Mediating care: Amerindian health agents across worlds, bodies and meanings

This volume has been edited jointly the previous and the current editors. The special issue puts Indigenous health care workers in focus. Our authors span a number of countries in lowland Amazonia to bring us vivid descriptions of individuals and groups of specialists dedicated to the health of their communities. Description and analysis of their experiences requires a sensitive ethnographic approach that enables us to follow the action between and within different structures and institutions. In her introduction, guest editor Johanna Gonçalves Martín persuasively argues that the Amazonian experience of Indigenous health care workers has much to bring to the public health literature on community health workers worldwide. She and guest co-editor, Alejandro Reig, acknowledge the challenge of describing practices of care that are complexly situated, and they propose the idea of a poeisis of care as a framework for grasping the genesis of Indigenous community health worker actions. Together the papers engage history, biography, ethnography, and institutional and political analysis in creative ways to bring their subject matter into bold relief. It is measure of the vitality of the Tipití journal that we can commend this collection of papers to our readers. William H. Fisher, editor.

The book forum also published in this volume is an initiative of Tipití’s current directorial board to mark October 2022, the turbulent month of elections in Brazil. In order to offer a plurality of perspectives on the many difficulties faced in putting into effect constitutional rights to traditionally occupied land, we invited several anthropologists and lawyers to contribute to the forum. They were asked to comment on the comprehensive edited collection Traditional Peoples and Biodiversity in Brazil, edited by Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, Sônia Barbosa Magalhães and Cristina Adams, which brings together many authors’ contributions. In particular, we called for our invited authors to reflect on Section 3 of the book, Difficulties in the Implementation of Territorial Rights. The forum opens with a text by Samara Pataxó, an indigenous lawyer, and includes six other anthropological voices. Together, they offer a plural understanding of the interlinked causes that have led to a dismantling of the effectiveness of those rights, bringing into focus key ideas about feasible revitalization of the implementation process. It closes with a contribution by the Observatory of Indigenous peoples in isolation and initial contact, which makes a timely homage to Bruno Pereira and Dom Philips. We join our voices to theirs, to face together the challenges of the somber times in which we are living.

This issue of Tipití grew out of a 2016 workshop held at King’s College, Cambridge in honor of Stephen Hugh-Jones. Guest editors Chloe Nahum-Claudel and Olivier Allard have taken the initiative to bring the project to fruition and have contributed an Introduction that provides an overview of Stephen’s career and the contents of the present issue. Five papers by Stephen Hugh-Jones are featured, including one never-before-published. Three are published in English for the first time and all have been, to a greater or lesser extent, fine-tuned by the author for publication here. This special issue also carries comments on two of these articles and five original contributions by anthropologists who, from different angles, draw on and extend the insights and interpretations found in Hugh-Jones’s work. In addition to the special issue content, readers will also find a comparative article on transgender relations by Drs. Dziubinska and Dias. The editor would like to thank the anonymous reviewers who contributed so much to the improvement of the papers. Special acknowledgement is also due to Kevin Richeson for his superb editorial and production work and to Joe Fitzgibbon for his close copyediting. Yijie Zou chipped in with useful editorial help. Outgoing SALSA president, Carlos Londoño Sulkin, incoming president, Jeremy Campbell, and Treasurer/Secretary, Laura Zanotti, also provided crucial encouragement and support during the production of this issue.