In these days of reflexive speculation on fieldwork and ethnographic writing, it may be appropriate for me to begin by acknowledging that this paper on the subject of death, like several of my papers on Kulina, has drifted quickly towards the subject of food. It may be that this culinary lens imposes itself as a consequence of spending so much time so hungry during my research with Kulina. 1 However that may be, I will suggest in this article that, for Kulina, death is a phase in a constant oscillation or movement of persons between life and death, and that as a transformation of exceptional symbolic significance, death reveals its effect through the semiotic medium of food and the metaphors of consumption.