Rainforest Shamans
Essays on the Tukano Indians of the Northwest Amazon

The renowned anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff spent most of his working life among tribes living in the vast rainforests of the Colombian Northwest Amazon. This book brings together eleven of his essays and articles about the Tukano Indians. Many of the essays are concerned with the role of shamanism in Tukanoan society:?initiation practices, the rock crystal (the shamans’ principal power tool), which provides the model for many aspects of the shamanistic world-view; and their curing spells, which show the Tukanoan concepts of illness and its cure. Other essays describe their concepts of universal energies and the ways they can be balanced, and the ecological dimensions of their world-view.

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was a world-renowned Colombian anthropologist who devoted the last years of his life to studying the Indian tribes of the North-West Amazon.