64 The LATIN AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW 2(2)

To Weave and Sing: Art, Symbol, and Narrative Inthe South American Rain Forest. DAVID M. GUSS.Berkeley: University of California Press,1989. xlii +274 pp., Illustrations, notes, bibliography, Index.$39.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0-520-06427-5,ISBN 0-520-07185-9.

ELLEN BASSOUniversity of Arizona

Placing non-European art fully in its social and culturalcontexts, examining the motives, character, but most impor-tantly the experiences of the artists who worked to producethe items in question, are now becoming of increasing interestto anthropologists in a climate of criticism aimed at how nativeobjects have been presented (or rejected) as "art" in Westernart institutions. This book, nicely illustrated with a lengthysection of photographs, is a good example of this criticalapproach, insofar as it is concerned with explicating thebasketry tradition of the Carib-speaking Yekuana Indiansliving in Venezuela as a system of meaning central to Yekuanabeing. Guss has harsh words for attempts to understandbasketry from either purely functional or purely aestheticcriteria, arguing correctly for understanding the meaning ofobjects as the recreation of cultural principles, thus as integralto the whole of a culture.

The author discusses at length certain cosmological prin-ciples that give meaning to the structure of the basketrypatterns, though how these principles are used in ongoingdiscourse by the makers is not clear from the text. Gussinterprets the meaning of the baskets through a metaphoricalstructure (the "dualism of all forms," p. 121) underlying theorigin myths of cultural artifacts. This structure creates orallows for (the connection is not clear), analogies betweencosmos, house, dress, settlement and basket. Characteristicof the Yekuana understanding of their world is the idea thatskills and powers are connected to beings residing in the"outside" realms, and these are equated with death, either asa weapon or a poison (p.94). According to the author, thereis a preoccupation with toxicity and with detoxification. TheYekuana see themselves as constantly subject to dangersfrom outside, against which body paints and songs rituallyprotect them, but also serve to incorporate them into anorganization at the center of which is a Yekuana community.As Guss explains, "Every event, through the manipulation ofsymbols it requires, becomes another exercise in Yekuanacosmology, another form of revelation" (p.68).

Considering this perspective on life, the manufacture ofobjects is hardly a purely technological activity, but rather isunderstood to be a ritual process involving the technicalcrafting of objects. As a ritual process, the manufacture ofcultural artifacts (including the transformation of persons in apotentially toxic state, such as a newly menstruating woman)is aimed at positively controlling dangerous toxic powers bybringing them to the "inside" realm of human life. Guss writes:

As the Yekuana recognize, this demands much more than simpletechnical expertise. With every object possessing an invisibledouble of incalculable power, humans must be able to control theunseen as well as the seen when negotiating the conversion of wildobjects into domestic ones. The ritual performance that accompa-nies every technical activity guarantees that the incorporation ofthis potentially dangerous new and foreign will not be disruptive.The material transformation...must be accompanied as well by a

spiritual transformation...* (p.95).And, the more skillful one is in making baskets, the moreritually knowledgeable one becomes, engaged in a deeperand more esoteric metaphysical dialogue.

The myths of origin are concerned with humanizationprocess, Guss continues. Thus, in the case of baskets, mythsof the origin of basketry design involve deadly snakes and thedevil. The images on the baskets represent not only aparticular physical image (for example, of the design on awoodpecker's back, the shape of a frog, monkey or bat) but amirror image, or invisible double of the first "where its realpower resides" (p. 122). What is actually depicted, Gusssuggests, is the dynamic relation between the seen andunseen, resulting in a kinetic structure that challenges per-ception "with the viewer forced to decide which image is realand which an illusion" (p. 122). Yet the materials he brings tobear to justify this interpretation as an indigenous one merelypoint to Yekuana attempts to explain that designs have aninterlocking structure, consisting of independent but insepa-rable, unbroken elements. The deeper metaphysical inter-pretations that Guss proposes are not borne out directly byany Yekuana discourse.

As with all interpretations of this kind, one wonders how theauthor arrived at such conclusions. Without any representa-tion and careful discussion of the dialogues the author mayhave had with his Yekuana teachers, the relationship of thecosmological principles to ongoing processes of makingbaskets, teaching an outsider, teaching a young person andtalking about making baskets (or talking about anything else)is obscure. What is missing from this otherwise interestingbook is that very processual discourse-oriented focus whichwould have made the argument considerably more convinc-ing than it now stands. For, as Suzanne Langer wrote sometime ago, the making of such cultural objects is (like that of allartistic processes) a kind of performance, a calling into beingof something through the technical activities of manufacture.

Yuqul: Forest Nomads In a Changing World. ALLYNMACLEAN STEARMAN. New York: Holt, Rlnehartand Winston, 1989. 164 pp. $8.00 (paper). ISBN0-03-022702-X.

BETH ANN CONKLINMount Holyoke College

What are the prospects for indigenous peoples' culturalsurvival under the impact of Amazonian development andcolonization? Allyn MacLean Stearman explores this ques-tion in an engaging ethnography examining change andadaptation among the Yuqui, a tiny band of rainforest foragersin eastern Bolivia. This recent addition to the Holt case studiesseries raises provocative questions about the maintenance ofcultural systems and issues of dependency, autonomy andappropriate development models.

The Yuqui have a long history of coping under conditions ofextreme stress. Until the 1960s, they were a hunted peoplethreatened with extinction, living beyond the fringes of non-Indian settlement. Like the related Siriono described in AllanHolmberg's Nomads of the Long Bow, the Yuqui have one ofthe least complex levels of technology known among living