The Sibundoy Valley of Colombia is a South American microcosm,
an indigenous cradle and crossroads, that has so far eluded thorough
ethnographic description. In the following pages I offer an account
of the spiritual life of its native peoples, a life marked by the unflagging
quest for spiritual indemnity. The story is told primarily
in the words of the Sibundoy peoples themselves, in their "sayings
of the ancestors," in their glosses on the sayings, and in a parallel
corpus of mythic narrative that provides the conceptual scaffolding
for this spiritual edifice
