Public lecture: Ethnohistory, culture and cognition in Southwestern Amazonia by Dr. Paweł Chyc

Southwestern Amazonia and its Chapacuran-speaking peoples - among them the Moré - occupy a position peripheral to mainstream anthropology, yet they offer exceptional analytical purchase on questions shared by anthropology and cognitive science of religion.

This presentation traces a research trajectory whose successive theoretical reorientations were each driven by the explanatory insufficiency of prior frameworks. Ethnographic fieldwork among the Moré established the empirical foundation; ethnohistorical expansion across the Chapacuran language family provided the temporal and comparative depth necessary to identify a mortuary complex organized around endocannibalistic practice - the ritual incorporation of the dead as a mechanism for managing personhood and the ontological boundary between the living and the deceased. These practices proved structurally central to the region's cosmological architecture.

Accounting for their logic required research on animism - widespread across Amazonia as an ontology extending personhood and intentionality beyond the human - but explaining its cross-cultural elaboration demanded a further turn toward cognitive anthropology. The presentation examines some of the cognitive and social mechanisms that render animism both cognitively natural and culturally productive.

By grounding this analysis in ethnographically and ethnohistorically dense data from an understudied region, the talk advances a model of mutual constitution between culture and cognition.