This collection of published and previously unpublished papers on Kayapo cosmology by the late Terry Turner (1935-2015) offers a sustained analysis of a single Kayapo myth: Fire of the Jaguar. The book places the myth within the broader context of Kayapo society and culture, showing how it came to be both an origin tale and a model ... Read morefor childhood socialization. In a refreshingly honest, jargon-free foreword, noted anthropologist David Graeber writes that Turner's main goal in examining the jaguar myth was to see 'mythic thought' as a way that the highest level of self-organization appears, as it were, from below. Put another way, Turner sought to understand myth, ritual, and social organization as generative processes of social reproduction. Based on five decades of fieldwork among the Kayapo of Central Brazil, the papers in this volume enable readers to glimpse how the tiniest of ethnographic details can be fused into a seamless whole in the life and works of a single scholar. For more than 50 years, Turner advocated a dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism that was different from that made famous by Claude Levi-Strauss. Since Turner's prose style can be impenetrable, this brilliant theoretical synthesis requires considerable commitment on the part of the reader. Highly recommended.
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