Unlike animist ontologies, centred on human–animal relationships, in Konduri culture the artefacts play a central role. For example, headdresses emerge as distinctive features of supernatural zooanthropomorphic beings, revealing animacy and agency. Other ontological categories are expressed through dynamic visual strategies and focal alternation. These strategies point to the performative quality of ceramics and their images, which can only be seen from certain angles or points of view.¹¹ In other words, its ambiguous mode of figuration includes the observer, who becomes a participant in the performance. The tactile experience (the direct manipulation of objects) is fundamental in experiencing relational ontologies through materiality and sensoriality.¹² The formal and iconographic analysis allows approaching them in their relationship with shamanic knowledge in the Amazonian societies of the past.¹³

We analysed a group of fragments with common and well-discernible characteristics within the total of appendices, which are the different types of external features added to the object’s main body, especially in the form of three-dimensional figures. The images present the visual theme of zooanthropomorphic beings with head ornaments (Figure 1.1) and superimposed figures. Originally called ‘double face’ by Hilbert, the superimposed figures comprise a larger zooanthropomorphic figure, with another smaller figure placed on top of its head (Figure 1.2). Generally, the smaller figure has a dotted fillet surrounding the composition, as long arms that embrace the more prominent figure, with the hands represented at their ends. It is important to emphasise the significant variability of this theme and the different plausible interpretations of elements such as the eyes, mouth, nose, wings and paws, which demonstrate the multivocal nature of Konduri compositions.

At first, the zoomorphic-anthropomorphic distinction helped us perceive differences and pointed to the formation of other possible categories and modes of figuration. This ‘equivocated’ methodology meets with the theoretical possibilities arising from the confluence of material studies, Amazonian perspectivist anthropology and a renewed interest in figuration, preparing fertile ground for the archaeological study of precolonial iconographies.¹⁴ Several authors have recognised the importance of questioning the modern Western concept of representation in the study of figuration. The anthropologists of art propose new methods and epistemologies that transform our way of seeing through animist/perspectivist visual technologies.¹⁵

The identification of a perspectivist iconography meets with Amazonian theories, centred on corporeity and the aesthetic production of artefacts and persons. The relationship between persons and things becomes more complex as ethnographies describe the ontological status of objects in Amazonian cosmologies.¹⁶ In Amazonian mythologies, ‘things, objects, artifacts, or at least some of these, are considered subjectivities that have a social life’ that remains hidden and invisible to most people.¹⁷ Their visibility is relational, created by the hands of artificers (especially shamans), in some cases capable of endowing them with a soul or controlling their agency. In some of these cosmologies, creating an ex-nihilo world gives way to transformations based on existing beings.¹⁸ Amazonian peoples understand artefacts such as headdresses as compositions made from the reorganisation and rearrangement of body parts of different animals and materials – they are beings made out of other beings.¹⁹

Oliveira proposed that the headdresses depicted in Konduri ceramics were full of multiple interiorities, visible or only suggested, and that they should be interpreted as artefacts composed of parts of animal bodies that reveal the interiority of these beings, in certain circumstances. On the other hand, the emergence of small faces at the ends of the linear body of superimposed figures (hands, paws and joints) is an example that helps understand how headdresses oscillate between artefactual appearance and animated interiority.²⁰ This subjectivising mode of figuration reaffirms the idea of images whose interpretation requires a point of view that recognises the surrounding diversity of beings.²¹

These visual expressions characterise a way of knowing that is not anthropocentric but anthropomorphic, as the artefacts are also constituted as subjectivities with a social life, possessing a hidden human perspective.²² They may present distinctions in the subjectivation regimes conferred by the shamans in the degrees of animation and agency. While some objects are inert, others are particularly powerful as they converse with humans and possess extraordinary powers, including the ability to self-transform. The manufacture of these objects is often seen as the materialisation of supernatural subjectivities, which give form to entities invisible to ordinary human perception.²³ The visual themes analysed here are directly related to the constructive dimension of Amerindian ontologies, which conceive of living beings as composite entities made from parts of other bodies, including artefacts. This composite character of forms is, in turn, related to the beings’ capacity for transformation, hence the need to use adornments to keep them in their human-view shape.

