Research Catalog

Title

The fire of the jaguar / Terence Turner ; edited by Jane Fajans ; [with a foreword by David Graeber].

Author

Turner, Terence

Publication

Chicago, Illinois : Hau Books, 2017.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Additional Authors

• Fajans, Jane
• Graeber, David

Description

xl, 254 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

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.

Subject

• Cayapo Indians > Mythology

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references (pages [245]-250) and index.

Contents

List of figures and tables. Editor's introduction: or why myth matters / Jane Fajans. Foreword: at long last / David Graeber. Part 1 The fire of the jaguar: the Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire : General problems and methodological issues -- The myth -- The social setting -- Cultural associations of the symbolic elements in the myth -- The structure of the myth -- The macaw and jaguar episodes -- The final pair of episodes -- Conclusions. Part 2 Later articles : Beauty and the beast: the fearful symmetry of the jaguar and other natural beings in Kayapo ritual and myth (the 2011 R.R. Marett Lecture) -- Cosmology, objectification, and animism in indigenous Amazonia -- The crisis of late structuralism. Bibliography -- Index.

Call Number

JFE 18-4931

ISBN

• 9780997367546
• 0997367547

LCCN

2017944968

OCLC

1018417836

Author

Turner, Terence, author.

Title

The fire of the jaguar / Terence Turner ; edited by Jane Fajans ; [with a foreword by David Graeber].

Publisher

Chicago, Illinois : Hau Books, 2017.

Type of Content

text

Type of Medium

unmediated

Type of Carrier

volume

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages [245]-250) and index.

Added Author

Fajans, Jane, editor.

Graeber, David, contributor.

Research Call Number

JFE 18-4931