The Northern Yaka see the body as an expanse bounded in time and space. Alimentary traffic, olfactory exchange, and procreation constitute oriented transitions of the body boundaries. The y provide a spatiotemporal order (inner-surface-outer, high-middle-low, before-simultaneous-after, etc.) which, by symbolic transference, patterns the semantic integration of the social. natural and bodily domains and which is itself patterned by this integration. The body-self has to do with the body as receptive of, and participating in, the activities of the other: in sensorial interaction, that is, in encounter, exchange, smelling, listening, speaking and seeing, individuals serve as reciprocal points of identification. The y pattern, and are patterned by, the relationships between the psychosomatic and the sociocultural, between self and other, ascendant and descendant, male and female, etc. I am concerned with the ways these multidimensional relationships in and through the body acts and the body-self may be symbolic, i.e., when they integrate, by differentiation and mediation in a metaphoro-metonymical process, the bodily, social and natural spheres; these relationships are symptomatic when they are disintegrative, dualistic, or intrusive.