The fire of the jaguar

Resource Information

The work The fire of the jaguar represents a distinct intellectual or artistic creation found in European University Institute Library. This resource is a combination of several types including: Work, Language Material, Books.

Label

The fire of the jaguar

Statement of responsibility

Terence Turner ; edited by Jane Fajans ; [with a foreword by David Graeber]

Creator

• Turner, Terence

Contributor

• Fajans, Jane
• Graeber, David

Contributor

• Graeber, David

Editor

• Fajans, Jane

Subject

• Cayapo Indians -- Mythology

Language

eng

Summary

Not since Clifford Geertz's "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" has the publication of an anthropological analysis been as eagerly awaited as this book. Turner's reanalysis of the famous myth from the Kayapo people of Brazil was anticipated as an exemplar of a new, dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism, one very different from the kind made famous by Claude Lévi-Strauss. But the study never fully materialized. Now, with this volume, it has arrived, bringing with it powerful new insights that challenge the way we think about structuralism, its legacy, and the reasons we have moved away from it. In these chapters, Turner carries out one of the richest and most sustained analysis of a single myth ever conducted. Turner places the "Fire of the Jaguar" myth in the full context of Kayapo society and culture and shows how it became both an origin tale and model for the work of socialization, which is the primary form of productive labor in Kayapo society. A posthumous tribute to Turner's theoretical erudition, ethnographic rigor, and respect for Amazonian indigenous lifeworlds, this book brings this fascinating Kayapo myth alive for new generations of anthropologists. Accompanied with some of Turner's related pieces on Kayapo cosmology, this book is at once a richly literary work and an illuminating meditation on the process of creativity itself. --

Assigning source

Provided by publisher

Illustrations

illustrations

Index

index present

Literary form

non fiction

Nature of contents

bibliography