Healing the Past: Historical Consciousness among the Pume People of Venezuela
This dissertation addresses the question of how the Pume people of Venezuela remember. While describing different modes of historical consciousness that coexist among the Pume, it deals with issues of temporality, agency and personhood. Drawing on theoretical insights from anthropology of the sense...
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| Format: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Language: | English |
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Philipps-Universität Marburg
2023
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| Online Access: | PDF Full Text |
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| Summary: | This dissertation addresses the question of how the Pume people of Venezuela remember. While describing different modes of historical consciousness that coexist among the Pume, it deals with issues of temporality, agency and personhood. Drawing on theoretical insights
from anthropology of the senses and phenomenological analysis, it demonstrates how a deep understanding of the use of metaphors is central to comprehending native processes of historical representation. Like most native Lowland South American societies, the Pume understand social change and social reproduction as processes that are brought about by
powerful others that are human as well as nonhuman agencies. The Pume become aware of the dynamics of such processes while sleeping or while going through other kinds of altered states of consciousness that are associated with certain diseases or that are attained while singing. I provide ethnographic examples to conclude that, in general, the Pume value dreaming experiences, the experiences of being ill and the experiences of singing as significant sources of knowledge. Likewise, this study shows how dreams, states of illness and the action of singing are particularly significant means by which the Pume experience, gain understanding and become knowledgeable of their past and current relations to alterity. |
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| Physical Description: | 258 Pages |
| DOI: | 10.17192/z2024.0124 |