Avoidance as Alterity Stance: An Upper Xinguan Affinity Chronotope

I analyze affinal name avoidance among Wauja speakers of Brazil’s Upper Xingu within the frame of Amazonian relationality as a symbolic economy of alterity. Focusing empirically on instances of naming and name avoidance, my analysis locates acts of nomination and acts of alterity in discourse. Names are inalienable possessions passed down across generations that, like gifts, confer essential ties between those who share them. Transmission of proper names in descent and their avoidance in interaction index stances that are situated within Wauja chronotopes. These models of space–time link descent-based names with constancy of ancestral identities through time and link affinity—marked by disrupting paths of transmission—with the pragmatic navigation of everyday spaces to be avoided. Name avoidance in the Wauja context can be seen to index stances of alterity between affines, to invoke chronotopic webs of kinship beyond the interactional encounter, at the same time that it implicitly references and validates wider cosmological preoccupations with difference.