Description: The ethnographic literature focusing on sorcery in Amazonia has been sporadic and sparse. However sorcery is often of great importance in the lives and cosmologies of many people in different parts of lowland South America.
Brief description: James Andrew Whitaker is an assistant professor of anthropology at Troy University, an honorary research fellow at the University of St Andrews, and affiliated faculty at Mississippi State University. His research focuses primarily on ethnohistory, ontologies, and historical memory in Amazonia and West Africa. He is the author of The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism: History and Ontology among the Makushi in Guyana (Cambridge, 2024) and co-editor of Climatic and Ecological Change in the Americas: A Perspective from Historical Ecology (Routledge, 2023). Matthias Lewy is a musicologist and cultural anthropologist. He works as a professor at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. For more than 20 years he has been working in collaborative research, archival, and educational projects with the Pemon (Venezuela) and more recently with the Aparai-Wayana in Brazil. As a collaborative professor at the University of Brasilia (Brazil), he supervises Indigenous researchers in the Master's program PPG/MUS - PROGRAMA DE POS-GRADUACAO EM MUSICA. Tarryl Janik recently received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. His research focuses on the ethnology of the Guianas and international religious movements involving ayahuasca. It emphasizes the connections between power and shamanism.