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To Weave and Sing - Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest (Paperback, Reprinted edition)
Loot Price: R663
Discovery Miles 6 630
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To Weave and Sing - Art, Symbol, and Narrative in the South American Rainforest (Paperback, Reprinted edition)
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"To Weave and Sing" is the first in-depth analysis of the rich
spiritual and artistic traditions of the Carib-speaking Yekuana
Indians of Venezuela, who live in the dense rain forest of the
upper Orinoco. Within their homeland of Ihuruna, the Yekuana have
succeeded in maintaining the integrity and unity of their culture,
resisting the devastating effects of acculturation that have
befallen so many neighboring groups. Yet their success must be
attributed to more than natural barriers of rapids and waterfalls,
to more than lack of 'contact' with our 'modern' world. The
ethnographic history recounted here includes not only the Spanish
discovery of the Yekuana but detailed indigenous accounts of the
entire history of Yekuana contact with Western culture, revealing
an adaptive technique of mythopoesis by which the symbols of a new
and hostile European ideology have been consistently defused
through their incorporation into traditional indigenous structures.
The author's initial point of departure is the Watunna, the Yekuana
creation epic, but he finds his principal entrance into this mythic
world through basketry, focusing on the elaborate kinetic designs
of the round waja baskets and the stories told about them. Guss
argues that the problem of understanding Yekuana basketry is the
problem of understanding all traditional art forms within a tribal
context, and critiques the cultural assumptions inherent in our
systems of classification. He demonstrates that the symbols woven
into the baskets function not in isolation but collectively, as a
powerful system cutting across the entire culture. "To Weave and
Sing" addresses all Yekuana material culture and the greater
reality it both incorporates and masks, discerning a unifying
configuration of symbols in chapters on architectural forms, the
geography of the body, and the use of herbs, face paints, and
chants. A narrow view of slash-and-burn gardens as places of mere
subsistence is challenged by Guss' portrait of these exclusively
female spaces as systematic inversions of the male world, 'the
sacred turned on its head'. Throughout, a wealth of narrative and
ritual materials provides us with the closest approximation we have
to a native exegesis of these phenomena. What we are offered here
is a new Poetics of Culture, ethnography not as a static given but
as a series of shifting fields, wherein culture (and our image of
it) is constantly recreated in all of its parts, by all of its
members.
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