This remarkable book (translated by the author and first published as Desana: Simbolismo de los Indios Tukano del Vaupés, Universidad de los Andes and Editorial Revista Colombiana Ltda. Bogotá, 1968) occupies a unique position in the ethnographic literature of the Americas: its nearest parallel in anthropological writing is perhaps Marcel Griaule’s treatise on the cosmology of the Dogon of West Africa (Le Dieu de l’eau, translated into English as Conversations with Ogutemelli, International African Institute, 1964). Both works present the total religious and cosmological system of a primitive people as recounted and interpreted by a single informant.
Both the most fascinating and the most problematical aspects of the two works derive from their origin in an account supplied by a single highly unusual individual. Griaule’s informant was a wise elder delegated by the Dogon themselves to explain to him the esoteric lore of the Dogon cosmos. Reichel-Dolmatoff’s informant, clearly an exceptionally intelligent and gifted person, is a Bogotá garage mechanic who had lived for a number of years apart from his tribe when Reichel-Dolmatoff met him and recorded the conversations that form the basis of this book. The informant’s account is descriptive but also interpretative; Reichel-Dolmatoff frequently intervenes in the text with elucidatory remarks of his own. How much of what is said represents the collective beliefs of the Desana (the Tukanoan tribelet from which the informant comes), how much the interpretations of the informant, and how much the views of Reichel-Dolmatoff himself is not always clear from the text. The problem is especially acute with respect to the sexual interpretations of Desana symbols and beliefs which pervade the text. Many of these interpretations strike me as strained and unconvincing on the strength of the evidence presented. On the other hand, the overall analysis of the Desana cosmological system as a dynamic equilibrium of reciprocal exchanges of energy between man and nature, provided by the informant and Reichel-Dolmatoff in the conclusion, is compelling and consistent with what is known of the beliefs of Tukanoan and other tropical forest groups. Sexuality undeniably plays a central symbolic role in this system. Reichel-Dolmatoff discusses the problem of distinguishing between the informant’s idiosyncratic interpretations and collective Desana beliefs at considerable length and has checked the data in several ways, including a field trip together with the informant to his tribal long-house. We have his word that the informant’s account is essentially accurate.
Whether the book is read as a straight ethnographic account of Tukanoan cosmology or as the idiosyncratic attempt of one man to arrive at a personally meaningful synthesis of his ancestral religion, the book is a fascinating document. It is indisputably the most coherent and detailed account of the religious beliefs of a South American tropical forest people in existence: the quantity and richness of the data alone puts the work in a class of its own. Reichel-Dolmatoff has clearly gotten the most out of his informant, and has produced a landmark in South American ethnography. The book will be indispensable to specialists in the anthropology of the tropical forest peoples, but should also prove a useful and stimulating component of undergraduate courses on the area.
