Folk Literature of the Yamana Indians

"In my opinion this project of publications devoted to folk literature of South America is of paramount importance. South American mythology belongs to the spiritual inheritance of mankind on par with the great masterpieces of Greek and Roman antiquity and of the Near and Far East. At the present time this material is scattered in numerous publications most of which are not easy to locate. It would do a great service to scholars all over the world and to the general public to have them collected in a series of volumes." --Claude Levi-Strauss     "It is time we had a set of volumes containing good source material for those who wish to study South American indigenous narratives; I am also quite certain that many nonspecialists would be interested in original documents of this kind." --Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff


"In my opinion this project of publications devoted to folk literature of South America is of paramount importance. South American mythology belongs to the spiritual inheritance of mankind on par with the great masterpieces of Greek and Roman antiquity an

Johannes Wilbert, Professor Emeritus, UCLA.

Wilbert was a professor of the UCLA Anthropology Department for nearly thirty years (1962 to 1991). For twenty years of his tenure he served as director of the Latin American Center (1963-1978; 1984-1989). Wilbert is a recipient of the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award (1978). He has been a Research Fellow in Amerindian ethnomedicine of the Botanical Museum of Harvard University (1973-1989). He holds an Honorary Professorship from the Sociedade Brasileira de Instruyiio, Rio de Janeiro (1969) and was elected a fellow of the Linnean Society of London (1977), and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (1990).