37 I t was June 2015. After two days of sailing up the Xingu River from the city of Altamira, we were about to harbor at the Apyterewa-Parakanã’s village port. We were beginning a workshop among the Tupi-speaking Parakanã on audio-video production, and I was traveling with two long- standing friends and partners in flmmaking: the brothers Takumã and Mahajugi, of the Kuikuro people, who live in the upper part of the same river, about one thousand kilometers to the south. Takumã had traveled extensively, both in Brazil and abroad, and is quite attentive to cultural dif- ferences, always trying to avoid possible gafes. Just before the pilot turned of the engines, he turned to me and asked in Portuguese: Carlos, what’s the name of the chief who’s going to welcome us? Taku, there’s no chief here. What do you mean? Tere’s no chief? Yeah, no chief. But, then, who’s going to welcome us? Takumã’s perplexity at the absence of chiefs among the Parakanã has nothing to do with European expectations about indigenous political power. It is not one of these cherchez le chef kind of anec- dotes that appears in colonial documents. Rather, it expresses an objective contrast between a world in which chiefs are nonviable and one in which chiefs are the very condition for a world to exist. 1 Tis same contrast also surprised me when I frst went to the Kuikuro in 1998, afer a ten-year research expe- rience with the Parakanã. 2 It was a genuine cultural shock that led me to revise my assumptions about Amazonia in the past and the present and to rec- ognize more variability within so-called tropical forest cultures. If I had been invited to write about the key topics of this volume before my research among the Kuikuro, I would have considered the enter- prise doomed to fail. Moreover, two decades ago, there existed a consensus that matter did not much matter in the region due to the low level of objec- tifcation of social relations—the only important 2 Chiefly Jaguar, Chiefly Tree Mastery and Authority in the Upper Xingu CARLOS FAUSTO