British sound recorders at drift in Columbia

 His face painted red with karayuru, a bow and quiver of curare-tipped arrows in his hands, he has little sympathy for strangers and would rather remain undisturbed. It is therefore no surprising that the Indian's face tells you little. When he stares at you with his black eyes, it is as though you were peering into the cold unknown, and there is little warmth in his expression. We very seldom noticed any demonstration of affection among the older people. Husband and wife life together rather as a matter of arrangement than through love, and tenderness was only shown to the younger children. The old people, once unfit to go out hunting or to work in the plantations, may be neglected in times of shortage and even left to die. They are no use to the society, so it is best they go; for theirs is a harsh world where only the fittest can survive.

A single bid of 3 dollars acquired me "The Cocaine Eaters" (1965) in hardback but with the dust jacket missing. In 1960 Brian Moser and Donald Taylor travelled to five different tribal people in Columbia to make sound recordings and this book tells their story. It's not a terrifyingly great book and the title is patently absurd. Moser and Taylor travel in the footsteps of notable Amazonian explorers like Richard Shultes and Reichel-Dolmatoff (and also, in their slipstream, Wade Davis who wrote about most of the same people in 'One River') and as part of this tradition this book adds an amusing but inconsequential chapter.

The field recordings are freely available online through a British Library subsite and they are wonderful, mixing environmental sounds, with chants, and panpipes playing a haunted dubstep. No kidding.

The pictures depict Tukano and the quote is about them as well.

Sniffing green pepper to get over a hangover.

   

From within the forest does not exist (Tukano Psychogeography)

Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff on the Tukano classification of environment:

 ...The Indians do not share our concept of nature, they divide their natural environment not only in what we would call ecosystems, but also segregate certain parts of the environments for their specific atmosphere . Now this is not quite the right word and I must try to explain this concept. There exist spots and spaces such as a beach, a watershed, or a tree, where people are said to be subject to unusual sensations, although there seems to be no obvious reason for it as far as the environment is concerned. But there is something in the environment that triggers off these reactions. These places or spaces do not constitute ecosystems, but the Indians mention them in any enumeration of ecological subdivisions as essential parts of the environment.They are liminal spots where transformations are likely to occur,places where all values are abolished and replaces with others, places that lie outside of time. It is obvious that we are entering here a dimension of the imaginary, but as these places do exist in reality as landscape features, and are singled out by the Indians as components of their concept of nature, I shall include them in the discussion that follows.

The Tukanoan Indians recognize at least 20 named subdivisions or areas of their environment. 

1. The maloca and its immediate surroundings or patio

2. Productive garden

3. recuperating garden

4. old abandoned garden and house sites

5. dense forest

6. open forest

7. caatinga forest

8. riverine forest

9. swamp forest

10. hills

11. hillocks

12. river

13. rapids

14. pools

15. streams, creeks

16. headwaters

17. confluence

18. island

19. beach

20. salt-lick

21. sites

All these subdivisions of the environment are believed to be charged with energies which continuously emit messages to which humans react in different ways. Many of these environments are resource areas of food or of raw materials of daily consumption, and in this manner the individual is in permanent contact with several subdivisions, and in occasional contact with most, if not all, others.