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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Archaeological Anthropology

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Shamanism

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 3 of 3

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Vaupés Multilingualism And The Substance Of Language, Stephen Hugh-Jones Nov 2023

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 Nov 2023

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 Dec 2019

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 …