Clothing as acculturation in the Peruvian Amazon

Abstract

This article examines the meaning of clothing for the Yine, an Arawak people of the Lower Urubamba, and the changes in clothing styles that have occurred in their history during the last centuries of contact with colonization. This historical approach has two consequences. First, it suggests that the Yine think of clothing as something that signals alterity. The Yine continually take clothing from other beings, whether neighboring peoples, white people, or jaguars. Second, it suggests that what we call "acculturation" is rather an indigenous Amazonian conception of ongoing historical processes. Amazonian peoples are not trying to acquire the "culture" of the other, because "culture" is alien to their perspectival cosmologies. "Acculturation" is, therefore, a superficial literal description of perspectival cosmologies in historical action.