Focussing on an analysis of the Kuna ritual iconography, this paper sets out to outline a theory of social memory based on images as well as on stories. The emergence of White Spirits in kuna shamanistic iconography refers to the long series of violent conflicts that have opposed Indians and Whites. However, once inserted in ritual tradition, stories of the past collapse, and condense in complex images. Two processes seem to be at work in the elaboration of these images: one tends to obliterate the external fact to insert it in an indigenous conceptual frame (the cosmology of the supernatural world); the other employs the ambiguities of cosmology to represent a salient aspect of the newcomers. The result is an elaborate (and ritually powerful) "engram" of ritual tradition, and becomes a significant part of social memory.
