Being Human: personhood, cosmology and subsistence for the Hoti of Venezuelan Guiana

This thesis is based upon fieldwork conducted between April 1994 and February 1997 with the Hoti, a largely unstudied group of approximately 700 semi-nomadic Amerindians living in the mountainous tropical forests of central Venezuelan Guiana. It is an exploration of ideas of personhood and what it is to be human in a world full of sentient beings - visible and invisible, human, animal and sometimes vegetable - where one cannot know the true nature of a being by its appearance, but only by its actions.