How should we account for the perception of environment among the Mirana, an native society of Columbian Amazonia? What significance do they assign to the body? How do they construct gender differences? Who participates in the conception and development of the fetus, and in which form? The answers to these questions, and other data collected in a field study where mythology was ever-present, constitute this publication"s frame. How can the ethnography of a small Amazonian population shed new light on more generalized problems in contemporary anthropology? The way the Mirana regard their bodies allows us to understand their perception of the environment, and vice versa. This opens a profitable path to the analysis of conceptual processes implied in the construction of knowledge.