Representational iconography tends to recognise the formal diversity of figures as the diversity of biological species. Thus, it categorises zooanthropomorphs and unidentified zoomorphs as difficult-to-define or fantastic beings. However, we can interpret these forms as beings of another type, valuing their shapes, traits and details as significant expressions of the diversity of spiritual or metaphysical beings. Thus, what naturalistic ontologies interpret as a biological diversity that continues to expand through identifying new species is, for perspectivist ontologies, a wide range of beings with fluid, invisible bodily forms living in other layers of the cosmos, below or above the world inhabited by humans and animals. These have different points of view and even pertain to different worlds, as expressed by Viveiros de Castro’s concept of ‘multinaturalism’.²⁴

From a biosemiotic perspective, Eduardo Kohn proposes in How Forests Think that the diversity of life forms in the tropical forest is the relational result of countless interpretive layers in which human and nonhuman beings and/or collectives participate. His approach recognises the importance of thinking and seeing according to the perspectives of other beings with whom one lives. Thus, Indigenous thought and practice incorporate forms of semiotic engagement other than the symbolic. The interaction between these semiotic modes leads to ever more complex relationships, diversifying in the tangle of interpreted and interpretive forms in continuous transformation. Kohn describes how the Runakuna people insert themselves into these more-than-human circuits of signs, not only representing but also being represented (and imagining themselves being represented) by other beings. Thus, Kohn’s semiotic materialism seeks to trace the origin of Amerindian perspectivism to what he calls the ‘ecology of selves’, that is, the concrete diversity of subjects (human and nonhuman) whose own forms of interpretations the Runakuna need to consider to live their lives:

Perspectivism is certainly a historically contingent aesthetic orientation – an orientation that, pace Viveiros de Castro, we might, in this sense, describe as ‘cultural’ – but it is also an ecologically contingent amplificatory effect of the need to understand semiotic selves in a way that simultaneously recognises their continuity with us as well as their differences. It is a response to the challenges of getting by in an ecology of selves whose relational webs extend well beyond the human, and it emerges from everyday interactions with forest beings.²⁵

Similarly, we interpret the diversity of Konduri figurations as the shamanic visual expression of a way of life that thought with the forest, interpreting how other beings saw the world and creating visibilities for others. Analysing their perspectives requires not only the methodological alternation between human and animal points of view, like in the hunter–prey formula, but also attending to relationships that include supernatural beings and artefacts, considering them as relational positions. The transformational element in the Konduri figurations reveals the practice of interpretive thinking and presents us with other ways of being synthesised in figures shaped through visual effects such as anatropy and reversibility.

In the case of Konduri ceramics, we can infer the referents of some images through formal similarities. But how to recognise beings in the tangle of figurative suggestions that seem to purposefully multiply before our eyes, welcoming and interpreting this multiplicity? We suggest that their identification is possible through attention to subtle elements, such as the orifices or simply the dots that – working at once as index and icon, texture and figure – reveal images that are only suggested. The richly dotted style is one of the most challenging expressions of Konduri ceramics. By paying attention to how the eyes and mouth are represented and the details that arise from a change in the focus of the observer’s gaze, we can identify images of recognisable and unrecognisable beings and their relationships.

As revealed by Amazonian ethnographies, the relations between humans and animals, such as predator and prey, are considered potentially dangerous due to the otherness enacted by the Other’s gaze. This encounter may imply an imagined bodily transformation involving participation, conviviality and food sharing, connecting inside and outside. The change of perspective generates instability in the body under transformation. Transformations can be visible or invisible, as these are changes in the relationships between people, each with their own visible world. In her ethnography of the Nambikwara (Mamaindê), Miller describes a healing session in which the shaman removes an internal ornament from the patient, making it visible. This shows that visibility/invisibility is not intrinsic to the object but emerges from the observer’s visual capacity.²⁶ Thus, although fluid, images and forms persist as figurations through their resemblance to animals, humans and artefacts.²⁷

The relationship between the figure and its visual referent is challenged, pointing to another referent. The connection between referent and image necessarily involves the presence of another that establishes a relationship with the visible images from a certain point of view. Severi proposes the concept of chimerical image as the condensation of two or more figures interpreted through a projection, thus enacting relationships between one or more beings and virtual figures in the same form or outline.²⁸ These two or more images correlate by expressing relationships between their respective visual referents, allowing one to see both (Figure 1.3). In the Konduri style, those images shown through anatropy – a term proposed by Rex González to describe images that can only be seen through a certain angle, highlighting the importance of the observer’s positioning and/or moving the piece – stand out among the chimerical figures.²⁹ Another way of seeing is achieved through changing the focal attention, in which the gaze prioritises one figure over the other, thus figure–ground reversing.

