This article is an ethnography of thinking and practice about death, the process of dying and personhood among the Cashinahua (Huni Kuin) of Western Amazonia (Brazil and Eastern Peru). It relates gender symbolism, arising from the practice of daily life, to the form that social relations between the moribund person and terrestrial, aquatic and celestial spirits take during each stage of dying. This ethnography is provided as a critical counterpoint to the model of such relations and the processes that surround them known in Americanist studies as "the symbolic economy of predation", in which "exchange" functions as the key process and metaphor. The paper suggests that any analysis of death among the Cashinahua must place emphasis on the whole cycle of consumptive production, not just on the symbolism of predation and exchange.