On May 18th, our dear friend and colleague Peter Gow (Edinburgh, 1958) passed away after a long illness. Peter was one of the most important ethnologists of his generation; his work on the Yine (Piro) people of the Peruvian Amazon was and remains a key reference for all subsequent Amazonian anthropology, in terms both of its ethnographic and theoretical contribution as well as its stylistic elegance.
Peter Gow taught anthropology at the universities of East Anglia, Manchester, the London School of Economics, and finally at St Andrews, where he was appointed Professor in 2003. Peter was a visiting lecturer at the Postgraduate Program in Social Anthropology (PPGAS) of the National Museum, in 1996-97, but he was with us practically every year, since at least 1992, on shorter visits, during which he was always invited to give lectures that attracted many colleagues and students. His last visit to Rio de Janeiro took place in September 2018, to participate in an international seminar on indigenous peoples in voluntary isolation, held on the campus of Praia Vermelha of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Peter had many friends and admirers in Brazil, a country he grew fond of, including several professors, students and alumni of PPGAS and similar institutions, with whom he maintained a constant dialogue, as can be seen in the number of reciprocal references in his publications and those of Brazilian researchers.
Peter obtained his doctorate at the London School of Economics (1988), under the supervision of Joanna Overing, with a thesis on the indigenous peoples of the Bajo Urubamba. The thesis became his first published monograph, Of Mixed Blood: Kinship and History in Western Amazonia (1991), followed ten years later by his second book, An Amazonian Myth and its History. These two studies, along with a good dozen seminal articles, - on economics, social organization, material culture, aesthetics, writing, religious conversion -, changed the terms of description and analysis of topics such as kinship, mythology and the history of the region. Peter Gow knew how to interweave these in a radically original way, in which history is articulated in the idiom of kinship, mythical narrative becomes historical interpretation, and kinship becomes the pragmatic context and condition of possibility of mythical narration. It should be added that Peter was a master of anthropological prose in the English language, a true example of argumentative subtlety and originality.
Combining the recording of event and structure, ethnographic detail and audacious generalization, a “Malinowskian” ethnographic discipline and a “Lévi-Straussian” intellectual sensitivity, Peter bequeathed us a memorable phenomenological description of the lived world of contemporaneous Piro communities, while showing the deep rootedness of this world in the great Amerindian mythological matrices. By thoroughly reconstructing the history of white colonialism in that part of western Amazonia, Gow revealed a whole dynamic of reinvention of native forms of sociality. On the one hand he identified a sophisticated indigenous theory of historical change (thus rendering obsolete the content and form of theories of acculturation and their sociological avatars) and, on the other hand, a no less sophisticated practice of change, that is, the ability of native peoples to innovate and renew their way of life. At the same time, he demonstrated the immanent continuity between this way of life and that of the indigenous peoples ostensibly more distant from the existential capturing devices employed by the nation-states of European origin.
Peter Gow was a fascinating conversationalist, with a prodigious memory and enormous erudition in many fields. He was endowed with tireless vitality, an infinite supply of anecdotes structured like The Mythologiques, in which multiple versions of the "same" story were constantly transforming, entertaining his listeners for hours on end. He was a great partner in drink and chat. A great intellectual, a kind man, a generous friend. His loss is irreparable.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro
(Translation: Luisa Elvira Belaunde)
(Revision: Elizabeth Ewart)