Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences

Themes on Waiwai Social Being

Bibliographic Data

ID11618216
AuthorsGeorge Mentore (0009-0007-5597-7643, corresponding author)
Year2006
Volume11
Issue2
Pages465-468
Publication date2006-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Latin American Anthropology (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1085-7052 • E-ISSN: 1548-7180
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/jlat.2006.11.2.465
OpenAlexW2089973447
LanguageEN
Citations received16
References cited8

Compelling and evocative, Of Passionate Curves and Desirable Cadences reveals the vital cultural interconnections at the heart of a rain-forest Amerindian society. The Waiwai, who live in the remote interior of Guyana and in neighboring Brazil, follow a customary subsistence lifestyle built around swidden agriculture and hunting. How do the Waiwai experience and think about themselves and their place in the so-called modern world around them? The anthropologist George Mentore draws on years of living with the Waiwai, a compelling theoretical perspective grounded in ethnographic subjectivity, and his own Guyanese heritage to depict the social and cultural world of the Waiwai. Mentore describes the relationship between the Waiwai cultural construction of the body, settlement, houses, fields, wildlife, power, knowledge, and gift giving in a variety of contexts and roles. This web of relationships, as well as the various spaces discovered and illuminated between Mentore's social being and theirs, point to a complex organization of culture that is distinctively Waiwai. When considering the Waiwai people's plaited design of passion and intimacy in the way it relates to humans, plants, and animals, Mentore promises the reader that through his text you will encounter a community of truth that tames logic and desire, where well being, beauty, morality, and care encircle the transcendent self

Aesthetics · Art · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Mathematics · Psychology

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