The Shaman as a Maker of Worlds: Creativity and the end of History

Joanna Overing

"One example was the use by an old man of the metaphor 'distant Guakamaya widowed red person' (otoaerae tuarekua) to express 'let us go bath' (ahe tiahae, or ' let us go to the river'). The knowlodge of neither the young people nor the anthropologist was sufficient to grasp the relationship of bathing and the metaphor.

(...)

Once I understood that the ruwang's main role as leader was that of worldmaker, I then was able to appreciate the precision of his metaphor, and its organizing power in the formulation of the significance of relationships between worlds. In brief, I began to understand the constitutive dimensions of the shaman's metaphors, where his aim was to understand and describe all the significant aspects of something (e.g. a disease) in its historical particularities."