Paper short abstract:

This presentation will focus on a comparative research about drawings produced in Lowland South America, mostly in Amazonia. The aim is to explore common traits of drawings collected by ethnographers, by NGO workers or produced spontaneously by shamans and/or masters of verbal arts.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation will focus on a comparative research about drawings produced in Lowland South America, mostly in Amazonia. The aim is to explore common traits of iconographic productions not necessarily related to individualized authorship and

the production of works of art, but rather to drawings collected by ethnographers, by NGO workers or produced spontaneously by shamans and/or masters of verbal arts. Although related to a classic ethnographic method employed by several researchers such as Karl Von den Steinen, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, B. Ribeiro, J-P. Chaumeil, A. Barcelos Neto and many others, the collection of such iconographic productions remains scattered and not very well known beyond their local contexts. The recent comparative efforts launched by the researches of Carlo Severi and Pierre Déléage and myself revealed some general traits associated to the logics of pictographic composition and to the

production of memory, as well as to the intersemiotic character of such expressions. Nevertheless, a wide range of comparative aspects (formal, plastic, ritual, ontological, temporal, among others) still need to be explored in order to reveal the singular aspects of such a complex and hybrid visual system. Departing from the material of Western Amazonian societies (Shipibo-Conibo, Marubo, Matsiguenga, Yagua and others) the presentation aims to explore such traits and to provide some reflections about the alleged absence of figurative and writing traditions in Lowland South America.