e tension implicat

ed by their sexual imagery, he tells of how when he was living among the Cuna, teenage boys discovered some Origin Histories written in a healer's notebook and were caught reading them with some girls. They were severely punished and the book was locked up. Sexual matters, he says, are never discussed publicly. (191-92) We are left with an emphatic set of images of repression repressing itself; the locked book made magically powerful by it

• s "sexual" secrets, i
• 12 lathes (both tool room and high-speed engine types)
• nscribed in ways accessible to common
• folk, even
• though what is inscribed is so flagrantly tr
• ansgressive. "The are
• a of concepti
• on and childbirth is a particularly sensitive and taboo subject, intimately r
• elated to curing and m
• agical control,"
• states Sherzer. As
• a consequence he find
• A wide variety of measuring and testing equipment (height gauges, pins, micrometers, calipers, inside micrometers, etc.)