Anthropology professor explores morality in the Colombian Amazon

Posted: June 20, 2013 10:45 a.m.

Professor Carlos Londono Sulkin, Head of the Department of Anthropology
Professor Carlos Londono Sulkin, Head of the Department of Anthropology Photo courtesy of Carlos Londono Sulkin

Department of Anthropology head Carlos Londono Sulkin’s new book People of Substance: An Ethnography of Morality in the Colombian Amazon (University of Toronto Press) draws on his many years of field research in the Colombian Amazon among the Indigenous groups known as the Muinane – the ‘People of the Centre’.

In the book, Londono attempts to explore the distinctly Muinane sense of morality – a curiosity rooted in his field observations about the everyday personal interactions among the group. Through their conversations, stories and other casual interactions, he noted, the Muinane tended to apply countless ‘moral evaluations’ about the positive and negative moral qualities they perceived in themselves and in others. Someone might describe another person as being ‘an angry animal’, ‘of unvanquishable good temper’, or ‘obsessed with foolishness’, writes Londono in the book. ‘Such portrayals were so frequent and so explicit during the time I spent in their communities that I soon lost my initial sense of shock…’.
In People of Substance, Londono examines these fascinating ‘moral portrayals’ within the wider context of Muinane (and Amazonian) society, cosmology, and history.

According to him, the Muinane understand their bodies as being made out of ‘substances’, such as tobacco paste or other materials. ‘And when they brag about virtues, accuse others of misbehaviors, counsel children, etc.’, he explains, ‘they often do so using this image of bodies made out of good or bad substances and accordingly, housing properly human or beastly thoughts and emotions’.

Some of what Londono considers his most significant observations about Muinane understandings of morality involve these ideas of ‘substance’, hence the book’s title. ‘For the Muinane, good people have to be people of substance; one comes to be a person of substance (or in a miscreant’s case, of no substance) because of how one’s family shapes one, but also how one personally develops this shape. Whether one is or is not a person of substance is, in principle, only brought to light by the outcomes of one’s actions. If one’s actions over time truly contributed to production, reproduction, health, tranquil contentment, and good mutual relationships among people, then one truly was a person of substance’.

While living in the Amazonian rainforest might be a fantasy for some, Londono admits that his time in the field has not been without its hardships. He describes some of the rigours of his field experience, which ‘often involved physical discomfort and stress — long, wet boat trips, an incredible variety of blood-sucking insects, the occasional bout of tummy trouble, and frequently not having sweat-free clothing to wear’, he says. All of this in addition to being physically apart from his wife and family, and ‘the emotional difficulty of finding my feet and establishing companionable relationships among the Muinane, who were hospitable, yet also very interested in exacting from me an explanation and a justification for my presence’.

Yet the resulting research contribution Londono has made has no doubt been worth the struggle. Writes anthropologist Magnus Course, ‘People of Substance represents a major contribution not only to the ethnography of the indigenous peoples of Amazonia but also to a growing body of anthropological literature concerned with the analysis of morality beyond the western context … Londono Sulkin provides the most detailed case study available of how an Amazonian people conceptualize the relative moral value of action and actors’.