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Articles 1 - 6 of 6
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
By focusing on ordinary conversational language, relying on a notion of “group” derived from unilineal descent theory, and neglecting mythology and ritual, studies of Vaupés Tukanoan multilingualism have inadvertently tended to reproduce a Western ideology of language as marking national identity and concerned with conveying meaning. This paper suggests that attention to musical, ritual, and shamanic contexts reveals multilingualism in a different light, with ritual speech acts as constitutive of social groups, names as vehicles of reproduction, and breath as a substance-like bodily element and source of vitality. The more esoteric, rhetorical, musical, or visual ornamentation is given to breath, …
The Age Of The Onanya - Regarding The Spread Of Ayahuasca Use Throughout The Ucayali Basin, Carlos Suárez-Álvarez
The Age Of The Onanya - Regarding The Spread Of Ayahuasca Use Throughout The Ucayali Basin, Carlos Suárez-Álvarez
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
The spread of ayahuasca shamanism throughout the Upper Amazon has become a matter of debate among scholars since, in 1994, anthropologist Peter Gow formulated the controversial suggestion that it could be a recent phenomenon in the Ucayali basin, usually considered the stronghold of a millenary tradition. Following Gow, Brabec de Mori argued that the Shipibo-Conibo people, a paradigmatic example of the antique practice of ayahuasca shamanism, adopted both the brew and the associated shamanic practices in a “relatively recent” past. Gow and Brabec pointed at the Maynas missions as the origin of this shamanic complex, and the mestizo and Cocama …
Singularity On The Margins: Autobiographical Writings Among The Shuar Of Ecuadorian Amazonia, Grégory Deshoulliere, Natalia Buitron
Singularity On The Margins: Autobiographical Writings Among The Shuar Of Ecuadorian Amazonia, Grégory Deshoulliere, Natalia Buitron
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Inspired by Stephen Hugh-Jones’s suggestion of a fit between Tukanoan writing genres and their sociocultural systems, in this article we explore Shuar autobiographical writings in light of Chicham (Jivaroan) individualism. By exploring first-person—nonpatrimonial—texts that have received much less attention in the regional literature, the article contributes to theorizing a different way of transmitting tradition:one focused on individual praxis rather than on collective patrimony. Through the analysis of three autobiographical texts, we show how their authors appropriate writing to construct singularity, or distinct “paths of individuation”: the personal story of resistance of a school teacher, the exemplary life course of a …
Guns And Sorcery: Raiding, Trading, And Kanaima Among The Makushi, James Andrew Whitaker
Guns And Sorcery: Raiding, Trading, And Kanaima Among The Makushi, James Andrew Whitaker
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
Raiding, trading, and sorcery are historically-interrelated phenomena among the Makushi Amerindians in Guyana. Colonial documents reveal that the Makushi were heavily targeted during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Luso-Brazilian and Amerindian slavers. The form of such slaving frequently fluctuated between raiding and trading and formed a nexus around which practices of sorcery came to be centred. A connexion between the historical positions of the Makushi as victims of slaving and practitioners of kanaima sorcery has been identified by Neil Whitehead, who hypothesized that kanaima practices gained socially-sanctioned applications as the introduction of guns led to transformations in traditional …
Canela Shamanism: Shamans’ Accounts, “Journeying,” And Delimitation Of Shamanic Terms, William H. Crocker
Canela Shamanism: Shamans’ Accounts, “Journeying,” And Delimitation Of Shamanic Terms, William H. Crocker
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
In this article I recount the stories of various shamans I have worked with throughout many decades of fieldwork among the Ramkokamekra-Canela (Eastern Timbira) of central Maranhão state, Brazil. Along with their narratives, I provide ethnographic context in order to address the following questions: (1) Who is a shaman? (2) What is shamanism? Is shamanism better understood (3) as a process or a method that is carried out to achieve certain ends, or is it better understood (4) as a particular set of beliefs associated with particular cultures? Additionally, (5) are altered or shamanic states of consciousness found in Canela …
Shamans, Wives, Families: An Isoseño Case Considered Using Turner On Kayapo Dominance And Beauty, Kathleen B. Lowrey
Shamans, Wives, Families: An Isoseño Case Considered Using Turner On Kayapo Dominance And Beauty, Kathleen B. Lowrey
Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America
In this essay I describe what I have seen elapse over twenty years in the lives (and sometimes deaths) of two shamans and their respective wives in Isoso, an indigenous community of Guarani-speaking people in the Bolivian Chaco. These shamans’ two different kinds of shamanic practice, their two different sorts of marriage, and the two different life-trajectories of their wives resonate with the dual nature of Isoso itself and its historical constitution. The reproduction of a hierarchical Arawakan way of life through feminine submission to a Guarani “egalitarianism” of masculine dominance has been, I suspect, a dynamic of long standing …