This anatropic and reversible way of presenting the images is present in Konduri pottery through rotations of the artefacts in 45, 90 and 180 degrees, showing the bodily characteristics of different beings. Through the artefact’s movements, guided by the figuration of the faces, these bodily states converge in a true dynamic labyrinth. Linked to Severi’s ‘chimerical image’, we propose the term ‘performative quality’ for these characteristics of movement, visual attention and the positioning of a ‘virtual’ image. It is possible to identify several of these virtual chimeras in the composition of Konduri pottery motifs. These images are multivocal, endowed with a multiplicity that reveals itself in its fullness through movement and acts of looking. Depth and diversity are formed through excessive figuration, perceptible through existing details in the same image. These appear as additional images, suggested through indexes, acquiring iconic autonomy.

A perspectivist iconography: motifs, attributes, relevance and visual themes

Based on iconicity, traditional iconography has formal similarity as its primary form of analysis. Furthermore, it takes the image as a composition of elements. Motifs are the basic unit in the compositions, which may or may not have iconic relevance. On the other hand, attributes are supra-stylistic identifiers of a visual theme, which allow their association with particular referents, such as the specific characteristics of an animal (which may or may not be discrete). Finally, the filling motifs, widely documented by Boas for the iconography of the Northwest Coast of America, consist of elements that have no intrinsic meaning in the compositions.³⁰

In the Konduri iconography, dots and incisions are used on the surface of the pieces to fill up spaces. They may or may not be relevant to iconographic analysis. The simple dots, forming a surface pattern, could easily be confused with filling motifs without greater relevance. However, our analysis shows that this same element is applied to represent the skin of different zoomorphs. Despite their filling function, such motifs are relevant for iconographic analysis. We suggest that they may indicate a bodily state of transformation. The vertical arrangement and the size of head decorations give the zooanthropomorphic figures a human-like appearance (Figure 1.4). The alignment between the eyes, mouth and nose in the configuration of the face and the diversity of head shapes also mark bodily differences.

The human, animal and hybrid forms are expressed through human traits or attributes combined with those conventionally used for animal figuration. The anthropomorphism of these hybrid figures is expressed in aspects related to body posture: frontality, vertical positioning and the use of cephalic ornaments. The animal form, in turn, manifests itself in particular elements, details that promote a formal differentiation of the body, sometimes subtle and discreet, such as a beak, a tail or a paw, but sometimes highly conventional/abstract. These can be described as animist images due to the correlation between human attitude/positioning and animal body shape as expressions of interiority and exteriority, respectively, as argued by Descola.³¹ Ingold approaches this correlation through the concept of clothing as an exchange of perspectives between species.³² Related to zooanthropomorphism, animistic figures can reveal themselves through recurrent strategies.

Head decorations are attributes that confer a human quality on zooanthropomorphic motifs. As in Knight Jr.’s depiction, head adornments are sometimes presented as motifs, showing themselves discreetly, or even as attributes associated with the human relational position.³³ The analysis of head decorations shows that they are formed by applied dots, incisions and fillets, which vary significantly in shape: they can be made up of a row of dots or just a smooth, almost invisible line. This oscillation between relevance and non-relevance, alternately presenting and hiding figures, is characteristic of Konduri figuration and indicates its fluid quality of bodily/perspectival transformation. In his work on Teotihuacan (Mexico) art, one of the pioneering works of configurational analysis, G. Kubler, shows that headdresses can alternate between a figuration of central or secondary importance in relation to the main motif’s composition, also alternating between adjectival and substantive functions.³⁴ The same happens in Konduri iconography. However, the head adornment gains figurative proportion in these figurations, showing the front part associated with face and hand motifs. This substantivation of the motif reveals the human interiority of Konduri images.

Visual themes are images composed of motifs, attributes and aspects that, expressing their variety in the analysed corpus, can be recognised by their patterns within a broad spectrum of compositions. There are differences in their conceptualisation. For Kubler, themes should be identified only through internal references to the style, while for Panofsky, themes are the elements interconnected to the reference narratives.³⁵ To allow greater methodological adaptability, Knight Jr. proposes the use of both concepts. He conceives of the visual theme as derived from configurational analysis internal to the corpus. He dubs ‘reference themes’ those themes identified in relation to their external reference.³⁶

We opted for the concept of visual theme because there is no direct and literal relationship between the images analysed and textual, ethnographic or ethnohistorical references. Our references to ethnography are always made through a theoretical discussion based on Amerindian perspectivism, suggesting connections with ethnographic examples. Our analysis starts from the configurational elements internal to the Konduri figuration mode to arrive at the identification of icons.

