A Tale of Gold and Tears. The El Dorado of the Yanomami
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18441/ind.v27i0.125-139Keywords:
El Dorado, Crisis, Yanomami, Brazil, 20th-21st CenturiesAbstract
This article takes a short Yanomami narrative about the Owner Spirit of Gold as a lead to briefly describe the turmoil that the gold rush of the late 1980s caused in the lives of numerous communities. It then relates the narrative to the various versions of the European El Dorado fable in order to discuss the power of certain recurrent ideas that still pervade how the New World is imagined. Given the virtual impossibility of linking the twenty-first century Yanomami narrative to sixteenthcentury European fantasies, the article also reflects upon the (in)capacity of contemporary canonical anthropology to analyze themes such as this one which defy the current ethnographic imagination.Downloads
Published
2010-01-01
Issue
Section
Dossier
License
Copyright (c) 2010 INDIANA
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. that allows others to share the work unchanged with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are encouraged to distribute the work themselves with information on its initial publication, e.g. upload it to open repositories linked to their personal website or institutional affiliation, or publish it in a book.
