Professor Warren Thompson publishes,听鈥淏eing Seen is Believing: Evidence and Authority in the Ache Mission Encounter,"听in the听Journal of Anthropological Research.
Abstract
Like many other lowland South American groups described in the literature, Ache give a higher epistemic value to visually experiencing events, a sensibility that some have argued has impeded lasting conversions by Amerindians to Christianity given that the evidentiary practices of the latter can only be expressed through language. In this article, I qualify this idea by showing how the Ache acceptance of the idea of 鈥渂eing seen鈥� by an omnipresent Christian God was able to reconfigure Ache evidentiary practices regarding vision and visual experience. Through a series of Ache conversion narratives recorded in the late 1970s, I show the importance of 鈥渂eing seen鈥� in Ache conversion and how it eventually provided resources for lasting engagements with Christianity鈥攂oth with and without the surveilling practices of missionaries from the New Tribes Mission.
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