408 pages
18 photographs, 7 illustrations, 2 maps, 2 tables, 2 appendixes
April 2020
978-1-4962-1122-4
$30.00 Add to CartJune 2013
978-0-8032-4681-2
$55.00 Add to CartMysteries of the Jaguar Shamans of the Northwest Amazon tells the life story of Mandu da Silva, the last living jaguar shaman among the Baniwa people in the Northwest Amazon. In this original and engaging work, Robin M. Wright, who has known and worked with Silva for more than thirty years, weaves the story of Silva’s life together with the Baniwas’ broader society, history, mythology, cosmology, and jaguar shaman traditions. The jaguar shamans are key players in what Wright calls “a nexus of religious power and knowledge” in which healers, sorcerers, priestly chanters, and dance leaders exercise complementary functions that link living specialists with the deities and great spirits of the cosmos. Exploring in depth the apprenticeship of the shaman, Wright shows how jaguar shamans seek the knowledge and power of the deities through several stages of instruction and practice.
This volume, the first study to map the sacred geography (“mythscape”) of the northern Arawak-speaking people of the Northwest Amazon, demonstrates the direct connections between petroglyphs and other inscriptions and Baniwa sacred narratives as a whole. In eloquent and inviting analytic prose, Wright links biographic and ethnographic elements in elevating anthropological writing to a new standard of theoretically aware storytelling and analytic power.
List of Illustrations
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Shamans, Chanters, Sorcerers, and Prophets
1. "You Are Going to Save Many Lives": The Life Story of Mandu da Silva, Hohodene Jaguar Shaman, coauthored by Manuel da Silva and Ercilia Lima da Silva
2. Mandu's Apprenticeship and a Jaguar Shaman's Powers of World-Making
3. "You Will Suffer Along Our Way": The Great Suffering in Mandu's Life
Part 2. Shamanic Knowledge and Power in the Baniwa Universe
4. Creation, Cosmology, and Ecological Time
5. Mythscapes as Living Memories of the Ancestors
Part 3. Transmission of Shamanic Knowledge and Power
6. The Birth of the Child of the Sun, Kuwai
7. Death and Regeneration in the First Initiation Rites, Kwaipan
8. A Struggle for Power and Knowledge among Men and Women
Part 4. Revitalization Movements in Traditional and Christianized Communities
9. The House of Shamans' Knowledge and Power, the House of Adornment, and the Pamaale School Complex
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Letter Authorizing Reproductions of Kuwai-ka Wamundana
Appendix 2. Description of The Mysterious Body of Kuwai
Notes
Bibliography
Index