Keepers of the Sacred Chants

The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society

Jonathan D. Hill (Author)
Hardcover ($55.00), Ebook ($24.95) Buy
The Wakuenai of the upper Rio Negro region in southern Venezuela employ a form of singing called malikai for ceremonies of childbirth, initiation, and healing. This ritual chanting is a rich amalgam of myth and music, and serves as a means of integrating individuals into a vertical hierarchy of power relations between mythic ancestors and human descendants. Jonathan Hill here shows how the musical and semantic transformations of everyday discourse in malikai integrate the everyday world into a poetic process of empowerment.
Keepers of the Sacred Chants
245 Pages 6 x 9 x 1
Published: December 1993Hardcover ISBN: 9780816511358
Published: March 2022Ebook ISBN: 9780816548095

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