Mystic endowment : religious ethnography of the Warao Indians

Book

Mystic endowment : religious ethnography of the Warao Indians / Johannes Wilbert.

Summary:

"Collection includes some of the author's most important essays written during 25 years of research among the Warao of the Orinoco Delta. Focus is on religious life, for which author provides in-depth comparative and historical interpretations of the symbolic values the Warao bestow on environmental, material, and social processes, revealing how Warao experience of life and the material conditions of existence are endowed with religious and mystical significance. This approach, outside of studies of the Guarani, has rarely been explored in South American ethnology"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57. http://www.loc.gov/hlas

Record details

ISBN: 094545404X
ISBN: 9780945454045
ISBN: 0945454058
ISBN: 9780945454052
Physical Description: xxi, 308 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.
Publisher: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Center for the Study of World Religions : 1993.

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Formatted Contents Note:: Ch. 1. Geography and Telluric Lore of the Orinoco Delta -- Ch. 2. Carpenters of Canoes -- Ch. 3. Eschatology in a Participatory Universe: Destinies of the Soul -- Ch. 4. Tobacco and Shamanistic Ecstasy -- Ch. 5. The Calabash of Ruffled Feathers -- Ch. 6. The House of the Swallow-Tailed Kite -- Ch. 7. Warao Cosmology and Yekuana Roundhouse Symbolism -- Ch. 8. The Lords of Rain -- Ch. 9. Compelling the Clouds -- Ch. 10. The Fiddle and the Dancing Jaguar.