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Lévi-Strauss argues that Amazonian mythology reveals a moral philosophy concerned with control of entries and exits to the tubes and apertures of the body. But which body? Following clues from attitudes to female singers in renaissance Italy, this essay suggests that this Amerindian body is not the one we take for granted but rather one very similar to the body that figures in the writings of Galen and other classical authors. This insight sheds new light on Amerindian mythology, where tubes and apertures are a dominant theme, and on ritual where music and tobacco smoke lend substance and fertility to life-giving breath and control of body orifices is emphasised. Such ideas, rooted in a common-sense anatomy and physiology, are also familiar in the modern West but have been submerged in Elias' civilizing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Flows trough tubular forms in the body, material culture and the natural environment play a key role in the thought of the indigenous peoples of Northwest Amazonia. Using examples from daily life, mythology and ritual, this paper examines the tube as an abstract concept that unites physiology, psychology and productive processes with wider sociological and cosmological issues. The material, visual and acoustic manifestations of tubular flow ("hair") also raise the issues of synaesthesia and fractal notions of totalisation/detotalisation. With tubes as tantamount to life itself, ritual attention is focused on regulating bodily and other apertures to ensure balanced, tempered flow. The paper concludes by suggesting that the cultural elaboration of tubes and synaesthesia in Northwest Amazonia may relate to the lineal, exogamic features of social structure characteristic of the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both verbal and non-verbal forms, and how contemporary books, maps and diagrams produced by indigenous organizations as part of programmes of research and education show continuity with these traditional forms. Rather than making firm distinctions between peoples with and without writing, I argue that it is more profitable to focus on how various mnemonic systems—“writing”—work in tandem with different narrative forms—“myth”. When “writing” and “myth” are understood in indigenous terms, contemporary written documents appear in a new light. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xingú: Body and soul Body and Soul (O Corpo e os Espímtos). Directed by Mari Corréa; camera, Dado Aguiar; sound, Myaú Kayabi. 1996; 54 mins., color. Portuguese narration; English subtitles. Distributor: Les Films du village, 24–26 rue des Prairies, 75020, Paris, France. Emancipation Efforts of African Women: Two Activist Films I Have a Problem, Madam. Directed by Maarten Schmidt and Thomas Doebele. 1995, 59 minutes, VHS, color. Distributed by First Run/Icarus Films, 153 Waverly Place, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10014. Tel: (212) 727–1711. Video rental $75, video sale $390. These Girls are Missing: The Gender Gap in African Schools. Directed by Shari Robertson and Michael Camerini. 1996, 60 minutes, VHS, color. Distributed by Filmmakers Library, 124 East 40th Street, New York, NY 10016. Tel: (212) 808–4980. Fax: (212) 808–4983. Video rental $75, video sale $295. Bury Me Twice Bury Me Twice—Tiwah: A Ngaju Dayak Death Ritual. Directed by Hanno Kampfmeyer and Sri Kuhnt Saptodewo; produced by Beate Engelbrecht for Institut für den Wissenschaftlichen Film, 1993; 120 mins., color; subtitles in German or English; narration in English. Distributed by IWF, Nonnenstieg 72, D‐37075 Göttingen, Germany; sale prices: 16 mm., DM 4960.80; VHS‐NTSC or VHS‐PAL, US $360.00. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An excerpt from the book "About the House: Levi-Strauss and Beyond," by Janet Carsten and Stephen Hugh-Jones is presented.