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1 • INTRODUCTION: The Syntax of Culture '/"here are many gods, many spirits, and many people who live above the earth and below the earth. I know them all because I am a great singer. There is the one who created the baskets, and the baskets began to ivalk, and they entered the water after having, eaten many Indians. They are the cayman alligators—you've only got to look at their skins to see that. An Indian doctor saw this spirit creating thefirst basket, and he managed to escape in time to avoid being eaten. It was a Yekuana. That's why our baskets are better made than anyone else's. — Kalomera, quoted by Alain Gheerbrant, Journey to theFarAmazon I went to the Yekuana for the first time in 1976 as part of a grant from the Organization of American States to translate their creation epic known as the Watunna. While this translation was based on a Spanish version prepared over the course of nearlytwo decades by the French paleontologist Marc de Civrieux(19706, 1980), I nevertheless wished to hear these tales told within their own context and language. So with a tape recorder perched on the top of my pack, 1 arranged to visit the village of Parupa, also known as Adujana, on the upper Paragua River. But listening to stories among the Yekuana turned out to be an entirely different proposition than I had originally imagined. There were no neatly framed "storytelling events" into which the foreign observer could easilyslip, no circles of attentive youths breathing in the words of an elder as he regaled them with the deeds of their ancestors. Rather, Watunna was everywhere, like an invisible sleeve holding the entire culture in place. Derived from the verb adeu, "to tell," it existed in even7 evocation of the mythic tradition, no matter how fragmentary or allu- 1 THE SYNTAXOFCULTURE sive. "That's Watunna," a Yekuana would say, and yet there would be no semblance of a narrative. To hear a story with anything remotely approaching completeness would take many years, and even then new details and episodes would continue to surface. But it was not only this open-ended quality of storytelling, the "stitching together" (rhapsoideiri ) of narrative into the fabric of daily life, that made recording myths so difficult. For even when tales were organized into self-contained units of expression, such as during the Garden and House Festivals, other problems still prevailed. First among them was the mode of composition , the specialized shamanic language unknown even to many of the participants themselves. Designed to communicate directly with the spirits of the invisibleworld, these songs had a purposefulness resistant to any electronic interference. And so, added to the difficulty of understanding these lengthy epics was a strict proscription against taperecording them (Guss 19866). In short, I soon began to realize that to understand even a single story among the Yekuana required a long and active apprenticeship. It was this recognition, along with the initial limitations of my linguistic skills, that led me to seek another entrance into the mythic universe I had come to explore. For it soon became obvious that although I could not yet understand the myths as told, I could at least see them. It was with this in mind that I began to concentrate on basketry, particularly the round serving trays known as waja. Of course, it was hard to avoid focusing one's attention on these beautiful objects, not only because of their dramatic geometric designs but also because they were inevitablywhere the attention of the Yekuana one was speaking to was also focused. Conversation simply did not occur without someone making a basket. It was the principal activity of almost every male while in the village and, as such, orchestrated each dialogue, with pauses and transitions paralleling the critical moments of a basket's construction. To really communicate it often seemed one had to be making a basket. And so, it was not long before I too entered into the long process of becoming a basket maker. My teacher was the eldest member of the village, a taciturn and brooding man named Juan Castro.1 Although he had once been chief, his deposal had left him isolated and bitter. His days were now spent with his wife and daughters and small grandchildren, doing little else than weaving baskets. There were many times when we were the only adult males in the village, all the others being off hunting or...

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