cal order. They control the fury of the thunder and winds
brought by storms, the regularity of the alternation between
day and night, or dry season and rainy season, the abundance
of game, and the fertility of gardens; they keep up the arch
of the sky to prevent its falling (the present earth is an ancient
fallen sky), repel the forest’s supernatural predators, and
counterattack the raids made by aggressive spirits of enemy
shamans. Most importantly, they cure the sick, victims of
human malevolence (sorcery, aggressive shamanism, attacks
on animal doubles) or nonhuman malevolence (coming from
malefic në waripë beings).
Makiritare. The Makiritare, Carib-speaking peoples of
the upper Orinoco Valley, recount the story of their creation
in the great tradition called Watunna. According to this tra-
dition, the primordial sun brought the heavenly creator
Wanadi into being. Through his shamanic powers, Wanadi
created “the old people” and then, in his desire to place
“good people” in houses on the earth, he dispatched three
aspects of himself to earth. The first buried his own placenta
in the earth, which gave rise to an evil being, called Odosha,
who then sought to destroy every creative effort and intro-
duced death into the world. The second aspect of Wanadi
was sent to teach the people that dying is an illusion and that
dreaming holds the true power of reality. He brought good
people, as sounds, inside a stonelike egg to earth, where they
would be born, but Odosha prevented this from happening.
Wanadi then hid them in a mountain to wait until the end
of the world and the death of Odosha. Wanadi’s third aspect,
Attawanadi, then came to earth to create the enclosed struc-
ture of the earth, which was then shrouded in the darkness
created by Odosha. A new sky, sun, moon, and stars were
created in this house, village, universe. Then there ensued a
struggle between Odosha and Attawanadi in which Odosha
is initially victorious, but Attawanadi outsmarts the evil
being by assuming elusive guises. As trickster, Attawanadi
thwarts Odosha’s constant attempts to destroy existence in
a sort of negative dialectic of the sacred. Thus cosmic history
was set in motion.
Other episodes of this important cycle relate the de-
struction through deluge of the primordial beings and their
world, and the origins of periodicity, differentiation, and
bounded spaces. The deluge was the result of the killing of
a primordial anaconda-monster. After this destruction,
Wanadi decided to make houses and “new people,” who live
in a symbolic world in which, through song, ritual, and
weaving, they recall these primordial events. The landscape
of the Makiritare world provides constant reminders of the
primordial times. The center of the universe is a lake in
Makiritare territory where, in ancient times, waters poured
forth from the cut trunk of the tree that originally bore all
fruit. This lake contains the sea that once flooded the earth
and is now bounded at the edges of the world.
Although numerous Makiritare communities converted
to Protestant evangelicalism in the 1980s, many others re-
jected conversion, maintaining firm belief in the Watunna
tradition.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Albert, Bruce. “Yanomami.” In Povos indígenas no Brasil. Instituto
socioambiental (Socio-Environmental Institute), 1999.
Available in Portuguese and English from http://
http://www.socioambiental.org/website/pib/epienglish/yanomami/
yanomami.shtm. Basic information on Yanomami society,
culture, and cosmology.
De Civrieux, Marc. Watunna: An Orinoco Creation Cycle. Edited
and translated by David M. Guss. San Francisco, 1980.
Major myth cycle of the Makiritare Indians of the upper Ori-
noco, collected by the author during twenty years of field-
work.
Hugh-Jones, Stephen. The Palm and the Pleiades: Initiation and
Cosmology in Northwest Amazonia. Cambridge, U.K., 1979.
One of the earliest and most important monographs on the
ritual and religious life of an indigenous peoples, the Tu-
kanoan-speaking Barasana of the Northwest Amazon. Struc-
turalist analysis of initiation rites, myths, and cosmology.
Pozzobon, Jorge. “Maku.” In Povos indígenas no Brasil. Instituto
socioambiental (Socio-Environmental Institute), 1999.
Available in Portuguese and English from http://www. so-
cioambiental. org / website / pib / epienglish / maku /
maku.shtm. Basic information on Maku society, culture, and
cosmology.
Sullivan, Lawrence. Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Meaning
in South American Religions. New York, 1988. Outstanding
source on native South American religions by a historian of
religions. Examines the cosmogonies, cosmologies, anthro-
pologies, and eschatologies of native peoples across the conti-
nent. Masterful work of interpretation of myths, rituals, and
beliefs.
Wright, Robin. Cosmos, Self, and History in Baniwa Religion: For
Those Unborn. Austin, Tex., 1998. Monograph on the Bani-
wa peoples of the Northwest Amazon, focusing on cosmogo-
ny, cosmology, eschatology, and conversion to Protestant
evangelicalism.
Wright, Robin, with Manuela Carneiro da Cunha. “Destruction,
Resistance, and Transformations—Southern, Coastal, and
Northern Brazil (1580–1890).” In The Cambridge History of
the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. 3: South America, ed-
ited by Stuart Schwartz and Frank Salomon, part 2,
pp. 287–381. New York and Cambridge, U.K., 1999. Histo-
ry of three centuries of contact between indigenous societies
in three regions of Brazil, and the expanding colonial
frontier.
ROBIN M. WRIGHT (2005)SOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF
THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN AMAZON
The vast region covered by the central and eastern Amazon
may, for the purposes of this entry, be delimited by the Río
Negro at the western end, the mouth of the Amazon to the
east, the Guyana highlands to the north, and the central pla-
teau of Brazil to the south. Within this region many of the
great language families of South America are represented: Ar-
awak, Tupi, Carib, Ge, and Timbira. Besides this diversity8626 SOUTH AMERICAN INDIANS: INDIANS OF THE CENTRAL AND EASTERN AMAZON