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Notions of animals as social subjects held by Amazonian Indians have played a central role in anthropology’s ontological turn. Written as a reply to two critical responses to an earlier paper on human-animal relations, this essay explores the complex and often contradictory nature of ideas about animals and attitudes toward them held by both Amerindians and Euro-Americans. It suggests that, alongside mythology and shamanism, a further source of the Amerindians’ ideas about animals as social subjects lies in their everyday interactions with animals, something they share in common with Welsh sheep farmers. This fits uneasily with Philippe Descola’s contrast between animism and naturalism. The essay concludes by querying radical contrasts between “us” and “them.” Such contrasts may have their heuristic, comparative, and rhetorical uses but tend to oversimplify complex ethnographic reality.

The previous paper was first published in 1982, when ethnoastronomy was still in its infancy. It appeared in Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, Tony Aveni and Gary Urton’s edited proceedings of an international conference held at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences. Aveni and Urton were true pioneers who opened up a new interdisciplinary field of research that brought together astronomers, anthropologists, archaeologists, historians and others, all interested in astronomical knowledge amongst contemporary indigenous societies, in how buildings, settlements and archaeological monuments were aligned with recurrent events in the sky, and in how such alignments matched up with astronomical information contained in ancient codices and other historical documents and in contemporary ethnographic accounts.

In 1905, the German ethnographer Koch-Grünberg published a report of an Indian astronomical system from the Northwest Amazon region.1 His account, based on drawings by two Indian informants, has remained one of the most comprehensive descriptions of ethnoastronomy from lowland South America. Scattered references to star lore in the works of other writers,2 together with Koch-Grünberg’s own word lists of the many different languages spoken in the area,3 suggest that the basic elements of the system he described are probably common to all the Tukanoan speaking Indians of the Vaupés and to their Arawakan speaking neighbors to the north. In his account, Koch-Grünberg identifies some seventeen named stars and constellations and states that knowledge of astronomy is used in time reckoning, orientation, and the regulation of agricultural activities. But little information is given, either by him or by other writers, as to how this knowledge is used and how it relates to the cosmology and worldview of the Indians involved. In this paper, I shall try to answer some of these questions with reference to the Barasana.

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