Love and Anger in Amazonia and in Academia – a disciple's account of Joanna Overing's oeuvre and teachings
Carlos D. Londoño Sulkin (University of Regina)

In the Caquetá, Colombia, in 1995, a man who was doing fieldwork for his PhD at Oxford told me that the most intellectually exciting Amazonianist anthropologist in the UK at the time was Joanna Overing. "Go to her if you can," he recommended. "She's at the London School of Economics."  Meeting him was the first in a chain of serendipitous events that led to my doing a PhD under Joanna's supervision and witnessing a golden but embattled era in her career. In this personal talk, I will tell you about her loves and peeves, her generous supervisory style, and her place in the history of our discipline and regional specialization, as I now see these. Regarding the latter, I'll focus especially on her brilliant accounts of anthropology as translation and of the centrality of moral understandings in social life, and on the whole rigmarole around conviviality, consanguinity, and alterity.