Company and the mysteries of a dugout canoe

This article examines the mysterious side of ‘company’, a fundamental aspect of human existence, exemplifying it with an ethnographic vignette about a dugout canoe in the mangroves of southern Bahia (Northeast Brazil). Inspired by Kant's proposal concerning aspects of world, the article distinguishes company both from empathy and from community, as distinct registers of human sociality. Being in company necessarily engages more than two persons inhabiting a common space; it involves an intersubjective encounter that has implications not only for what we do, but also for who we are and where we are. As they emerge into personhood from within company, persons necessarily experience the presence of third parties as a possible threat, inevitably giving rise to contradictory emotions: there is as much fear and conflict as peace within company, for it brings together entities with divergent interests and combines persons and objects in the world. The article addresses the way in which companionship engages power relations, by reference both to gender and to control over land.