ethnos,฀vol.฀70:3,฀2005 The Attachment of the Soul to the Body among the Huaorani of Amazonian Ecuador Laura Rival University฀of฀Oxford,฀UK abstract Despite their general acceptance of pacific coexistence and village life, the Huaorani are still living in a social world structured by the continuous efforts they need to deploy to contain homicidal rage and to mitigate the ravages of violent death. Death is generally interpreted as having been caused by some raptorial agency which may in turn drive men to kill blindly. This article shows that it is because men are particularly susceptible to the predatory call of supernature that society works at embedding them within matrifocal house-groups. I discuss death and the desire to kill in relation to cultural constructions of sex and gender, especially in the context of funerary rites. Huaorani perspectivism, which articulates the point of view of the prey, not of the predator, associates the soul, maleness and conquering predation, to which it opposes the body, femaleness and resisting victimhood. keywords Amazonia, Huaorani Indians, gender, uxorilocality, predation S ignificant developments have occurred in Amazonian anthropology in the last ten years, not least the formulation of a new theory to ac- count for the particular forms of animism found in Amazonia, known as perspectivism. 1 First developed as a theory to elucidate the very specific human/animal relations found in myths, perspectivism postulates a pan- Amazonian (and possibly pan-Amerindian) cosmological system centrally concerned with the possibility of trans-specific communication between sentient beings divided by obvious physiological discontinuities. According to this theory, all classes of living organisms possessing a soul see themselves as humans, and can establish or avoid communication with one another. Sentient beings have the same dispositions, values and culture as humans, and, from a subjective perspective, behave just like humans, that is, as persons endowed with subjective selves. However, the ways in which one sentient