Konduri visual strategies: alternation and anatropy

Our iconographic analysis showed the use of formal resources to configure chimerical images. The alternation between encompassing and encompassed figures makes it possible to see a face and another face within it, oscillating between a larger and smaller figure. Sometimes this is very subtle; for example, a face taking the place of the nose. In this way, one can focus on the smaller or larger figure, taking the smaller face as the nose of the larger one. This visual strategy might be associated with manipulating the ceramic object by slightly inclining it and alternating the visual focus.³⁷

Thus, we suggest that Konduri figurations use an artifice similar to the visual strategy discussed by Lagrou through the notions of ‘encompassing and encompassed’ associated with the technique of figure and ground reversal.³⁸ It is the same visual dynamic that in Konduri ceramics makes the vision alternate between a larger and more prominent figure and a smaller one, shaped three-dimensionally. In addition, the sculpting of graphic elements on the surface transforms the body, pointing to the possibility of perceiving figures that only insinuate themselves in the relationship between the drawn surface and the volume. In this example, we find another visual technology, which allows one – through changing the gaze’s focus and the observer’s position in relation to the artefact – to recognise graphic elements that would not be visible from another perspective, also maintaining a subtle character of the figuration.

We argue that these complex and often indecipherable images are spiritual and changing beings. Lagrou discusses ways of figurating the invisible in Amazonian Indigenous arts. According to her, the figuration of the invisible produces a paradoxical presence, as the relationship between image and referent does not consist of an ‘imitation of appearance’.³⁹ Americanist ethnologists have referred to invisible beings through the concept of the ‘double’, initially proposed by Vernant to identify the status of spirits, souls, images or ghosts in contrast to the living body.⁴⁰

In the universe of Konduri iconography, full of different gazes and indecipherable shapes – and whose figuration of visible bodies has significant variability – invisible beings were materialised through ceramic technology. The images that emerge in the artefacts act on the observers. The images are indices of presences identified not only through the main theme but also through motifs that emphasise sense organs, connecting inside and outside, like eyes, mouths and noses.

There is a profusion of images that are intentionally visible from some points of view and invisible from others. This differential visibility constitutes a visual-figurational aspect of an animist/perspectivist ontology, highlighting the performance of ceramic artefacts in the context of shamanic technology. The motifs and figurative elements are affordances – or characteristics that emerge from the artefacts themselves, in the sense pointed out by Ingold after J.J. Gibson – which broadens our perception of these objects and their relationality.⁴¹

Through stippling, the figuration of the eyes is accentuated by its concentricity and intensity, which guides the gaze through visual empathy. But it also ceases to figurate those same eyes momentarily by sharing them with another figure. The motif we call an eye is also a temporal, ephemeral eye, as are the figurations that depend on the gaze to establish themselves. The variety of eyes can be classified in the following way: simple stippling, stippling with depth, stippling with one circular matrix, deep perforation, coffee bean (horizontal, vertical or inclined), subtle lines, stippling with more than two circular matrices; and even less recurrent variations such as the dotted protruding eyes, and the protruding eyes with dots and incisions.

The figuration of the nose is ambivalent. It represents noses and sometimes small heads. One recognises the characteristic incisions of the incised-dotted fillets applied to the noses of the zooanthropomorphic figures. These are not just noses but noses that transform themselves, showing something in common with the figures wearing headdresses, superimposed figures (double-faced), and incised-dotted fillet bands surrounding the pieces’ outer perimeters (Figure 1.5). Morphologically, the nose can thus be represented through buttons, with two dots and a central incision, as well as two or three dots. These varieties are associated with the incised-dotted fillet, sometimes forming small faces. The ways of figuration of the mouth are related to the diversity of head shapes and face composition, as the proportion between the nose and the eye varies. Its main forms are the mouth configured between two points, the hourglass-shaped mouth, the mouth followed by protuberance, the bird’s beak, the poured conical mouth, the mouth with a vertical notch and the mouth with dots. Beaks are easier to recognise, being associated with bird figures.

The small heads that emerge from the nose sometimes also appear on other parts of the body. Its isolated figuration helps us perceive that it is a minimal face composition. But this also varies, indicating different visual references, which allows us to perceive the autonomy of its meaning, that is, its visual relevance and discrete quality. The theoretical position that interprets the profusion of dots as a decorative aspect does not capture the visual relevance of this motif. We recognise that when the motif occurs in isolation, one must always ask about its figurativeness, and when it appears associated with the face, it also carries this meaning. As a chimerical image, the possibility of this figuration remains latent and does not fade away – it adds to the resulting figure. We consider that the idea of a figurative nose is present even in those compositions enclosed in the figure of the nose as a potential figure. The potential figure then reveals itself through its supernatural interiority, which appears as a superimposed figure.

