Rainforest Shamans: Essays on the Tukano Indians of the Northwest Amazon

Abstract

The renowned anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff spent most of his working life among tribes living in the vast rainforests of the Colombian Northwest Amazon. This book brings together eleven of his essays and articles about the Tukano Indians. Many of the essays are concerned with the role of shamanism in Tukanoan society:?initiation practices, the rock crystal (the shamans' principal power tool), which provides the model for many aspects of the shamanistic world-view; and their curing spells, which show the Tukanoan concepts of illness and its cure. Other essays describe their concepts of universal energies and the ways they can be balanced, and the ecological dimensions of their world-view.

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