SOCIA LICULTURA L ANTHROPOLOGY 1073

the urban ghettos of Latin America. The ra- cial and cultural alloying has not so far per- mitted social osmosis and improved living conditions for the Indians or for the Blacks of the region.

Icanchu’s Drum: An Orientation to Mean- ing in South American Religions. Lawrence E. Sullivan. New York: Macmillan, 1988. 1,014 pp. $35.00 (cloth).

JONATHAN HILL Southern Illinois Universio

In Icanchu’s Drum, Lawrence Sullivan sets out to explore the religions of indigenous South American peoples as an endlessly crea- tive process of restyling primordial mythic time into symbolically ordered rhythms and configurations of cultural separateness. Using examples drawn from throughout the conti- nent (including some Afro-Brazilian cases), the author follows the dynamic movements between the stable unity of imagined mythic worlds and the changefulness of “a human ex- istence that is mortal, partial, imitative, sym- bolic, cyclic, multigenerational, socially di- vided, linguistically fractured, ritually re- stricted, and historically lived” (p. 101). Rit- ual and ceremonial performances of this “negative dialectic” are not simple reenact- ments of mythically imagined events but con- stitute a process of renewing time by multiply- ing the times ofexistence and assuring that the spaces and times of the mundane world are ex- perienced as a paradox “wherein the end be- comes the beginning and the celebration of the beginning marks an end to what has already unfolded” (p. 171) .

Icanchu’s Drum calls attention to the great importance of South American narratives about catastrophic floods and conflagrations as sources ofmythic imagery that mediates the creative tension between imagined, nonsym- bolic, primordial worlds and humanly fash- ioned orderings of body, society, and cosmos. Fiery transformations of the cosmos provide images of the coming-into-being of structured human life as an “endless cycle of consump- tion in which all is food” (p. 69). Ritual and ceremonial evocations of the cosmic fire form an ongoing process of constructing human so- cial worlds by regulating the passage of foods and other substances through bodily orifices and across collective boundaries. Cosmic floods, on the other hand, furnish mythic im- ages of the “gaping openness of bodily ori- fices” (p. 64) and an undifferentiated state of being. In collective rituals, flood imagery is transposed into a variety of sense modes to re-

generate structured human life by revealing and symbolically containing the undifferen- tiated primordium that surrounds and infuses all cultural separateness.

The book’s organization into four parts is designed to reflect indigenous South Ameri- can mythic time as a multilinear unfolding of creation, transformation, and destruction. Part 1, “Archaeology,” states the author’s ap- proach to comparative religious studies and explores various meanings of the mythic pri- mordium. Part 2, “Cosmology,” compares and contrasts the ways in which specific cul- tural orderings of space and time are carved out of the undifferentiated mythic primor- dium. Part 3, “Anthropology,” surveys sym- bolic processes of defining and transforming the meanings of humanness, human growth and creativity, and ritual specialists. Part 4, “Terminology,” focuses on indigenous under- standings of death and on ritual enactments that reaffirm life through symbolic contain- ments of death. A concluding chapter recapi- tulates the main arguments of the book.

As the book’s title implies, Sullivan finds that the auditory symbolism ofhuman speech, musical performance, and other sound-pro- ducing events is crucial for understanding South American religions. Sound symbolism serves as the ultimate reality upon which tem- poral orders are founded (p. 223). Sound is the source of shamanistic power (p. 439), and songs a re instruments for controlling the sounds ofdeath (p. 483). “Music, rather than language, is the ‘primary modeling system’ or- ganizing human bodies” (p. 282). Language is the basic instrument of socialization; musical sounds regenerate society and the individual by integrating performers into precultural or- ders of mythic creation and destruction.

Icanchu’s Drum is a major synthesis of eth- nological knowledge about the religions of in- digenous South American peoples. In addi- tion to its primary focus on myth, ritual, and cosmology, the book touches on the dynamic interrelations between myth and history, the integration of dreams and visions into reli- gious performances, and the fusion of mythic imagination with everyday activities and ma- terial objects. For South Americanists, the book contains an impressive and highly useful bibliography cutting across the usual schol- arly division of labor between highland and lowland specialties. For the broader commu- nity of anthropologists, the book draws to- gether the results of a myriad of ethnographic studies, dispersed in hundreds of publications and written in several languages, into a coher- ent interpretation of basic themes in South American religions.