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.
Table of Content
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’s Creative 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
About the author
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).
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