Our lives are mostly composed of ordinary reality -- the flow of
moment-to-moment existence -- and yet it has been largely overlooked as
a subject in itself for anthropological study. In this work, the author
achieves an understanding of this part of reality for the Mehinaku
Indians, an Amazonian people, in two stages: first by observing various
aspects of their experience and second by relating how these different
facets come to play in a stream of ordinary consciousness, a walk to the
river. In this way, abstract schemata such as 'cosmology, ' 'sociality,
' 'gender, ' and the 'everyday' are understood as they are actually
lived. This book contributes to the ethnography of the Amazon,
specifically the Upper Xingu, with an approach that crosses disciplinary
boundaries between anthropology, philosophy, and psychology. In doing so
it attempts to comprehend what Malinowski called the 'imponderabilia of
actual life.'