Stephen Hugh-Jones

University of Cambridge | Cam · Division of Social Anthropology

Lévi-Strauss argues that Amazonian mythology reveals a moral philosophy concerned with control of entries and exits to the tubes and apertures of the body. But which body? Following clues from attitudes to female singers in renaissance Italy, this essay suggests that this Amerindian body is not the one we take for granted but rather one very simila...

Neste capítulo, proponho que o estilo relativamente uniforme da vestimenta cerimonial masculina, compartilhado pelos povos Tukano Oriental e Arawak do Alto Rio Negro, é uma das facetas de um sistema ritual que dá coerência ao sistema social regional. Partindo de dados de grupos Tukano Oriental, este capítulo analisa a ornamentação corporal de persp...

The primary concern of this essay is to document and analyse the use of coca, tobacco, beer and yagé (a hallucinogenic drink prepared from the bark of Banisteriopsis caapi vines) among the Barasana, a group of Tukanoan-speaking Amerindians living in northwest Amazonia on the frontier between Colombia and Brazil. 1 However, it is also intended to st...

O texto apresenta detalhes etnográficos do sistema astronômico dos ameríndios da região do Noroeste Amazônico, a partir do en-tendimento dos Barasana do Rio Pirá-Paraná da bacia hidrográfica do Rio Uaupés em território colombiano. Os Barasana acreditam que o universo seja composto de três camadas básicas: o céu, a terra e o mundo subterrâneo, expre...

Los flujos a través de formas tubulares en el cuerpo, en la cultura material y en el medio natura juegan un papel clave en el pensamiento de los pueblos indígenas del noroeste amazónico. Usando ejemplos de la vida cotidiana, la mitología y el ritual, este artículo examina el tubo como un concepto abstracto que une fisiología, sicología y procesos p...

This paper deals with the relation between different kinds of indigenous speech and music and various iconographic forms such as petroglyphs, house painting, basketry designs and also features of landscape that are understood in graphic terms. It examines how Northwest Amazonian myth-history is structured and memorized, how it can appear in both ve...

THE ORIGIN OF NIGHT: AND WHY THE SUN IS CALLED “CARANÁ LEAF” Abstract By analysing a wide set of narratives on the origin of night found among the Indigenous people of the upper Rio Negro, in northwest Amazonia, this article shows how these people represent the alternation between day and night at different levels of meaning: in the sounds and colo...

By analysing a wide set of narratives on the origin of night found among the Indigenous people of the upper Rio Negro, in northwest Amazonia, this article shows how these people represent the alternation between day and night at different levels of meaning: in the sounds and colours of insects, birds and forest animals; in the material, texture and...

The multi-ethnic and multilingual complexes of the Upper Rio Negro and the Upper Xingu share common aspects that frequently emerge in ethnographies, including notions of descent, hierarchical social organization and ritual activities, as well as a preference for forms of exogamy and the unequal distribution of productive and ritual specialties and...

The previous paper was first published in 1982, when ethnoastronomy was still in its infancy. It appeared in Ethnoastronomy and Archaeoastronomy in the American Tropics, Tony Aveni and Gary Urton’s edited proceedings of an international conference held at the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium in New York under the auspices of...

Building on a previous experiment to apply Strathern's discussions of Melanesian gift exchange to ethnography relating to Tukanoan societies in Northwest Amazonia, this essay asks why other authors should repeatedly affirm that the gift has no relevance in the Amazonian context. Two answers are proposed. Firstly, the authors concerned tend to assum...

With attention more on the message or content of sacred texts, anthropologists have often missed books objects in their own right. Examples from the tribal world focus attention on the materials from which books are made and on how books relate to other ritual objects while comparisons between different world religions reveal a range of attitudes t...

Traduit de l’anglais par Gerard Lenclud L’universel et le particulier Consacrer un volume de Terrain au sang, au sang tout court1, peut paraitre relever de la gageure. Sujet oblige des lors qu’il est question de la vie humaine, le sang constitue en effet un theme aborde dans un tel eventail de disciplines (physiologie, medecine, histoire, anthropol...

This article analyses a remarkable series of publications, the Coleção Narradores Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro (henceforth NIRN), published over the past ten years by Tukanoan indigenous authors from the Brazilian Upper Rio Negro region. These books are financed by the Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Alto Rio Negro (FOIRN) and the Instituto...

Xingú: Body and soul Body and Soul (O Corpo e os Espímtos). Directed by Mari Corréa; camera, Dado Aguiar; sound, Myaú Kayabi. 1996; 54 mins., color. Portuguese narration; English subtitles. Distributor: Les Films du village, 24–26 rue des Prairies, 75020, Paris, France. Emancipation Efforts of African Women: Two Activist Films I Have a Problem, Mad...

To begin with I should say how honoured I am to be able to render homage to Levi-Strauss, who I personally consider to be not only the greatest living anthropologist, but also the greatest anthropologist, full stop. So it’s a great pleasure to be allowed to say some words about him. However, I’m afraid I’m the bringer of not particularly good news...

In 1905, the German ethnographer Koch-Grünberg published a report of an Indian astronomical system from the Northwest Amazon region. 1 His account, based on drawings by two Indian informants, has remained one of the most comprehensive descriptions of ethnoastronomy from lowland South America. Scattered references to star lore in the works of other...

INTRODUCTION The high profile of names and naming systems (“onomastics”) is a distinctive hallmark of the ethnographic literature on lowland South America. Names were typically excluded from anthropological research on kinship - witness textbooks on the subject - but when it came to the complex social structures of the Gê and Bororo or the Kariera-...

A importância dos sistemas de nominação para a compreensão das sociedades e culturas ameríndias é hoje amplamente reconhecida, mas as informações sobre esse tópico concernentes aos povos Tukano do Noroeste Amazônico permanecem esparsas e dispersas. Tomando os Barasana e seus vizinhos como referência, este artigo apresenta alguns dados básicos quant...

Beyond Kinship: Social and Material Reproduction in House Societies Rosemary A. Joyce and Susan D. Gillespie, eds. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2000. 280 pp., maps, figures, notes, references, index.

Amazonian and Melanesian ethnography takes “gender” to be a fixed, unitary, and relatively unproblematic attribute of persons. For Amazonia and Melanesia, both intra- and interregional comparisons compare like with like, flute cults with flute cults, exchange with exchange. This chapter builds on this analysis with reference to exchange, using some...

Traduit de l'anglais par Philippe Erikson La premiere fois qu'ils se sont rendus en Amazonie, mes jeunes enfants furent horrifies de voir qu'on y tuait des singes et des aras afin de les manger. Etre confrontes a la mort d'un quelconque animal etait deja assez difficile en soi, mais la, c'etait le comble. Comment de telles creatures pouvaient-elles...

The domestic unit is inseparable from its homestead, and the 'house', at once a physical place and a social unit, is often also a unit of production and consumption, a cult group, and even a political faction. Inspired by Lévi-Strauss's suggestion that the multi-functional noble houses of medieval Europe were simply the best-known examples of a wid...

This book concerns barter, a transaction in which objects are exchanged directly for one another without the use of money. Economists treat barter as an inefficient alternative to market exchange, and assume that it is normal only in 'primitive' economies or marks the breakdown of more developed exchange mechanisms. For their part, anthropologists...