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Professor Warren Thompson publishes,��“Being Seen is Believing: Evidence and Authority in the Ache Mission Encounter,"��in the��Journal of Anthropological Research.

Abstract

Like many other lowland South American groups described in the literature, Ache give a higher epistemic value to visually experiencing events, a sensibility that some have argued has impeded lasting conversions by Amerindians to Christianity given that the evidentiary practices of the latter can only be expressed through language. In this article, I qualify this idea by showing how the Ache acceptance of the idea of “being seen” by an omnipresent Christian God was able to reconfigure Ache evidentiary practices regarding vision and visual experience. Through a series of Ache conversion narratives recorded in the late 1970s, I show the importance of “being seen” in Ache conversion and how it eventually provided resources for lasting engagements with Christianity—both with and without the surveilling practices of missionaries from the New Tribes Mission.

Read the article in��