Tipití,

Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

Volume 1, Number 2, December 2003

John Hemming                        A Fresh Look at Amazon Indians: Karl Von den Steinen
                                                and Curt Nimuendajú, Giants of Brazilian Anthropology

Fernando Santos-Granero       Pedro Casanto’s Nightmare: Lucid Dreaming in Amazonia
                                                and the New Age Movement

Richard Price                           Refiguring Palmares

JOHN HEMMING

A Fresh Look at Amazon Indians

This essay examines two German anthropologists who changed the style of Brazilian anthropology. Karl von den Steinen made first contact with eight peoples of the upper Xingu in the 1880s. His anthropological observations were accurate and valuable, and he was the first to describe indigenous people as individual human beings. Curt Nimuendajú also had no formal training, but was on an anthropological or archaeological expedition every year between 1905–1945, produced a prodigious volume of writing, studies shattered tribal remnants as well as newly contacted peoples, and was a pioneer in championing indigenous rights. Both were seminal figures in the study of the indigenous peoples of Brazil.

FERNANDO SANTOS-GRANERO

Pedro Casanto's Nightmare

Taking as a point of departure the recurring nightmares of a Yanesha boy, the author examines the dream theories and practices of Yanesha people of Peruvian Amazonia. Particular emphasis is placed on the conscious manipulation of actions taking place in nightmares. This practice, common to many indigenous peoples throughout the world, has become known in Western tradition as "lucid dreaming." The author explores how New Age thinkers and entrepreneurs have adopted this and other connected indigenous dream practices by means of "simulation," a mode of appropriating the magic of "Others" that, in the context of globalized neocolonial encounters, appears as the counterpart of "mimesis." In this process of "cultural cannibalism" and commoditization, native practices are simplified, secularized, and sanitized in ways that contribute—even if unintentionally—to the perpetuation of the long-lasting opposition between the "civilized" West and the "savage" Others.

RICHARD PRICE

Refiguring Palmares

In this methodological/poetical exercise, the author attempts a mind-game in which he reads through the primary and secondary sources on the great seventeenth-century Brazilian quilombo of Palmares, drawing on his knowledge of Maroon societies elsewhere in the Americas, in order to imagine the institutions of that quilombo from their own, rather than outside observers', perspectives. Using oral testimonies from the descendants of Maroons in Suriname, and comparing them to outsiders' views of those societies as recorded in archives, he tries to better evoke the cultural institutions that would have existed in Palmares.

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