When it was first published in 1979, this book, together with its companion volume, From the Milk River, by Christine Hugh-Jones, was hailed as setting 'a new standard for South American ethnographers, one to be emulated' (Third World Quarterly). Both are now available for the first time in paperback. The book is an extended study in English of Amazonian ritual. Through an analysis of a secret men's cult widespread throughout Northwest Amazonia, Hugh-Jones builds up a general picture of a South American Indian society, and of a religious and cosmological system that is common to a large area of Northwest Amazonia. The book is also an exercise in the anthropological interpretation of ritual, myth and religious symbolism from a structuralist point of view.
The aim of these two volumes is to bring together a representative selection of the writings of Edmund Leach (1910-1989), a brilliant and prolific anthropologist known not only in his field but to the
The societies of the Vaup's region are now among the most documented indigenous cultures of the New World, in part because they are thought to resemble earlier civilizations lost during initial coloni
