Instruments of Power: Musicalising the Other in Lowland South America

Indigenous peoples across Amazonia make and play a rich variety of flutes and other wind instruments in their collective rituals and ceremonies. These instruments are cultural tools for enacting semiotic transformations that are central to indigenous understandings of human and non-human powers to control social reproduction and natural fertility. This essay will explore collective performances of flutes and other aerophones as ways of harnessing powers of predation and reproduction in two Amazonian communities, the Wauja of the Upper Xingu and the Wakuénai/Curripaco of the Upper Rio Negro. My theoretical approach to musicalising the other is offered as a critique of perspectivism. I will demonstrate how musicalising the other, embodying intrinsic linkages between life-giving and life-taking forces, is a more nuanced process of making history through engaging others, sharing the space–time of others (rather than violently consuming them) and always returning to one's own identity.