Creation and Creativity in Indigenous Lowland South America

Ernst Halbmayer is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Institute for Comparative Cultural Research, University of Marburg, Germany. Among his recent publications are Indigenous Modernities in South America (Sean Kingston, 2018), and Amerindian Socio-Cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica: Toward an Anthropological Understanding of the Isthmo-Colombian Area (Routledge, 2020).

List of Figures, Ilustrations, Tables and Maps



Introduction

Anne Goletz and Ernst Halbmayer



Part I. Creation and the Original Conditions of Being



Chapter 1. Creation, Creativity, and the Times of Origin: The Multiplicity of Transformative and Transcreational Processes in Amazonia and the Isthmo-Colombian Area

Ernst Halbmayer



Chapter 2. The Maize Bringer’sCreative Potentials: How People and Maize Co-actively Ensure the Continuous Existence of Maize in the Yukpa Territory of Sokorpa, Northern Colombia

Anne Goletz



Chapter 3. What Does it Take to Be a Singer? Ritual and Creativity among the Pume People of Venezuela

Silvana Saturno



Part II. Creating and the Genres of Transmutation



Chapter 4. How to Charge a Voice with Power? Transmuting Non-Human Creativity into Vocal Creations in the Western Amazon

Bernd Brabec



Chapter 5. From the Songs without Names to the Stories inside a Name: On the Poetic Creation of Normativity among the Ayoreo from the Northern Paraguayan Chaco

Alfonso Otaegui



Chapter 6. The Chant-Owner and His Music: Musical Creativity and Verbal Artistry in the Ritual Life of an Amazonian Community

Jonathan D. Hil



Chapter 7. How to Transform the World(s): Generating Transactive Timescapes through Myths, Songs, and Magic Formulas in the Guianas

Matthias Lewy



Part III. Creativity and Shifting the Context of Signification



Chapter 8. Basketry, Mythology, and Shamanism in the Amerindian Cultures of Venezuela: An Ancestral “Art” Facing Innovation

Marie Claude Mattei Muller



Chapter 9. Yurupari’s Disappearance: Women’s Laughter and Organology without Musical Instruments in Vaupés

Juan Carlos Castrillón Vallejo



Conclusion

Ernst Halbmayer and Anne Goletz



Index