Sayings of the Ancestors: The Spiritual Life of the Sibundoy Indians

Abstract

The Sibundoy Valley of Colombia is a South American microcosm, an indigenous cradle and crossroads, that has so far eluded thorough ethnographic description. In the following pages I offer an account of the spiritual life of its native peoples, a life marked by the unflagging quest for spiritual indemnity. The story is told primarily in the words of the Sibundoy peoples themselves, in their "sayings of the ancestors," in their glosses on the sayings, and in a parallel corpus of mythic narrative that provides the conceptual scaffolding for this spiritual edifice.