ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the significance of tobacco among the Yanomami in daily life and in relations between distant villages, suggesting that its consumption and circulation conveys the always unfinished condition of a sociality based on circulation and exchange. It looks at issues by examining the connection between people, consumption and place; the Yanomami subsistence pattern as an incomplete gestalt with different components; and the role of want and need in everyday life. The chapter highlights some aspects of tobacco in its customary practices of exchange and consumption as well as the complementary relation between this consumption and the configuration of social landscapes and places. It suggests that what gives traditional tobacco practice its central place in Yanomami existence is that it serves as a ‘libidinal machine’, an enabling mechanism of sociality charged with desire. The chapter expands the webs of exchange at different scales: among friends and kin, between villages, between distant villages and landscapes.
