Yukuna means « stories ». Yukuna consider themselves caretakers of an oral tradition « left behind by some mythical Yukuna, more “real” than them » (p. 28). Everything in the present takes its significance and potency from what is known about its origin and past. But ancestral authority is both absolute and flexible here (ibid.). Since Yukuna have no priestly specialists and since every Yukuna man is something of a shaman, claims to seniority are there to be made, through narrations of nacimi...