Introduction

For many of us who work among the indigenous peoples of Amazonia, the recent critiques of the grand narratives of modernist thought as formulated within the human sciences, and through which anthropology as a discipline was conceived and hatched, have come as both a relief and a liberating breath of fresh air. Most importantly, we are now allowed, even within the confines of academia, to shed the bonds of all those master tropes of Western sociological theory that have militated against a Western understanding, much less appreciation, of Amazonian social philosophies and associated everyday practice.