ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Panara people and their enduring and intensive interest in glass beads. Imitation and appropriation of techniques and skills as well as material objects have thus long been central to Panara ideas about glass beadwork as well as being important to other cultural practices such as body modification and ritual. Indigenous Amazonians might well recognise the idea, resonating as it does with their own versions of creation as re-fashioning or transformation and the relative absence of concepts of creation out of nothing. Such ideas of making, and re-fashioning, remind us of a big theme that runs through much Lowland South American ethnography, namely the relationship between transformation and continuity in one form or another. The pleasure of working on beads is the pleasure of inventing new objects, and exploring new arrangements for beads and colours. Beads by virtue of their nature as enduring materials lend themselves precisely to a potentially unending process of fashioning, undoing and re-fashioning.
