Overview

Originally published in Spanish in 1970, Watunna is the epic history and creation stories of the Makiritare, or Yekuana, people living along the northern bank of the Upper Orinoco River of Venezuela, a region of mountains and virgin forest virtually unexplored even to the present. The first English edition of this book was published in 1980 to rave reviews. This edition contains a new foreword by David Guss, as well as Mediata, a detailed myth that recounts the origins of shamanism.

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9780292715899

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Reviews

Anthropologists and folklorists have gathered, against the coming night of worldwide electronic frost, sheaves and sheaves of oral narrative, but little of it is as readable, coherent, and thought-provoking as Watunna... Though the Watunna can be for us... little more than a resonant entertainment and gaudy fossil, the two existential mysteries that it addresses - the existence of the universe, the existence of 'I'--have not been, beneath the great flurry of modern knowing, dissolved. John Updike, New Yorker One rarely reads a mythical corpus so richly textured as this Makiritare cycle...The result is a stunning portrayal of Makiritare creativity and an enthralling narrative of the way they imagine meaning in the universe. ...Civrieux and Guss bring the reader inside a contemporary worldview breathtakingly different in the way it imagines conflict and beauty. Lawrence Sullivan, New Scholar

""Anthropologists and folklorists have gathered, against the coming night of worldwide electronic frost, sheaves and sheaves of oral narrative, but little of it is as readable, coherent, and thought-provoking as Watunna... Though the Watunna can be for us... little more than a resonant entertainment and gaudy fossil, the two existential mysteries that it addresses - the existence of the universe, the existence of 'I'--have not been, beneath the great flurry of modern knowing, dissolved."" John Updike, New Yorker ""One rarely reads a mythical corpus so richly textured as this Makiritare cycle...The result is a stunning portrayal of Makiritare creativity and an enthralling narrative of the way they imagine meaning in the universe. ...Civrieux and Guss bring the reader inside a contemporary worldview breathtakingly different in the way it imagines conflict and beauty."" Lawrence Sullivan, New Scholar

Author Information

David Guss teaches anthropology at Tufts University and is an associate of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, Harvard University. Marc de Civrieux, a French-born paleontologist, has conducted ethnographic research throughout Venezuela since the late 1940s. His widely published work has received many awards.

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