The Wauja snake-basket: myth and the conceptual imagination of material culture in Amazonia

Abstract

The literature on Amazonian ethnology is plenty of mythical serpents whose deeds are relatedto the origin of humanity, the invention and teaching of shamanic knowledge, artefacts, graphicmotifs and songs. If the mythological themes on Amazonian serpents have already been widelydescribed and analysed, the same cannot be said about the visual forms related to these themes.Many studies on Amazonian mythology left aside the very plastic aspects of material culture.These studies did not take into account that several features of the mythological themes areprecisely merged with the qualities of the visual styles. This article discusses some aspects ofthe conceptual imagination of Wauja (an Arawak speaking people of the Upper Xingu) materialculture through the analysis of a mythical character that explicitly exposes the intrinsic andsimultaneous musical and iconographic nature of weaving art.

Keywords

• Upper Xingu
• Cosmology
• Art
• Myth
• Music