摘要:How to capture a multi-media community event—bristling with song, dance, esoteric allusions, double-entendres, critical interruptions, raucous joking, and veneration of a recently deceased kinsperson—and convey its substance and spirit to readers far away who understand none of the languages being used? A video recording, supplemented by English subtitles, might have gone pretty far. But for two young anthropologists in the Amazonian rain forest in the 1960s, the tools at hand were a Uher tape recorder spinning five-inch reels and a notebook.