What makes the Konduri figurations even more complex is the incised-dotted fillet, which generally occupies the position of head adornment (or nape cover), discernible on the figure’s front face and back. This fillet often discretely surrounds the entire figure and makes other figurations emerge. There are several identifiable compositions, but for the purposes of our argument, we point out just those related to the theme of superimposed figures and the theme of zoo anthropomorphic figurations bearing head adornment. Closer attention to the fillet allows the visualisation of small faces that appear on the central figures’ elbows, shoulders, wings and endings, such as hands or paws, sometimes suggesting images of serpents.

An iconography of invisible beings

Our interpretation of Konduri iconography draws on Viveiros de Castro’s reflections on the ontology of spirits in the Amazon, which cannot be classified as animals or humans but as ‘disjunctive syntheses’ of beings that defy any categorisation.⁴² Discussing the Yanomami example through the narrative of Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, the author explores the visuality or even the perceptual quality derived from the shamanic experience of Kopenawa, who describes the forest as full of reflections of crystals in which the xapiripë spirits dance. These spirits are tiny luminous beings seen as shining dust because of their infinity and dispersion, which inspire a broader discussion on cosmologies and shamanism in the Amazon.

According to Viveiros de Castro, there are common characteristics in the way of existence and manifestation of spirits in the Indigenous Amazon related to notions linked to the idea of an intensive virtual multiplicity. In the Yanomami example, Kopenawa refers to spirits, more than a class of distinct beings, as an image or vital principle, genuine interiority or essence of animals and other beings of the forest – immortal images of a primordial humanity. However, he points out that this notion also refers to human shamans, conceived as having the same nature as auxiliary spirits, suggesting a reverberation between the positions of shaman and spirit observed in different Amazonian cultures. These notions about generic and undifferentiated identities are present in Amazonian mythology, which often deals with speciation or the unstable emergence of different subjects, with humans and nonhumans finding themselves entangled.

Based on these notions – which seem to indicate empirical invisibility – the spirits are understood as non-representational images capable of assuming different forms. These beings are visible only to the shamans’ eyes through hallucinogenic drugs and other manners of body sensitisation, such as masks, eye drops and sleep deprivation, contributing to a sort of ‘deterritorialization of the gaze’.⁴³ Rather than sight, the perception of these spirits is linked to a luminous intensity, also observed in other Amazonian cultures. In this way, the invisibility of spirits for most people is related to their luminous visibility for shamans.

The Konduri iconography and its complex images suggest a connection with the arts arising from shamanic technologies as an expression of this universe of spirits. His intense and plural figurations, zoomorphic, anthropomorphic or hybrid in appearance, are neither human nor animal, indicating their belonging to a broad spectrum of images of invisible beings, evidenced by their transformational, performative, dynamic and fluid quality. As discussed, movement and fluidity are part of the perspectivist visual technologies described by Lagrou. They can also be interpreted with reference to virtual space, as proposed by both Lagrou and Séveri, in which the dynamic between abstractionism and figurativism momentarily blinds us – or opens our eyes to possible figurations. The profusion of images is the same formal strategy that makes the Konduri figure invisible (its invisibility/visibility device) – see Figure 1.6.

Conclusion

Konduri ceramics present complex images linked to the Amazonian imaginary, which include a myriad of beings that, according to Indigenous ethnology, are only visible through specific perceptual states. Consequently, they are irreducible to a single typology. The artefacts analysed here are bearers of zooanthropomorphic figures, animals and unrecognisable beings, which share the same motifs and attributes. Subjective perception, attention and visual intensity are fundamental for their interpretation. Through an approximation from ethnological theory, we propose to observe the images challenged by equivocation, in a way critical to anthropocentrism and the representational paradigm that separates nature from culture and materiality from spirituality. In this sense, our iconographic analysis sought to understand visual effects, revealing the relationships between person and object, as well as intrinsically connected chimerical images.

This theoretical-methodological problematisation, arising from the visual agency of Konduri iconography, enables the recognition of different forms in a continuous flow of transformation. The identified motifs compose figurations with hybrid characteristics (humans and animals) connected in the same visual space, showing relationships between these diverse beings in a single composition. In this chapter, we explored two recurring themes in Konduri pottery. The first is zooanthropomorphic figures with head adornments. The second, designated as superimposed figures or ‘double face’, refers to a being with another face that is revealed above it.

