The Piaroa are people, living along tributaries of the middle Orinoco, who recognize that the dance of every bodily process participates in a poisonous, primordial design of things. This paper explores the relation of sensory processes and the cosmic to Piaroa ways of knowing and doing their arts of the culinary. In so doing it is an expedition into ethnopoetics. My focus is upon the interplay...
Departing from the specific case of Matsigenka people in the Montaña of southeastern Peru, this article challenges some of the assumptions associated with predominant conceptions of Amazonian perspectivism. Examining different cultural registers such as birth rituals and mythology, Matsigenka peoples’ notions about being, soul, and self are discussed in relation to the importance that often is...
Book review of O uso ritual da ayahuasca. Beatriz Caiuby Labate & Wladimyr Sena Araújo (editors). Campinas (São Paulo, Brazil): Mercado das Letras / FAPESP, 2002. 686 pp. ISBN 85 85725-91-5.