ABSTRACT
It is the soul that plunges us into the heart of the mimetic world. In notes made in the early 1930s on Cuna notions of purba, which he hesitantly translated as "soul," Baron Nordenskiold tried to sum it up as being a mimetic double—an "invisible replica" he called it, of one's body. Time and again the ethnography remarks on the abundance of detail in the chants. Norman Chapin for instance refers to their "lavish description" and emphasises that such excess of description by far outweighs narrative action, even in the long narrative chants. Copiedness is redolent in the mimetic worlds. Joel Sherzer draws our attention to the way that repetition, retellings, and quotation form an outstanding set of features, not only in these chants but in everyday Cuna speech as well. The chanter chanting creates and occupies a strange position, inside and outside, part of, yet also observer of the scenes being sung into being.
