Substances and Persons: on the Culinary Space of the People of the Centre
This paper refers to a cultural ensemble of groups of northwest Amazonia who selfdesignate as the People of the Centre (Witoto, Ocaina, Nonuya, Bora-Mirana, Muinane, Andoque). The production of food and the production of ‘true people’, in People of the Centre’s discourse, are referred to with a same set of terms; and the instruments and technical transformations of cooking (heating, pounding, filtering, combining and separating) are conceived of as bodily processes. The first section presents the main substances that constitute such a culinary space, both ritual and everyday. The second section, addresses the main technical processes that they undergo to transform them into foods. The third section discusses the meaning of the combination of different processed foodstuffs. It addresses these substances, processes and combinations—this alchemy—as the culinary and technical expression of the formation of true persons.
Traversing language barriers

 The ‘Witoto’ people from Northwest Amazonia practised long distance drum communication, used for relaying messages
 among their villages. The messages were encoded on a pair of hollowed-out wooden drums, and appear to have been ‘drummed codes’,
 with only some iconic relation to the sound structure of the spoken language. The practice of drum communication appears to be
 easily diffusible in contact situations. The Caquetá-Putumayo (C-P) cultural area is a case in point, as the Witoto drums were
 shared with other C-P groups including the Ocaina, Nonuya, Bora, Muinane, Resígaro, and Andoque. Today, the practice of long
 distance drum communication among the Witoto has been long gone, with just a handful of elders who are still able to recall some
 of the (once extensive) drummed signal repertoire.
PROPOSAL FOR A SHARED CLASSIFICATORY TREE FOR DOBES LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATIONS AND OTHER SOCIO-CULTURAL DATA BASES.
This article proposes a classification for socio-cultural and linguistic data bases, especially those that document society, culture and language of Amazonian indigenous or rural mestizo people. The proposal was elaborated in the context of a DOBES language documentation project about the language use of the “People of the Center” (Bora, Witoto, Ocaina, Nonuya, and Resigaro). The basic principles of this proposal are derived from Bakhtin's/Volosinov's theory of the proposition.