A Walk To The River in Amazonia

Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality--the flow of moment-to-moment existence--and yet it has been largely overlooked as a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author achieves an understanding of interstitial reality for the Mehinaku Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different parts come to play in the stream of their ordinary consciousness. In this way, abstract schemata such as cosmology, sociality, gender, and the everyday are understood as they are actually lived. This book contributes to the general ethnography of the Amazon, specifically the Upper Xingu. Its approach crosses disciplinary boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology, and in doing so attempts an understanding of what Malinowski called the imponderabilia of actual life.

Carla Stang received her undergraduate degree at the University of Sydney and was awarded the Frank Bell Memorial Prize for Anthropology for her studies there. She took her doctorate in Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2005. She carries out her ethnographic fieldwork in the Upper Xingu area of the Brazilian Amazon. Presently she is a Visting Scholar in cultural anthropology at Columbia University.