Julian Steward Organizes a Continent's Worth of Fieldwork Into One Handbook

Amazonian anthropology studies the social organization, cosmology and ritual life of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin, describing distinct societies on their own ethnographic terms rather than treating Amazonia as a single undifferentiated forest culture. The field received its first major synthesis in 1946, when the anthropologist Julian Steward edited the first volume of the Handbook of South American Indians for the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of American Ethnology, drawing together more than a hundred contributors to organize the available fieldwork on marginal, Andean, tropical forest and circum Caribbean cultures into a single systematic reference for the first time.

Amazonian indigenous cosmologies, shamanic practice and ritual plant use are frequently generalized in popular writing as a single shared Amazonian religion, when the ethnographic record the Handbook organized instead shows distinct societies with their own specific cosmologies and ritual systems. The atlas draws on Amazonian anthropology to describe a specific indigenous society's religious practice on its own documented terms rather than folding it into an undifferentiated regional generalization.