Nawa

Nawa is the name of the other. Against huni kuin, the real or true people, the nawa are everyone and everything outside: foreigners, enemies, whites, and the mythic strangers of the beginning. The word runs through nearly all Panoan languages and is notoriously hard to fix, sliding between enmity and alliance, danger and gift. In Cashinahua myth the nawa are the source from which cultural goods, names, songs and dangerous powers flow into the world of the real people, and powerful mythic figures such as the Inka are themselves classed among them. The category is less a single personage than a personified pole of the cosmos, the outside whose appropriation and holding-at-bay defines what it is to be a real person; it names the standing truth that culture and peril come from the same alien source.

Domains

• alterity
• cultural goods

Powers

• personifies the world of the outside
• is the source of cultural goods and names

Sources

• Nawa denotes the primordial and continuing others, foreigners and enemies from whom the real people (huni kuin) distinguish themselves, and from whom cultural goods and dangerous power alike derive; the category is central to Cashinahua thought about alterity.: Deshayes, Patrick & Barbara Keifenheim. 1994. Pensar o outro entre os Kaxinawa do rio Jordao. Rio Branco: UFAC. (secondary); Instituto Socioambiental. Povos Indigenas no Brasil: Huni Kuin (Kaxinawa). (secondary)