Praying and Preying offers one of the rare anthropological monographs on the Christian experience of contemporary Amazonian indigenous peoples, based on an ethnographic study of the relationship between the Wari’, inhabitants of Brazilian Amazonia, and the Evangelical missionaries of the New Tribes Mission. Vilaça turns to a vast range of historical, ethnographic and mythological material related to both the Wari’ and missionaries perspectives and the author’s own ethnographic field notes from her more than 30-year involvement with the Wari’ community. Developing a close dialogue between the Melanesian literature, which informs much of the recent work in the Anthropology of Christianity, and the concepts and theories deriving from Amazonian ethnology, in particular the notions of openness to the other, unstable dualism, and perspectivism, the author provides a fine-grained analysis of the equivocations and paradoxes that underlie the translation processes performed by the different agents involved and their implications for the transformation of the native notion of personhood.   " Praying and Preying is a remarkably original and important study." ― Anthropology Review Database Published On: 2016-06-06 "This volume is an outstanding model of how ethnography and theory can illuminate each other. Drawing on a sophisticated command of anthropology’s central debates and decades of careful research with the Wari', Aparecida Vilaça’s masterful discussion is a real gem."—Webb Keane, author of  Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter "This book will be something of a milestone in the long journey anthropology has made in the company of people facing vast changes in their lives. Vilaça brings to a new level recent probings of Christian practice: as it becomes a vehicle through which the Amazonian Wari' give shape to their world, Christianity itself shifts, and it is no longer quite the perspective on change an outsider might have thought. Frankly and lucidly written, this is a superb testimony to the openness of first-hand inquiry." —Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge   "This volume is an outstanding model of how ethnography and theory can illuminate each other. Drawing on a sophisticated command of anthropology’s central debates and decades of careful research with the Wari', Aparecida Vilaça’s masterful discussion is a real gem."—Webb Keane, author of  Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter "This book will be something of a milestone in the long journey anthropology has made in the company of people facing vast changes in their lives. Vilaça brings to a new level recent probings of Christian practice: as it becomes a vehicle through which the Amazonian Wari' give shape to their world, Christianity itself shifts, and it is no longer quite the perspective on change an outsider might have thought. Frankly and lucidly written, this is a superb testimony to the openness of first-hand inquiry." —Marilyn Strathern, University of Cambridge   Aparecida Vilaça is Associate Professor at the Graduate Program in Social Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She is the author of  Strange Enemies ,  Quem somos nós, and Comendo como gente  and coeditor of  Native Christians .  Praying and Preying Christianity in Indigenous Amazonia By Aparecida Vilaça, David Rodgers UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-520-28914-7 Contents List of Illustrations, xi, Acknowledgments, xiii, Introduction, 1, 1 • The New Tribes Mission, 30, 2 • Versions versus Bodies: Translations in Contact, 48, 3 • The Encounter with the Missionaries, 75, 4 • Eating God's Words: Kinship and Conversion, 97, 5 • Praying and Preying, 121, 6 • Strange Creator, 144, 7 • Christian Ritual Life, 173, 8 • Moral Changes, 194, 9 • Personhood and Its Translations, 219, Conclusion, 242, Notes, 257, References, 279, Index, 301, CHAPTER 1 The New Tribes Mission "Why go out there and risk your lives on those Indians? They are not worth going out after. They're just animals." "It is because the name of Jesus is not known here, and must be made known at any cost ... that we are going to the savages." Dialogue between "Bolivian government men" and an NTM missionary, reproduced from Brown Gold, January 1944; bold in the original text In getting information for the anthropological paper, we had to ask about all their miserable customs and superstitions and stories, but we explained that God's Book spoke differently and that His book is true. ROBERT HAWKINS, Bob's Diary: Four Months in the Forests of North Brazil, 1954 THE HISTORY OF THE NTM READS LIKE A THRILLER, its happy ending a reward for surviving an unbelievable series of accidents and misfortunes, with the added peculiarity of the script being written by God. The ordeals sent by