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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 …