While taking as his starting point the concepts of house and village and moving seamlessly through to landscape and the spiritual shamanistic geography of "worlds," that is, "houses" in the cosmos, Halbmayer takes nine geographically non-contiguous Cariban groups from four distinct areas of South America.
Volume 1 encompasses seven chapters, with Chapters 1 through 4 laying out in great detail the background and methodology, introducing the Cariban language family, and describing the previous focus of anthropological research on the groups of the Cariban family.
Volume 2 consists of five chapters, three on the selected Cariban groups of the Xingu, one on the Yupka of the Northern Andean Lowlands, and one that looks again at the objectives initially set out for the book and establishes questions and directions for future research.