We have argued that Konduri iconography presents performative figurations of natural, supernatural and artefactual beings in various relational states. These images include zooanthropomorphic figures and animals mingled with other animals whose gazes change the referents; the nose has the shape of a face, linear beings that populate the outer surface of the pottery, sometimes reappearing as (animated) head adornments of zooanthropomorphic beings, sometimes as figurative endings or as beings of superlative capacity, superimposed on others. Thus, Konduri pottery acts as a shamanic technology that highlights the potency of artefacts in ritual contexts in a way that assumes, imagines and investigates how other beings think and perceive. The transformations identified through our iconographic analysis – highlighting the motifs, their compositions and characteristics of specific themes – modify iconographic concepts and allow the recognition of nonhuman perspectives. In our interpretation, the highlighted categories establish a relationship with traditional iconography, while being aware of its shortcomings.

Over three decades, Amazonian archaeology sought to rescue social forms from the past, producing narratives that mirrored realities known in the Western world. This was an effort, often in vain, to value evidence of social hierarchies and political centralisation. An archaeology based on a transversal discussion with anthropology opens up other possibilities. Previously seen as a stylistic indicator, Konduri pottery is now understood as an active materiality whose artefacts were involved in shamanic ceremonies and indicate a way of thinking. The images refer to the plurality of modes of existence in the Amazon rainforest, where different forms of biological life interact, but also intangible, supernatural beings. This animated world that emerges in our analysis allows us to highlight sociocultural contexts and institutions from the past that have long-term historical continuity with contemporary Indigenous societies, whose survival has been threatened by a global crisis. One of Brazil’s greatest challenges today is protecting the Amazonian biocultural heritage. At the same time, the country has in the forest itself the theoretical tools (ontological, metaphysical) to face the communicational crisis linked to the problem of human-nonhuman coexistence – which puts the forest itself at risk. By empirically evidencing the existence of beings other than humans and opening the way for recognising precolonial worldviews, archaeology – in conjunction with the study of visuality – contributes to decolonising our ways of thinking.

Notes

1. 1. Peter Paul Hilbert, A cerâmica arqueológica da região de Oriximiná. Belém, Instituto de Antropologia e Etnologia do Pará, 1955.

2. 2. Peter Paul Hilbert & Klaus Hilbert, ‘Resultados preliminares da pesquisa arqueológica nos rios Nhamundá e Trombetas, Baixo Rio Amazonas’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Nova Série, Antropologia 75 (1980), 1–11; Betty Meggers & Clifford Evans, ‘An experimental formulation of horizon styles in tropical forest of South America’. In: Samuel Lothrop (ed.) Essays in precolumbian art and archaeology. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1961, 372–88.

3. 3. Vera Lúcia Calandrini Guapindaia, Além da margem do rio – as ocupações Konduri e Pocó na região de Porto Trombetas, PA, unpubl. PhD dissertation, University of São Paulo, 2008.

4. 4. Camila Jácome & Jaime Xamen Wai Wai, ‘A paisagem e as cerâmicas arqueológicas na bacia do Trombetas: uma discussão da arqueologia karaiwa e WaiWai’, Boletim Do Museu Paraense Emılio Goeldi. CiênciasHumanas 15, no. 3 (2020), e20190140.

5. 5. Marcony Lopes Alves, ‘Revisitando os alter-egos: figuras sobrepostas na iconografia Konduri e sua relação com o xamanismo’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 15, no. 3 (2020), e20190105.

6. 6. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007; ‘Esperando a Gaia. Componer el mundo común mediante las artes y la política’, Cuadernos de Otra parte. Revista de letras y artes 26 (2012), 67–76.

7. 7. Bruno Latour, 2019; Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A requiem to late liberalism. Durham, Duke University Press, 2016; Pierre Maniglier & Stephen Muecke, ‘Art as fiction: can Latour’s ontology of art be ratified by art lovers (an exercise in anthropological diplomacy)’, New Literary History 47, nos. 2–3 (2016), 419–38.

8. 8. Bruno Latour, Investigação sobre os modos de existencia: uma antropología dos modernos. São Paulo, Editora Vozes, 2019; Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectival anthropology and the method of controlled equivocation’, Tipití: Journal of the Society for Anthropology of Lowland South America 2, no. 1 (2004), 3–22; ‘Metaphysics as mythophysis. Or, why I have always been an anthropologist’. In: Pierre Charbonnier, Gilda Saldon & Peter Skafish (eds.) Comparative metaphysics: ontology after anthropology. London-New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016, 249–74.

