The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls

By Michael Harner

Harner's classic ethnography of the Shuar of eastern Ecuador, based on fieldwork begun in the late 1950s. He describes a society organised around the conviction that ordinary life is illusion and that real power is found in visionary states reached at sacred waterfalls — a worldview that would reshape his own career. Rigorous, unsentimental and quietly astonished.