today, religion is not an institution differentiated from other
aspects of their lives. When they use the term religion, they
are generally referring to the Christian religions introduced
among them in their long history of contact with nonindige-
nous society. When they wish to refer to their own beliefs
and practices that have to do with the sacred, they generally
use such phrasings as “our tradition” and “the wisdom of our
ancestors.” To understand these traditions, it is useful to
consider four dimensions that characterize all religious tradi-
tions: cosmogony (the meaning of the beginning); cosmolo-
gy (spatial and temporal structures of the universe); anthro-
pology (the relations among living beings, including
“specialists” who mediate relations with the spirits and divin-
ities); and eschatology (the meaning of the end). This entry
will seek to provide a minimum understanding of these di-
mensions from the rich and complex contemporary tradi-
tions of the Tukanoan-speaking peoples, the Arawak-
speaking Baniwa and Kuripako, and the Maku of the Rio
Negro region and its main tributaries, the Uaupés and Içana;
the Yanomami of the Parima highlands on the border of Bra-
zil and Venezuela; and the Carib-speaking Makiritare of the
upper Orinoco Valley.
Tukanoans. Tukanoan-speaking peoples inhabit the
rainforest region on the border of Brazil and Colombia. Al-
though they are divided into numerous linguistic groups,
they nevertheless share a body of broadly identical mytholo-
gy. Religious life revolves around these myths; the impor-
tance of sacred flutes and trumpets representing the ancestors
of each group; shamans and chant specialists; and a cosmolo-
gy centering on the themes of mortality and immortality,
death and rebirth, and the conjunction of male and female
principles in the creation and reproduction of culture.
The myths explain the origins of the cosmos, describing
a dangerous, undifferentiated world with no clear boundaries
of space and time and no difference between people and ani-
mals. They explain how the first beings created the physical
features of the landscape, and how the world was gradually
made safe for the emergence of true human beings. A key ori-
gin myth explains how an anaconda-ancestor entered the
world-house through the “water-door” in the east and trav-
eled up the Rio Negro and Uaupés with the ancestors of all
humanity inside his body. Initially in the form of feather or-
naments, these spirit-ancestors were transformed into human
beings over the course of their journey. When they reached
the center of the world, they emerged from a hole in the
rocks and moved to their respective territories. These narra-
tives give the Tukanoan peoples a common understanding
of the cosmos, of the place of human beings within it, and
of the relations that should pertain between different peoples
and between them and other beings.
The universe consists of three basic levels: the sky, earth,
and underworld. Each layer is a world in itself, with its spe-
cific beings, and can be understood both in abstract and in
concrete terms. In different contexts, the “sky” can be the
world of the sun, the moon, and the stars; the world of the
birds who fly high; the tops of mountains; or even a head
adorned with a headdress of red and yellow macaw feathers,
which are the colors of the sun. In the same way, the under-
world can be the River of the Dead below the earth, the yel-
low clay below the layer of soil where the dead are buried,
or the aquatic world of the subterranean rivers. In any case,
what defines the “sky” or the “underworld” depends not only
on the scale and context, but also on the perspective: at night,
the sun, the sky, and the day are below the earth and the dark
underworld is on top.
In symbolic terms, the longhouse is the universe, and
vice versa. The thatched roof is the sky, the support beams
are the mountains, the walls are the chains of hills that seem
to surround the visible horizon at the edge of the world, and
under the floor runs the River of the Dead. The longhouse
has two doors: the one facing east, called the “water door,”
is the men’s door; the other, facing west, is the women’s
door. A long roof beam called the “path of the sun” extends
between the two doors. In this equatorial region, the under-
world rivers run from west to east, or from the women’s door
to the men’s door; completing a closed circuit of water; the
River of the Dead runs from the east to the west.
The longhouse is likewise a body—the “canoe-body” of
the ancestral anaconda—which, according to the myth of
creation, brought the ancestors of humanity, the children of
the ancestral anaconda, inside it, swimming upriver from the
Amazon to the Uaupés in the beginning of time. These chil-
dren are the inhabitants of the longhouse, replica of the origi-
nal ancestor, containers of future generations and they them-
selves are future ancestors. But if the longhouse is a human
body, its composition is also a question of perspective. From
the male point of view, the painted front of the longhouse
is a man’s face, the men’s door his mouth, the main beams
and side beams his spinal column and ribs, the center of the
house his heart, and the women’s door his anus. From the
female point of view, however, the spinal column, ribs, and
heart are the same, but the rest of the body is inverted: the
women’s door is her mouth, the men’s door her vagina, and
the inside of the house her womb.
In the Tukanoan life cycle, there is a notion of reincar-
nation shared by all Tukanoans: at death, an aspect of the
dead person’s soul returns to the “house of transformation,”
the group’s origin site. Later the soul returns to the world
of the living to be joined to the body of a newborn baby
when the baby receives its name. People are named after a
recently dead relative on the father’s side. Each group owns
a limited set of personal names, which are kept alive by being
transmitted back to the living. The visible aspect of these
name-souls are the feather headdresses worn by dancers, or-
naments that are also buried with the dead. The underworld
river is described as being full of these ornaments and, in the
origin story, the spirits inside the anaconda-canoe traveled
in the form of dance ornaments.
Buried in canoes, the souls of the dead fall to the under-
world river below. From there they drift downstream to the8622 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE NORTHWEST AMAZON