front cover of The Ecology of the Spoken Word
The Ecology of the Spoken Word
Amazonian Storytelling and the Shamanism among the Napo Runa
Michael A. Uzendoski and Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy
University of Illinois Press, 2012

This volume offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. Michael A. Uzendoski and Edith Felicia Calapucha-Tapuy present and analyze lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being--in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape--Uzendoski and Calapucha-Tapuy weave exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language. A companion websiteoffers photos, audio files, and videos of original performances illustrates the beauty and complexity of Amazonian Quichua poetic expressions.

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front cover of The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador
The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador
Michael Uzendoski
University of Illinois Press, 2005

Michael Uzendoski's theoretically informed work analyzes value from the perspective of the Napo Runa people of the Amazonian Ecuador. 

Based upon historical and archival research, as well as the author's years of fieldwork in indigenous communities, The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuadorpresents theoretical issues of value, poetics, and kinship as linked to the author's intersubjective experiences in Napo Runa culture. Drawing on insights from the theory of gift and value, Uzendoski argues that Napo Runa culture personifies value by transforming things into people through a process of subordinating them to human relationships. While many traditional exchange models treat the production of things as inconsequential, the Napo Runa understand production to involve a relationship with natural beings (plants, animals, and spirits of the forest) that they believe share spiritual substance, or samai. Value is the outcome of a complicated poetics of transformation by which things and persons are woven into kinship forms that define daily social and ritual life.

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front cover of Puyo Runa
Puyo Runa
Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia
Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten
University of Illinois Press, 2007

The Andean nation of Ecuador derives much of its revenue from petroleum that is extracted from its vast Upper Amazonian rain forest, which is home to ten indigenous nationalities. Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten have lived among and studied one such people, the Canelos Quichua, for nearly forty years. In Puyo Runa, they present a trenchant ethnography of history, ecology, imagery, and cosmology to focus on shamans, ceramic artists, myth, ritual, and political engagements. Canelos Quichua are active participants in national politics, including large-scale movements for social justice for Andean and Amazonian people. Puyo Runa offers readers exceptional insight into this cultural world, revealing its intricacies and embedded humanisms.

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