Chapter 2 Moral Gestures: Forms of Life and Forms of Death in Amazonian Waters

In: Sentient Entanglements and Ruptures in the Americas: Human-Animal Relations in the Amazon, Andes, and Arctic
Author:
Carlos Emanuel Sautchuk
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Abstract

This chapter examines the gestures of killing involved in two main modalities of artisanal fishing in the Amazon River estuary – using harpoons on the region’s lakes and longlines on the coast. It seeks to make sense of the inevitable centrality of the death of fish without reducing this fact to ethnocentric dilemmas of utilitarianism or animal rights, for example. Also avoiding recourse to broader, generic categories such as (multi)species or humans and nonhuman animals, the different meanings and moralities of killing are considered within the technicities of these two fishing methods. In focusing its approach on the shared semiotic materialities of these two activities, the chapter also explores the meanings of the death of fishermen in both contexts. It thus ethnographically demonstrates that their forms of life correspond to particular forms of death, including the gestures of killing and their dilemmas.

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