A Walk to the River in Amazonia

Book excerpt: Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality—the flow of moment-to-moment existence. In this anthropological study of the Amazon’s Mehinaku Indians, the author achieves an understanding of this part of reality by both observing various aspects of their experience and by relating how these different facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the river. In this way, abstract schemata such as ‘cosmology,’ ‘sociality,’ ‘gender,’ and the ‘everyday’ are understood as they are actually lived.