Terence S. Turner (1935 2015) was emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago and a visiting professor of anthropology at Cornell University. He wrote extensively on the Kayapo throughout his career.
"A major contribution to the study of Indigenous cosmologies.
Turner's analysis of the Kayapo myth of the origin of cooking fire
provides methodological advice and perspectives that can contribute
to revitalising myth analysis in anthropology. His theoretical
reflections form another major contribution to the current debates
in the anthropological study of indigenous societies, whether it be
to the never-ending nature-culture question, the body/spirit
duality, or the reproduction of social structure and social change.
It is clear that many of Turner's insights will help the discipline
develop an analysis critical of the ontological turn."--
"Anthropologica"
"This book makes available in a single volume some of the writings
of one of the best-known Amazonianist ethnographers of the second
half of the twentieth century. They are representative of his
research on the Kayapo and his attempt to reformulate the study of
myths, alerting us to the possible significance of the most minute
details. It will doubtless stimulate debate on a number of key
philosophical issues, not the least being the question of
subjectivity, for years to come."-- "Anthropos"
"This collection of published and previously unpublished papers on
Kayapo cosmology by the late Terry Turner (1935-2015) offers a
sustained analysis of a single Kayapo myth: "Fire of the Jaguar."
The book places the myth within the broader context of Kayapo
society and culture, showing how it came to be both an origin tale
and a "model for" childhood socialization. In a refreshingly
honest, jargon-free foreword, noted anthropologist David Graeber
writes that Turner's main goal in examining the jaguar myth was "to
see 'mythic thought' as a way that the highest level of
self-organization appears, as it were, from below." Put another
way, Turner sought to understand myth, ritual, and social
organization as generative processes of social reproduction. Based
on five decades of fieldwork among the Kayapo of Central Brazil,
the papers in this volume enable readers to glimpse how the tiniest
of ethnographic details can be fused into a seamless whole in the
life and works of a single scholar. For more than 50 years, Turner
advocated a dynamic, materialist, action-oriented structuralism
that was different from that made famous by Claude Levi-Strauss.
Since Turner's prose style can be impenetrable, this brilliant
theoretical synthesis requires considerable commitment on the part
of the reader. Highly recommended."-- "Choice"
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