Description
Mysteries 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.Author: Robin M. Wright
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 11/01/2016
Pages: 408
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.31lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.90d
ISBN13: 9780803295230
ISBN10: 0803295235
BISAC Categories:
- Biography & Autobiography | Cultural, Ethnic & Regional | Indigenous
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Native American Studies
- History | Latin America | South America
About the Author
Robin M. Wright is an associate professor of religion at the University of Florida. He is the coeditor of Native Christians: Modes and Effects of Christianity among Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and In Darkness and Secrecy: The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia.