Narrative
An Historical and Ethnological Survey of the Cuna Indians
Synopsis
A survey in seven parts on the Guna people of the San Blas archipelago: geography and population, families and communities, social ties, political chiefs, a series of Guna texts, the view of the world, healers and the treatment of illness, the magic chants of hunting and the chants for pleasure. The texts, written down by Guna, sometimes in their pictographic writing, appear on the left-hand page, with their annotated translation facing them.
Context
The book appeared in Gothenburg in 1938, six years after Nordenskiöld's death: Henry Wassén, who had assisted him for six months and had then gone to the Guna himself, put the unfinished manuscript and the museum documents in order. Pérez Kantule helped to arrange and interpret these materials. Nordenskiöld had already published, from 1928 to 1930, the pictographic writings and other documents of Nele and his secretary. The work runs to nearly seven hundred pages, with plates of pictographic writing.
Who it is for
A substantial ethnographic volume in English, dense, mixing texts, songs and social description; never translated into French.
Prizes and reception
The first of the core documents that Yale's eHRAF database selects for the study of the Guna, consulted by anthropologists since its publication.