Ebook: Artifacts and Society in Amazonia/ Artefactos y sociedad en la Amazonía

To explore the utility of material culture to anthropological studies at the turn of the
century the authors organized a symposium entitled, “Artifacts and Society in Amazonia”
at the 50th International Congress of Americanists held in Warsaw on July 10 – 14, 2000.1
Present at the Warsaw symposium were representatives from Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico,
the United States, Spain, France, Germany, and Austria. It was truly an international symposium. Most participants also contributed papers to this volume. Unfortunately, Lelia
Delgado who presented a paper entitled “Entre la etnografía a la incertidumbre de los objetos artesanales de los indígenas del Sur de Venezuela” was unable to participate in the published volume.
The papers presented here are original contributions based upon the field investigations of the authors in various parts of lowland South America. They deal with the Cashinahua and Ticuna of Brazil, the Canelo and Secoya of Ecuador; the Miraña of Colombia;
the Yanomamï of Venezuela; and the Conibo/Shipibo of Peru. All of us are indebted to Sabine Dedenbach-Salazar, editor of Bonner Amerikanistische Studien (BAS), who made this
volume possible.
The premise of the symposium was that anthropologists often find that objects are
profoundly interwoven in the fabric of human life. We put the question to a series of anthropologists who are not normally associated with material culture studies. As might have
been expected, they responded in different ways.