Christians without faith: Some aspects of the conversion of the Wari’ (Pakaa Nova)*

Abstract

In the 1970s, the Pakaa Nova, also known as the Wari’, an indigenous people of the State of Rondonia, Brazil, converted to the Christianity of the Protestant missionaries of the New Tribes Mission of Brazil. They developed their own distinctive interpretation of Christian teachings, adapting them to their own cultural codes and to their cosmology. Wari’ adherence to Christianity cannot be understood as a simple process of adoption of new values and strange rituals by a group which had been disrupted and stunned by contact. The Wari’ found, in Christian practice, values from their own culture, related to an ideal of generalized consanguinity. The abandonment of funerary cannibalism and of festivals is analyzed from this perspective.