keeping it oral: a Yekuana ethnology

Following a brief survey of early ethnographic contact, this paper focuses on the dynamics of what Roy Wagner has termed “reverse anthropology,” the “metaphorization” of the foreign into one's own ideology. Through an analysis of various myths, the manner in which new historical realities have been incorporated into the existing symbolic structures of the Yekuana Indians of Venezuela is discussed. While attention is devoted to the transformation of the Spanish into a powerful negative symbol, it is the technology they introduced, particularly literacy, that is mainly focused upon. Issues such as cultural creativity, mythopoesis, and the relation between history and myth are all central to this discussion of oral cultures as dynamic systems of thought capable of accommodating new information and ideas.