Josephine Mullen – Whitten Research Fund 2023-24

Josephine Mullen

St Andrews University

Winner of the Norm and Sibby Whitten Research Fund 2023-2024

Changing Paradigms of Existential Experience Among the Eastern Tukano in the Colombian Vaupes  

This research aims to explore the relationship between death and existential experience among Eastern Tukano language groups who live along the Papurí river in the Colombian Amazon. I will focus on how an existential sense of moral personhood emerges through a cosmological understanding of death and question how this may or may not have changed in the aftermath of Christianity and influences of the state. A view of emerging subjectivities in the present context contends with how a meaningful existential identity persists or enters a state of crisis.

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