In the Shadow of the Tiger

There may have been as many as twenty distinct Amerindian groups, speaking different languages, on Surinamese soil before the final settlement of the Europeans there in the 1650s, from which time on Amerindian life would change forever. While Suriname, for historical reasons, counts as a Caribbean country, the Amerindian peoples have a distinctly Amazonian culture, one in which the human and the spirit world are intricately connected. Transformations of form from spirit to human or to animal abound, different levels of realities co-exist. Mediation between these worlds is the task of the shaman.