Suzanne Oakdale has written an insightful and compelling study of ritualized autobiographic performance among the Kayabi Indians of central Brazil. Her topic—the narration of personal history, and narration as history–also opens up space for a welcome historical ethnography of the Kayabi.

Oakdale focuses her primary attention on two forms of ritualized narration: maraca cures held by senior shamans and jawosi songs to help end mourning. In each, the senior men who perform the narratives use dialogic speech forms that incorporate autobiographical text, giving both of these the form of ritualized autobiography and autobiographical rituals. Despite having senior male leaders, both maraka cures and jawosi songs are villagewide, collective rituals that alter the collective state of being in the community. Much of Oakdale’s interesting analysis concentrates on the ways in which the dialectic movement between a narrating subject and the community transacts the personal autobiography of the leader, negotiates political alignments, and offers models of and for proper personhood to community members. Each genre of narrative performance posits a different relationship among the living and the dead to accomplish different social and psychological ends. Maraka identify the current population with past generations to affect cures and promote health; jawosi separate the living and the dead to bring an end to the social isolation of mourning.

Oakdale draws on Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s influential notion of “perspectivism,” the idea common among indigenous Amazonian peoples that different beings have different and unique perspectives or views of the same things (e.g., what people see as manioc beer, peccaries might see as blood) and that individuals represent themselves through the perspectives of others. In Kayabi autobiographical ritual, for example, this perspectivism takes several forms, including the use of quoted speech in which the narrator recites what others have said about him. As Oakdale notes, this produces a kind of “dividual”: Years of association with multiple others yield an orchestration of voices rather than a single narrative line in ritual. Her analysis is similarly a fine orchestration of frameworks and perspectives that produce a satisfyingly coherent picture of these interesting rituals.

Oakdale’s focus on these narrative forms also opens a broader field for her to explore a wide range of aspects of Kayabi culture and social life. Illness and its cure, and death, are critical life events that enroll local and regional political forces, notions of the body and spirit, maturation, gender, and relations with non-Kayabi. Oakdale folds all of these issues into her analysis with a seamless touch, as she radiates out from single songs or narrations to the broader issues that inform them for the narrator and his listeners. Oakdale is also sensitive to the fact that the Kayabi, like other indigenous Amazonian societies, are a kind of refugee community, the small remnants of once-vast populations, and she uses this fact to explore how the multiple contacts Kayabi have with other local and regional populations, indigenous and nonindigenous, shape the contemporary Kayabi sense of themselves and their history.

For many years the Kayabi have been well-known but understudied, one of several groups descendant from the famous Tupinamba Indians, who lived on the coast of Brazil in the 15th century. Oakdale’s research and especially this outstanding new book provide welcome access to the ethnography of this interesting community.