Nawa
nawa
The Shipibo-Konibo term Chonon Bensho uses for the outsider who remains outside the kinship network: not the one who comes from far away geographically, but the one who has no lived connection with the group. She applies it to her own husband, Pedro Favaron, before their marriage—born in Lima, he had nonetheless already spent years living with Indigenous peoples. Since their union, he is no longer a *nawa*: he belongs to an effective network of relationships, shared origins, and common life. The word designates a reversible position, not an essence: one can cease to be *nawa* through alliance.
He no longer is a foreigner or a stranger, a nawa, as we say in the Shipibo language, but belongs to an effective network of relationships, of those who have a common origin and live together in the now, sharing efforts, sadness, laughter, and thoughts.
Chonon Bensho describes her husband Pedro Favaron, before their marriage, as a nawa—a stranger, someone outside the circle. Born in the city of Lima, he had nonetheless spent years conducting research and living among various Indigenous peoples; it wasn’t geographical distance that made him a nawa, but the lack of a bond recognized by her people.
Since their marriage, she says, he is no longer one: “he is no longer a stranger, a nawa, as we say in Shipibo, but now belongs to an effective network of relationships—those with a shared origin, living together in the present, sharing effort, sorrow, laughter, and thoughts.” The term thus designates a position, not an essence: one can step out of it through an alliance that brings them into lived kinship.
≠ the mahua yoxin, the disaffiliated dead—this one can no longer rejoin the network, their rupture is final. The nawa, by contrast, is a living person who may still enter it—precisely what Pedro Favaron’s case illustrates. ≠ the Greek barbarian, defined solely by the sound of an incomprehensible language: the nawa is not defined by the language they speak, but by the absence of a lived relational network.