The Piaroa are people, living along tributaries of the Middle Orinoco, who recognise that the dance of every bodily process participates in a poisonous, primordial design of things. This paper explores the relation of sensory processes and the cosmic to Piaroa ways of knowing and doing their arts of the culinary. In so doing it is an expedition into ethnopoetics. This article will dwell upon the interplay of two contrasting narrative genres, the sublime and grotesque realism, as used by shamanic chanters to unfold the manifold ways in which bodily processes and sensory life are intimately involved in ways of knowing. The imagery of the sublime evokes the beautiful sensual capacities of the upper body, while that of grotesque realism dwells upon the poisonous expellings, and openness, of the body's nether parts. In both genres, bodily process is an important, often ambiguous, operator in the mastery of knowledge, and also in its loss. For Piaroa, human ways of knowing are always involved in the toxic, and thus attached to the twinned processes of degeneration and regeneration: poison, as an agent of transformation, is creative of life and it also can kill.
Amazonia; Venezuela; Piaroa; sensory perception; ethnopoetics; modes of knowledge