A Walk to the River in Amazonia Ordinary Reality for the Mehinaku Indians [Paperback]

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality  the flow of moment-to-moment existence  and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the river. In this way, abstract schemata such as cosmology, sociality, gender, and the everyday are understood as they are actually lived. This book contributes to the ethnography of the Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu, with an approach that crosses disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. In doing so it attempts to comprehend what Malinowski called the imponderabilia of actual life.

List of Figures
List of Plates
Preface
Acknowledgements
Pronouncing Mehinaku Words
Glossary

Introduction
I. The Question
II. Writing about Lived Experience
III. Writing about Ordinary Reality: from My Walk, through Her World, to Her Walk
IV. Some Methodological Issues to Do with My Approach
V. Contributions and Limitations of This Book
VI. Some Background

Chapter 1. My Walk

Chapter 2.Con
gurations in Mehinaku Experience
I. Substance
II. Who Are the Apapanye?: the Substantiality of Spirits
III. The Deception of Substance: All about Skins
IV. Eternal Archetypes and the Generation of Skins
V. The Lake of Butteries: an Amazonian Metaphysics
VI. Mirroring and Parallel Configurations of Different Soul-worlds

Chapter 3.Dynamic Aspects in Mehinaku Experience
I. The Constant Movement of Mehinaku Existence
II. Star Birds: Movement between Different Dimenl.