9. 9. Latour, 2007; Benjamin Alberti, ‘Archaeology and ontologies of scale: the case of miniaturization in first millennium northwest Argentina’. In: Benjamin Alberti, Andrew Meirion Jones & Joshua Pollard, Jr. (eds.) Archaeology after interpretation: returning materials to archaeological theory. Walnut Creek, Left Coast Press, 2016, 43–58; Benjamin Alberti, Severian Fowles, Martin Holbraad & Christofer Witmore, ‘Worlds otherwise: archaeology, anthropology and ontological difference’, Current Anthropology 52, no. 6 (2011), 896–912; Benjamin Alberti & Yvonne Marshall, ‘Animating archaeology: local theories and conceptually open-ended methodologies’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3 (2009), 344–357; Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes, ‘O perspectivismo ameríndio e idea de uma estética americana’, Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi. Ciências Humanas 7, no. 1 (2012), 133–59; ‘Politics and ritual in large villages in Santarém, Lower Amazon, Brazil’, Cambridge Archeological Journal 27, no. 2 (2017), 275–93; ‘Images of transformation in the Lower Amazon and the performativity of Santarém and Konduri pottery’, Journal of Social Archeology 22, no. 1 (2022), 82–103; Philippe Descola, Más allá de naturaleza y cultura. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2012; ‘La fabrique des images’, Anthopologie et sociétés 30, no. 3 (2006), 167–82; ‘O avesso do visivel: ontología e iconologia’, Arte & Ensaios 31 (2016), 127–37; ‘La Fabrique des images. Exposition au Musée du Quai Branly (16 février 2010–11 juillet 2011)’; La lettre du Collège de France 28 (2010), 13; Tim Ingold, ‘Totemism, animism and the depiction of animals’. In: Tim Ingold, The perception of the environment. London, Routledge, 2000, 125–45; Tamara Bray, ‘An archeological perspective on the Andean concept of Camaquen: thinking through late Pre-Columbian ofrendas and huacas’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, no. 3 (2009), 357–66.

10. 10. George Kubler, ‘The iconography of the art of Teotihuacan’, Studies in Pre-Columbian Art and Archaeology 4 (1967), 1–40; Vernon Knight, Jr., Iconographic method in new world prehistory. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013; Viveiros de Castro, 2004, 2016.

11. 11. Gomes, 2012.

12. 12. Catherine Allen, Matias Lépori, Bill Sillar, Marisa Lazzari & Maria Florencia Becerra, ‘Pensamientos de una etnógrafa acerca de la interpretación en la arqueología andina: comentado por Bill Sillar y Marisa Lazzari’, Mundo de Antes 11 (2017), 13–68; Carlos Fausto, Art effects: images, agency and ritual in Amazonia. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2021; Denise Maria Cavalcante Gomes, ‘Images of transformation in the Lower Amazon and the performativity of Santarém and Konduri pottery’, Journal of Social Archaeology 22, no. 1 (2022), 82–103; Els Lagrou, ‘Le graphisme sur les corps amérindiens. Des chimères abstraites?’, Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts 13 (2011), 68–93.

13. 13. Bruno Latour, Investigação sobre os modos de existência: uma antropologia dos modernos. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Vozes, 2012; Pierre Maniglier, ‘¿Cuántos planetas Tierra? El giro geológico en antropología’, Avá 29 (2016), 199–216.

14. 14. Alfred Gell, Art and agency: an anthropological theory. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1998; Amira Henare, Martin Holbraad & Sari Wastell, ‘Introduction’. In: Amira Henare, Martin Holbraad & Sari Wastell (eds.) Thinking through things: theorizing artefacts ethnographically. London, Routledge, 2007, 1–37; Carlo Severi, Le principe de la chimère. Une anthropologie de la mémoire. Paris, Editions rue d’Ulme/Musée du Quai Branly, 2007; Gomes, 2012.

15. 15. Tim Ingold, 2000; Descola, 2006, 13; ‘O avesso do visível: ontologia e iconologia’, Arte & Ensaios 31 (2016), 127–37; Lagrou, 2011; Allen, Lépori, Sillar, Lazzari & Becerra, 2017.

16. 16. Lúcia Hussak Van Velthem, ‘Artes indígenas: notas sobre a lógica dos corpos e dos artefatos’, Textos Escolhidos de Cultura e Arte Populares 7, no. 1 (2010), 19–29; Anne Christine Tylor & Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Un corps fait de regards’. In: Stephanie Breton (ed.) Qu’est-ce qu un corp? Amazonie. Paris, Musée du Quai Branly-Flamarion, 2006, 148–99; Els Lagrou, Arte indígena no Brasil: agência, alteridade e relação. Belo Horizonte, Com Arte, 2009; Lagrou, 2011.

