Can we wash away love with bleach? Affect, gender, and agency in Western Amazonia

Abstract

Although some Kakataibo women say that their elders did not know romantic love and that they learned it only recently by going to the city, that romantic love is actually having a hard time taking root in Indigenous Amazonia. This article explores some aspects of affectivity based on Amazonian women’s discourses and experiences of love and conjugality. Using an analytical framework of the anthropology of affects, I argue that to understand Indigenous uneasiness about passionate love as a voluntary, sublimated, and symmetrical relationship, love needs to be approached in terms of control exerted by one person over another. The ethnography of sensible experiences related to love and desire, in which women often occupy the place of prey, sheds light not only on the relational dimension of the affect and on the feminine interpretation of a lived world permeated by power relations, but it also allows us to add some nuance to the Indigenous conception of gender and the underlying notion of agency.