Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, which first began in the 1950s. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic, and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and Christian perspectives, including the New Tribes literature, interviews with New Tribes missionaries, translation practices and translated Christ ... More

Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission, which first began in the 1950s. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic, and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and Christian perspectives, including the New Tribes literature, interviews with New Tribes missionaries, translation practices and translated Christian texts, and the author’s own ethnographic field notes from her more than thirty-year involvement with the Wari’ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.