This article is a study of various examples of the shamanic verbal arts, the majority taken from South America. It takes as its starting point their parallelistic constructions - that is, the effects produced by repeating and juxtaposing images and verses. As well as providing a bibliographic survey of the topic, it also explores the relationship between the phenomenon of verbal repetition in chants and narratives, and various contemporary issues in Americanist anthropology, such as the dynamics of personification, sociocosmic agency and predation. The study also proposes a number of new directions in the study of Amerindian transformational aesthetics, based on the comparative analysis of specific traits of orality in ritual performance.
Shamanism; Orality; Parallelism; Personification; Poetics
