Exchanging Words: Language, Ritual, and Relationality in Brazil’s Xingu Indigenous Park by Christopher Ball (review)

Rituals in which things and words are exchanged are central to the social lives of indigenous people in the Upper Xingú region of Brazil. Anthropologist Christopher Ball, through this ethnography of the Wauja people—an Arawak language speaking population of about 350 living in the Xingú Indigenous Park (PIX)—asks us to consider the value of taking that fact not simply as an ethnological datum, but rather as generative idea for theory building about social relations more broadly.

In recent years a number of anthropologists, including Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Marisol de la Cadena, have been making persuasive arguments about how the indigenous cultures of the Americas may help us fundamentally rethink the human experience, and hence help us develop new theoretical paradigms for the social sciences. Christopher Ball’s signature contribution is to argue for how a focus on linguistic acts can sharpen this kind larger project. Balls notes that for the Wauja, discursive interaction, ritual, and exchange are “integrated in praxis that is at once communicative, religious, and economic” (10) and that recognizing this helps us make sense of the ways in which Wauja manage and experience social relations. To this end, Exchanging Words draws on linguistic anthropology’s methodology of closely analyzing specific instance of talk to illustrate the multiple ways that Wauja conceive of and enact their relationality through the dynamics of ritualized language and open-ended exchange with a range of others, which includes co-villagers, members of other Xingúan indigenous groups, Brazilian state functionaries and NGO workers, spirit-monsters, and all manner of foreigners both proximate and distant.

The chapters in this book are rather ingeniously organized into sections that take the reader from the center of the Wauja’s village progressively outwards into the PIX, Amazonia, and ultimately to foreign spaces, focusing at each step on how Wauja manage their social relations with others through ritualized language and exchange. Along the way we see a chiefly speech performed for co-villagers, a healing ritual in which villagers act as stand-ins for spirit-monsters, ritual songs topicalizing the value of endogamy, negotiations around the performance of a regional ritual cycle, protests, and petitions and negotiations over a development projects, culminating in an episode that sees a group of Wauja men travelling overseas to perform a ritual dance as part of a French museum’s cultural programming. In each context Ball deftly interprets how language is used to manage the dynamics of power and reciprocity that Wauja expect from their interlocutors, even if often these result in disappointment, as when a chief narrates his spiritual connection to the river as a means of protesting a damn but which state functionaries fail to recognize as an objection, or when the Wauja’s French hosts dismiss requests for cigarettes and Coca- Cola as greedy demands, rather than as necessary steps for guarding against the spirit-monsters invoked by the ritual. While the book’s structure of expanding circles of interaction works well for illustrating the author’s larger point about how Wauja use ritualized language with varying degrees of risk and success in managing a wide range of interactions, it also has the effect of making chapters feel somewhat separate from each other narratively.

The book is primarily aimed at anthropologists, and linguistic anthropologists especially will appreciate the strong case it makes for why a focus on ritualized language is necessary for understanding the larger social worlds that indigenous people inhabit. By the same token, readers unfamiliar with that literature may find the more theoretical sections of the book to be tough going (but also ultimately rewarding), since there is an abundance of the technical language used. However, Ball does good job of explaining his theoretical touchstones and makes a convincing case for why a linguistic approach offers critical insight into social relations in Amazonia. Readers looking...