berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

List of Figures, Ilustrations, Tables and Maps

Introduction
Anne Goletz and Ernst Halbmayer

Part I. Creation and the Original Conditions of Being

Chapter 1. Creation, Creativity, and the Times of Origin: The Multiplicity of Transformative and Transcreational Processes in Amazonia and the Isthmo-Colombian Area
Ernst Halbmayer

Chapter 2. The Maize Bringer’sCreative Potentials: How People and Maize Co-actively Ensure the Continuous Existence of Maize in the Yukpa Territory of Sokorpa, Northern Colombia
Anne Goletz

Chapter 3. What Does it Take to Be a Singer? Ritual and Creativity among the Pume People of Venezuela
Silvana Saturno

Part II. Creating and the Genres of Transmutation

Chapter 4. How to Charge a Voice with Power? Transmuting Non-Human Creativity into Vocal Creations in the Western Amazon
Bernd Brabec

Chapter 5. From the Songs without Names to the Stories inside a Name: On the Poetic Creation of Normativity among the Ayoreo from the Northern Paraguayan Chaco
Alfonso Otaegui

Chapter 6. The Chant-Owner and His Music: Musical Creativity and Verbal Artistry in the Ritual Life of an Amazonian Community
Jonathan D. Hil

Chapter 7. How to Transform the World(s): Generating Transactive Timescapes through Myths, Songs, and Magic Formulas in the Guianas
Matthias Lewy

Part III. Creativity and Shifting the Context of Signification

Chapter 8. Basketry, Mythology, and Shamanism in the Amerindian Cultures of Venezuela: An Ancestral “Art” Facing Innovation
Marie Claude Mattei Muller

Chapter 9. Yurupari’s Disappearance: Women’s Laughter and Organology without Musical Instruments in Vaupés
Juan Carlos Castrillón Vallejo

Conclusion
Ernst Halbmayer and Anne Goletz

Index

Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

Anthropological Perspectives

Edited by Ernst Halbmayer and Anne Goletz

290 pages, 29 illus, bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80539-006-0 Hb Published (June 2023)

eISBN 978-1-80539-007-7 eBook

Details

“This volume is an outstanding piece of scholarship, which, from the standpoint of the processes of creation and creativity, accomplishes, in a good measure, a critique and reassessment of current styles on analyzing Amazonian sociality.” • Juan Alvaro Echeverri, Universidad Nacional de Colombia

Investigating local Indigenous processes of creation and creativity, this book uses ethnographic and comparative anthropological perspectives to enquire about creative transformative practices in lowland South America. The volume shows how people create and reinforce their conditions of being by employing different genres of transgression and by creatively shifting contexts of significance. Local socio-cosmic orders, the interrelation of creative genres (myth, verbal art, song, ritual, and handicrafts), and their changing frames of reference (from communal celebrations to wider political and commercial realms) demonstrate the relational, generative, and processual quality of Amerindian creativity.

Ernst Halbmayer is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, University of Marburg, Germany. Among his recent publications are Indigenous Modernities in South America (Sean Kingston, 2018), and Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica: Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo-Colombian Area (Routledge, 2020).

Anne Goletz is a doctoral student and research associate at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Marburg. Currently she forms part of a German-Polish research project about Indigenous graphic communication systems between Mexico and the Andes, funded by the German Research Council (DFG).

Subject: Anthropology (General) Cultural Studies (General)

Area: Latin America and the Caribbean

LC: F2519.1.A6 C67 2023

BISAC: SOC002010 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Anthropology/Cultural & Social; SOC008050 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Ethnic Studies/Caribbean & Latin American Studies; SOC062000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Indigenous Studies