This chapter goes beyond Surama Village and focuses on how Anglican missionaries from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) established missions in British Guiana during the mid nineteenth century that impacted the Makushi and other Indigenous groups. Based on archival sources, it closely describes how Thomas Youd formed three successive missions in the Makushi territory during the 1830s and 1840s. The chapter considers the relational modes, acquisitions of desiderata, and patterns of interaction evident among Makushi groups in this context. It considers the strategies and intentions involved in their seeking relations with Youd and other Anglican missionaries against the backdrop of ongoing threats of slaving expeditions directed against them from Brazil. The chapter also examines a later visit to the Makushi by an Anglican missionary during the 1850s and introduces early evidence of the aftermath of such missionisation. The chapter builds up to a discussion of the shamanic dimensions of these historical interactions.

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis and discussion of eco-tourism in Surama Village. It considers such tourism’s origins and development in the village, as well as the circumstances regarding its ongoing operations and daily processes. There is an emphasis on the ways that this tourism is described in the local discourse of villagers. The chapter examines villagers’ interactions with outsiders, such as tourists, tourism leaders, and consultants, within the context of eco-tourism and explores how eco-tourism fits into a broader discursive context of ‘development’ in the village. The chapter discusses issues concerning commodification, as well as alternative options for paid employment in the region. It begins to elucidate how villagers working in eco-tourism relate to tourists as outsiders. Throughout the chapter, there is a central focus on how eco-tourism provides a context through which outside resources (both material and immaterial) are acquired and transformations towards otherness and alterity are enabled.

This chapter examines how the acquisition of material and immaterial things from outside visitors to Surama Village is used in local projects of transformation and becoming. The chapter begins with the author’s encounter with a villager in Surama who claimed to have inadvertently started becoming ‘white’ during his work with a BBC film crew. This transformation mostly centred around changes in diet and clothing. The chapter discusses how such transformations among the Makushi occur at a broader level through changing practices and how they are often associated with ‘development’ in the present. It links Makushi interactions with tourists with bodily orientated perspectival changes and shows how transformation is seen in the desires for education, healthcare, and political representation in Surama Village. Transformation is also seen in the gradual adoption of economic individualism, wage labour, and a cash-mediated economy. The chapter focuses on the shamanic aspects (particularly perspectival shape-shifting) of such transformations.

The afterword discusses the author’s return to Surama Village in 2019–2020 and describes recent political and economic changes. The chapter further addresses the consequences following the death of the local shaman (Mogo) and the elevation of one of the early promoters of eco-tourism in Surama to national political prominence. This final chapter addresses the mixed record of ‘development’ in Surama Village and the still changing nature of the eco-tourism economy in the context of Covid-19 and political uncertainties. It also further connects the book’s themes with the Amazonian ethnological literature as part of a broader examination of Makushi practices of drawing in the outside through persons, objects, and organisations. The chapter reiterates the significance of a shamanic relational mode for contemporary Makushi interactions with certain visitors (particularly tourists) in the village and the importance of these relations to the Makushi in forming partnerships with outsiders aimed at addressing contemporary challenges.

This chapter centres around a structural equivalency between certain outside entities (e.g., anthropologists, tourists, and some organisations) and shamanic spirits (e.g., master-owners and spirit allies) in Surama Village. This equivalency is explored in connexion with the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) and means (particularly hospitality) through which Makushi people form and manage strategic engagements with human and non-human others. This chapter articulates themes from previous chapters to clarify how Makushi shamanism reveals the status of contemporary visitors (particularly tourists) as akin to spirit allies and the Iwokrama International Centre as a magnified master-owner. Makushi shamanic relations with spirits, past missionaries, tourists, and organisations resonate and overlap. Makushi people seek esoteric knowledge and material goods from such outside entities. The chapter also discusses the spatial centralisation of alterity in Surama Village. The author’s status as a visitor and potential ally is highlighted to reflexively position the author within these relations.

This chapter consists of an extended discussion of shamanism and related ontological concepts among the Makushi. It opens with a narrative of the author’s experiences with a Makushi shaman named Mogo since 2012 and this shaman’s later death. The chapter discusses shamanic training and practices (including charms, spells, and tobacco use), as well as how shamans form relationships with spirits. It describes methods through which Makushi shamans obtain things and abilities from spirit allies. It examines notions of ‘mastery’ and ‘ownership’ and how these relations are grounded within the local landscape. However, unlike other recent ethnographic accounts from elsewhere in Amazonia, this chapter emphasises dimensions of reciprocity in Makushi shamanic relations with non-human beings. The chapter conceptualises Makushi shamanism through the combined theoretical lenses of historical ecology and Amerindian perspectivism. The shamanic relational mode described in this chapter provides a basis for examining relations with human outsiders in subsequent chapters.

Indigenous management of otherness and ‘alterity’ has increasingly become a central theme for anthropologists working in Amazonia and broader lowland South America. Much of the literature concerning this theme has focused on relations between specific Indigenous groups and otherly beings (whether human or non-human) in the present. These contemporary contexts of relations with otherness enable new readings and interpretations of comparable historically documented engagements, such as in contexts of missionisation, and clearer understandings of ongoing ethnographic interactions in the region. Relations between Indigenous people, outsiders, and non-human beings reveal conceptual differences and provide new interpretive means for understanding both continuities and discontinuities in historical and contemporary encounters across broader lowland South America.

This chapter initially begins with a narrative concerning how the author first came to Surama Village in Guyana in 2012. After discussing the author’s path to the village, as well as the author’s positionality in the field, the chapter describes the landscape of the Makushi people in Guyana. It provides an overview of the relational modes (particularly kinship and shamanism) through which Makushi people in Surama and beyond have engaged with outsiders (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) in the past and present. The chapter then summarises historical Makushi encounters with European colonisation involving the Dutch, English, Portuguese, and Spanish during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as Anglican missionisation during the mid nineteenth century. It provides a brief history of Surama Village, which is the Makushi village that is centred throughout the book. The chapter closes by providing context and background for contemporary transformations among the Makushi people in Surama Village.

This chapter examines the aftermath of early Anglican missionisation to Makushi groups. It begins with a story that was told to the author of a past Makushi leader described by a villager in Surama as a false prophet. The chapter then discusses various prophetic movements that arose among the Makushi and neighbouring Indigenous groups during the 1840s and afterwards which culminated in the alleluia religion. These movements used material and immaterial objects acquired and appropriated from the missionaries for new purposes. Many of these movements emphasised a central theme of transformation, which was often described in colonial sources in terms of Indigenous people becoming ‘white’ in one form or another. The movements combined resistance to colonialism with Christianity, shamanism, and sometimes also sorcery. In this context, shamanism became a means for contacting the Christian God. The chapter foregrounds a shamanic relational mode that structures interactions with outsiders among the Makushi.