Ritual Wailing in Amerindian Brazil

As a means of charting the complicated semiotic pathway leading from ceremonialized expressions of emotion to their underlying social motivations, this article undertakes a comparative investigation of the “ritual wailing” complex of Amerindian central Brazil. Based upon fine‐grained analyses of tape‐recorded instances of wailing, coupled with ethnographic descriptions of their social contexts, the article argues that ceremonialized affect is itself a sign vehicle, a form of “meta‐affect,” designed to communicate a desire for sociability.