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The Performance of Healing
Medical systems need to be understood from within, as experienced by healers, patients, and others whose minds and hearts have both become involved in this important human undertaking. Exploring how the performance of healing transforms illness to health, initiate to ritual specialist, the authors show that performance does not merely refer to, but actually does something in the world. These essays on the performance of healing in societies ranging from rainforest horticulturalists to dwellers in the American megalopolis will touch readers' senses as well as their intellects.
In Darkness and Secrecy
In Darkness and Secrecy brings together ethnographic examinations of Amazonian assault sorcery, witchcraft, and injurious magic, or “dark shamanism.” Anthropological reflections on South American shamanism have tended to emphasize shamans’ healing powers and positive influence. This collection challenges that assumption by showing that dark shamans are, in many Amazonian cultures, quite different from shamanic healers and prophets. Assault sorcery, in particular, involves violence resulting in physical harm or even death. While highlighting the distinctiveness of such practices, In Darkness and Secrecy reveals them as no less relevant to the continuation of culture and society than cur...
The Fruitful Darkness
“The wisdom of cultures that live harmoniously with nature spoken through the heart and mind of a true gnostic intermediary.” —Ram Dass In this “masterwork of an authentic spirit person,” Buddhist teacher and anthropologist Joan Halifax Roshi delves into “the fruitful darkness”—the shadow side of being, found in the root truths of Native religions, the fecundity of nature, and the stillness of meditation (Thomas Berry). In this highly personal and insightful odyssey of the heart and mind, she encounters Tibetan Buddhist meditators, Mexican shamans, and Native American elders, among others. In rapt prose, she recounts her explorations—from Japanese Zen meditation to hallucinogenic plants, from the Dogon people of Mali to the Mayan rain forest, all the while creating “an adventure of the spirit and a feast of wisdom old and new” Halifax believes that deep ecology (which attempts to fuse environmental awareness with spiritual values) works in tandem with Buddhism and shamanism to discover “the interconnectedness of all life,” and to regain life’s sacredness (Peter Matthiessen).
Aliens Like Us?
In this authoritative, accessible, and at times funny and irreverent work, distinguished anthropologist Anthony Aveni speaks to the trained astrophysicist and the curious layperson alike about a simple but previously unexplored question: Why do we assume aliens, if they are really out there, behave just like us? Aveni’s newest work departs from the usual scientific treatment of extraterrestrial intelligence by probing the historical and widely neglected anthropological record, which offers relevant analogous incidents of contact among terrestrial cultures. Beginning with theories of the evolution of life and culture advocated by astrobiologists, Aliens Like Us? explores how the Western cul...
Medicinal Resources of the Tropical Forest
This book opens readers' eyes to the enormous resources of the Earth's rain forests and the potential impact of their destruction in terms of human health.
Made from Bone
Made-from-Bone is the first work to provide a complete set of English translations of narratives about the mythic past and its transformations from the indigenous Arawak-speaking people of South America. Among the Arawak-speaking Wakuénai of southernmost Venezuela, storytellers refer to these narratives as "words from the primordial times," and they are set in an unfinished space-time before there were any clear distinctions between humans and animals, men and women, day and night, old and young, and powerful and powerless. The central character throughout these primordial times and the ensuing developments that open up the world of distinct peoples, species, and places is a trickster-creat...
Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of the spread of indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon to Western societies, looking at how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The authors focus on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals.
Stories in the Time of Cholera
Cholera, although it can kill an adult through dehydration in half a day, is easily treated. Yet in 1992-93, some five hundred people died from cholera in the Orinoco Delta of eastern Venezuela. In some communities, a third of the adults died in a single night, as anthropologist Charles Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs, a Venezuelan public health physician, reveal in their frontline report. Why, they ask in this moving and thought-provoking account, did so many die near the end of the twentieth century from a bacterial infection associated with the premodern past? It was evident that the number of deaths resulted not only from inadequacies in medical services but also from the failure of publ...
Antropológica
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Dance of the Dolphin
In folktales told throughout much of the Brazilian Amazon, dolphins take human form, attend raucous dances and festivals, seduce men and women, and carry them away to a city beneath the river. They are encantados, or Enchanted Beings, capable of provoking death or madness, but also called upon to help shamanic healers. Male dolphins—accomplished dancers who appear dressed in dapper straw hats, white suits, and with shiny black shoes—reportedly father numerous children. The females are said to lure away solitary fishermen. Both sinister and charming, these characters resist definition and thus domination; greedy and lascivious outsiders, they are increasingly symbolic of a distinctly Amaz...
