Since this book was first published in 1994, it has become one of the most renowned books on the Anthropology of the Americas, having been translated into several languages and published in several countries around the world. In this surprising and fascinating book Jeremy Narby proves that the ancestral shamanism of the Amazon includes knowledge that resembles the principles of modern molecular biology. More importantly, after a careful examination of the Amazonian cultural heritage, he even questions the essence of the western conscience. Indeed, the author turns his research expedition to the Asháninka communities of the Amazon into a journey inside himself, and that experience helps him produce ideas that will have momentous consequences for western epistemology – an epistemology, by the way, which has always had a tendency to separate the shape from its contents. After questioning the origins of knowledge and its meaning for human communities, the Canadian author’s considerations do not differentiate between societies, as could be expected, but rather they unify those societies in the shared capacity to learn and observe. By rescuing the importance of the oneiric/visionary dimension in the cognitive processes used in scientific research, the Cosmic Serpent teaches its readers how to observe their own thoughts, de-focus, identify sense matrixes in shapes, and more importantly, to view the world as a system of relationships. The latter capability is at the core of the transformation that scientific research is undergoing in the 21st century, and hints at how the world can always be improved in light of what we can observe and identify. Anthropology has not proven that the Amazonian indigenous people possess an ancestral key to sustainable scientific knowledge, but this book, which in itself is a bright cornerstone of anthropology, might be a step in that direction.

Additional information:
Author: Jeremy Narby
Year of publication: 2013
Language: Spanish
Pages: 312
Size: 14 × 21 cm
Legal deposit: 2013-04430
Copyright: Apus Graph Ediciones