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The hold of life in a warao village

an assemblage analysis of householding practices

Christian Sørhaug

pp. 137-158

In this chapter, I explore an assemblage analysis of households. Assemblage analysis is a strain of thinking associated with the broad ontological turn. Households analyzed as assemblages engage three central concepts: emergence, agency, and relations of externality. Emergence concerns the household as assembled event that constantly unfolds, rather than any fixed and stable entity. Agency in this perspective is symmetric, analyzed as a property of relations, creating effects in cooperations and not in isolation. Studying householding as emerging events performed through a collection of people and things provides a way of analyzing change among the indigenous Warao. The Warao Indians of the Venezuelan Orinoco River Delta live on stilted houses on the river's edge in the tidal zone of the Atlantic. Houses are literally held by poles in the waters, connected with footbridges between the houses. The tidal waters crisscrossing the myriads of rivers and channels daily flood thousands of islands. Canoes do all movement in this landscape, where the waterways function as paths. Fishing, gardening, hunting, and gathering makes out the most important part of the procurement tasks. At the same time, Warao economy entangles with external markets, city centers, and peripheral garbage heaps: welfare funds, cash crop, suitcase art, travels to urban centers trading, and garbage gathering. "Things of nature" and "things of modernity" comingle in Warao householding and is part of enacting sociality for the Warao of the twenty-first century.

Publication details

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-40475-2_6

Full citation:

Sørhaug, C. (2016)., The hold of life in a warao village: an assemblage analysis of householding practices, in B. Enge bertelsen & S. Bendixsen (eds.), Critical anthropological engagements in human alterity and difference, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 137-158.

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