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"Amazonia" designates the Amazonian world, to be more precise a body of peoples distinguished by a specific culture which anthropologists also call "lowland societies" as opposed to those of the Andine world. Some of the peoples whose objects are shown here live outside the Amazon hydrographic basin. Others do not - or no longer - live in the humid tropical Amazonian forest but in savannah or dry forest ecosystems.
Some people possess superior abilities enabling them to converse with all beings and to arbitrate relations between them. Amongst these are shamans, exceptional figures, socially recognized in Amazonian cultures. "Shamanism" can be described simply as the capacity of certain individuals - deliberately if they are shamans, usually unintentionally if they are not - to "cross" the borders from one world to another in special circumstances. Shamans use hallucinogens which plunge them into a state of trance and give them various visions. Rattles and whistles are among their most common instruments.
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