The Shamanism of Eco-Tourism
History and Ontology among the Makushi in Guyana

This book explores the influence of shamanism on past and present Indigenous engagements with outside visitors in Guyana.

James Andrew Whitaker (Author)

9781009478403, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 6 February 2025

228 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.48 kg

'In this finely conceived volume, Whitaker has traced two hundred years of how the Makushi have transformed outsiders, especially missionaries and tourists, into parts of a long-established social order, thereby maintaining their society and cosmology despite numerous threats.' Mark Harris, University of Adelaide

In the first book in English to focus specifically on the Makushi in Guyana, James Andrew Whitaker examines how shamanism informs Makushi interactions with outsiders in the context of historical missionization and contemporary tourism. The Makushi are an Indigeneous people who speak a Cariban language and live in Guyana, Brazil, and Venezuela. Combining ethnohistory, ethnographic fieldwork, and archival research, this book elucidates a shamanic framework that is seen in Makushi engagements with outsiders in the past and present. It shows how this framework structures interactions between Makushi groups and various visitors in Guyana. Similar to how Makushi shamans draw in spirit allies, Makushi groups seek human outsiders and form strategic partnerships with them to obtain desired resources that are used for local goals and transformative projects. The book advances recent scholarship concerning ontological relations in Amazonia and is positioned at the cusp of debates over Amazonian relations with alterity.

Introduction
1. Fetching the outside among the Makushi
2. Eco-Tourism and development in Surama Village
3. Missionaries, explorers, and other Spirits
4. Transformation and otherness: Prophetic movements in the aftermath of early missionization
5. Spirits in the landscape: Makushi Shamanism and ecological relations
6. Tourists as shamanic spirits: strategic engagements with the other
7. Becoming the other: shifting alterity In Surama Village
Afterword
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]