ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how indigenous and non-indigenous people in the Alto Rio Negro region of the Brazilian Amazon are reflexively negotiating their relationships with each other. Starting from Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s notion of “controlled equivocation,” the chapter considers several dynamics that emerge from the author’s ethnographic research and notes. These are that equivocations—the gaps that “unfold in the interval” between different conceptual languages or referential universes—might be thought of as forms of intercultural relation; that these equivocations, or gaps, seem to shift and move; and that being unable to shift an equivocation can lead to an acute sense of uncertainty and doubt. The people the author spoke to in the Alto Rio Negro were all highly reflexive about the potential for equivocations and misunderstandings in their relationships with each other, and the chapter ends with a discussion of an odd feature of reflexivity: that it makes you what you are at the same time as transforming you.
