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An Amazonian Myth and Its History. Peter Gow. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 338 pp.
An ethnography addressing Claude Lévi-Strauss's ideas about myths as "instruments for the obliteration of time" is a surprising development in Amazonian studies. While Lévi-Strauss's extensive writings on myth constitute important resources for thinking through Amazonian narratives, over the years scholars have noticed a number of significant problems. The first involves his failure to define myth in any direct way. We see that a definition of sorts is contained within the structuralist models and methods themselves. The transformations of semiotic structures are the defining factor: stories that do not reveal a particular structural logic, which are not "important" stones, are simply not "mythological." Second, after publication of the earlier volumes of Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss rejected, as irrelevant to the semiotic issues at stake, concern about his reliance upon what others judged "faulty" versions-incorrectly or incompletely narrated, and poorly translated. Third, Lévi-Strauss's "myths" are decontextualized, taken by and large from "collections" of published texts lifted out of the discursive stream and translated according to the particular conventions of the collectors. Lévi-Strauss has no interest in the interactive character of storytelling (so crucial to understanding the role of segmentation structures and thus a story's meaning), nor in the reasons why particular stories are being told to particular listeners in the first place. In this regard his work does not directly engage the field experiences of ethnographers like Gow who are asking for, and listening to, such stories. Fourth, is the equally important and related question concerning how stories might change in connection with changes in these interpersonal relations (especially as Amazonian people have come more and more into close permanent contact with outsiders). It is the latter two issues that this book seeks to address.
The Piro people of the Bajo Urubamba River in Peruvian Amazonia, characterized by profound changes over the previous century according to the author of the present book, have often told stories to outsiders. Piro stories told in Arawakan and Spanish have been recorded by the Dominican missionary Ricardo Alvarez, the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) missionary-linguist Esther Matteson, and...