17. 17. Fernando Santos-Granero (ed.), The occult life of things: native Amazonian theories of materiality and personhood. Tucson, The University of Arizona Press, 2009.

18. 18. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Exchanging perspectives: the transformation of objects into subjects in Amerindian ontologies’, Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (2004), 463–84.

19. 19. Santos-Granero, 2016.

20. 20. Luisa Vidal de Oliveira, ‘Figuras zoo-antropomorficas e seus adornos corporais: ponteado, linha incisa e modelagem na cerâmica Konduri (1000–1500 A.D.)’, Revista de Arqueologia 33, no. 1 (2020), 147–68.

21. 21. Viveiros de Castro, 2016.

22. 22. Viveiros de Castro, 2004.

23. 23. Santos-Granero, 2016, 8.

24. 24. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Perspectivismo e multinaturalismo na América Indígena’. In: Eduardo Viveiros de Casto, A inconstância da alma selvagem. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2002, 345–400.

25. 25. Eduardo Kohn, How forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. Berkeley, University of California Press, 2013, 96.

26. 26. Joana Miller, ‘Things as persons: body ornaments and alterity among the Mamaindê (Nambikwara)’. In: Fernando Santos Granero (ed.) The occult life of things: native Amazonian theories of materiality and personhood. Tucson, The University of Arizona Press, 2009, 62.

27. 27. Els Lagrou, A fluidez da forma: arte, alteridade e agência em uma sociedade Amazônica (Kaxinawa, Acre). Rio de Janeiro, Topbooks, 2007.

28. 28. Carlo Severi, Le principe de la chimère. Une anthropologie de la mémoire. Paris, Editions rue d’Ulme/musée du Quai Branly, 2007; ‘L’espace chimérique. Perception et projection dans les actes de regard’, Gradhiva. Revue d’anthropologie et d’histoire des arts 13 (2011), 8–47; ‘O espaço quimérico. Percepção e projeção nos atos do olhar’. In: Carlo Severi & Els Lagrou (eds.) Quimeras em diálogo: grafismo e figuração nas artes indígenas. Rio de Janeiro, Editora 7 Letras, 2013, 25–66.

29. 29. Alberto Rex González, Arte, Estructura y arqueologıa: análisis de figuras duales y anatropicas del N.O. Argentino. Buenos Aires, La Marca Editorial, 1974; Mary Weismantel, ‘Encounters with dragons: the stones of Chavin’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 65 (2015a), 37–53; ‘Looking like an archeologist: Viveiros de Castro at Chavin de Huantar’, Journal of Social Archaeology 15, no. 2 (2015b), 139–59.

30. 30. Franz Boas, Primitive art. Mineola, Dover Publications, 1955; Vernon Knight, Jr., Iconographic method in new world prehistory. New York, Cambridge, 2013, 80.

31. 31. Descola, 2006, 2012, 2016.

32. 32. Ingold, 2000.

33. 33. Knight, 2013.

34. 34. Kubler, 1967.

35. 35. Erwing Panofsky, O significado das artes visuais. São Paulo, Perspectiva, [1955] 2001.

36. 36. Knight, 2013.

37. 37. Gomes, 2022.

38. 38. Els Lagrou, ‘Perspectivismo, animismo y quimeras: una reflexión sobre el grafismo como técnica de alteración de la percepción’, Mundo Amazónico 3 (2012), 54–78; ‘Podem os grafismos ameríndios ser considerados quimeras abstratas? Uma reflexão sobre uma arte perspectivista’. In: Carlo Severi & Els Lagrou (eds.) Quimeras em diálogo: grafismo y figuração na arte indígena. Rio de Janeiro, Editora 7 Letras, 2013, 67–109; ‘La figuración de lo invisible en Warburg y en las artes indígenas amazónicas’. In: Sanja Savkic & Hanna Baader (eds.) Culturas visuales indígenas y las prácticas visuales en las Américas desde la antigüedad hasta el presente. Berlin, Ibero-Amerikanische Institut Rreubischer Kulturbesitz/Gebr. Mann Verlag, 2019, 303–27; ‘Learning to see in Western Amazonia’, Social Analysis 63, no. 2 (2019), 24–44.

39. 39. Lagrou, 2019.

40. 40. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘The birth of images’. In: Froma I. Zeitlin (ed.) Mortals and immortals: collected essays. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991, 165–85.

41. 41. Ingold, 2000.

42. 42. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘A floresta de cristal: notas sobre a ontologia dos espíritos amazônicos’, Cadernos de Campo 15, no. 14–15 (2006), 319–38.

43. 43. Viveiros de Castro, 2006, 332.

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