Conversão, predação e perspectiva

Abstract

The Wari', speakers of a Txapakura language living in the west of Rondônia state, Brazil, have been in close contact with fundamentalist Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission for five decades. Using myth as a comparative framework, this article looks to understand conversion to Christianity as a process of adopting the enemy's perspective, related to the Wari' attempt to stabilize their position as humans. It also aims to contribute to the contemporary debate between anthropologists and scholars of religion over the integrity of Christianity as it propagates around the world by showing that the dichotomy between continuity and rupture makes no sense to peoples - like the Wari' and other Amerindians - whose culture is reproduced through successive alterations involving the transformation into an other and the acquisition of this other perspective. The adoption of Christianity as something new and external does not contradict the assertion of a continuity between this religion and native culture.