Volume 19, Issue 1 (2023) An Amazonianist and his history: thinking through (the writings of) Peter Gow

This volume is a homage to the extraordinary anthropologist Peter Gow and the fertile and brilliantly honed ideas and ethnographic analyses set out in his work. It is an inspired collection of articles written by a younger generation of anthropologists, former students of Pete’s, who, like him, work with Amerindian peoples of Lowland South America. They are his kin in a wider sense, in the Amerindian sense, a sense Pete himself recognized, named, and put on the map, at a time when anthropological theories of kinship and the social blinkered us to such non-canonical forms and practices of relatedness. Pete, with his clarity and humor, added a very Amazonian dimension to the movement away from these restraints. The authors in this volume are Pete’s descendants not just as his former doctoral students, but as persons with skills, affects, and perspectives developed during engagement with him over years, in some cases, decades. Not just his students, but also his friends, companions in more than academic settings, through late nights and during long journeys, physical and intellectual: here, they speak to us not in nostalgic terms, but in beautifully crafted texts that bring original research and theorizations of Amerindian lives to contemporary anthropology. Some pieces are long, dense with ethnographic analysis; some are short, small gems packed with insight and empathy. Some openly provide the kind of critical and cutting engagement with Pete’s ideas that he himself so thoroughly enjoyed; others offer more subtle invocations, or simply clear accounts of his ideas on a particular topic, before showing us how, through ethnographic investigations, these ideas can be confirmed, challenged, expanded, and developed. As editors, we can only say we are enchanted with the outcome of the authors’ work, and we express our heartfelt thanks to Juan Pablo Sarmiento Barletti and Victor Cova, to all the authors, and to Pete himself, wherever he may be, for making possible the coming-together of such an assemblage of refined ethnographic thinkers.