In the hills of north central West Virginia, there lives a cast of characters who face all manner of problems. From the people who are incarcerated in West Virginia’s prisons, to a woman who is learning how to lose her sight with grace, to another who sorely regrets selling her land to a fracking company, Jaws of Life portrays the diverse concerns the people of this region face every day—poverty, mental illness, drug abuse, the loss of coal mines, and the rise of new extractive industries that exert their own toll.

While these larger concerns exist on the edges of their realities, these characters must still deal with quotidian difficulties: how to coexist with ex-spouses, how to care for sick family members, and how to live with friends who always seem to have more. 

Drawing on ethnographic field work she conducted among Christians in her home state of North Carolina, Claudia Gould crafts stories that lay open the human heart and social complications of fundamentalist belief. These stories and the compelling characters who inhabit them draw us into the complex essence of religious experience among southern American Christians.

José María Arguedas (1911–1969) is one of the most important authors to speak to issues of the survival of native cultures. José María Arguedas: Reconsiderations for Latin American Cultural Studies presents his views from multiple perspectives for English-speaking audiences for the first time.

The life and works of José María Arguedas reflect in a seminal way the drama of acculturation and transculturation suffered not only by what we think of as the indigenous and mestizo cultures of Peru, but by other Latin American societies as well. Intricately reflecting his pluricultural and bilingual life experience, Arguedas’s illuminating poetic visions of Andean culture cross multidisciplinary borders to transfigure pedagogical and social practices.

Few texts convey the complexity and contradictions of an Andean cosmopolitanism with the intense accuracy of Arguedas’s anthropological, ethnographic essays and literary writings. The ramifications of Arguedas’s cultural critiques have yet to be assessed, particularly as a response to the disruptive forces of modernity, acculturation, and essential identity.

José María Arguedas was a Peruvian ethnographer, anthropologist, folklorist, poet, and novelist. He based his novels and stories on the life and outlook of the Quechua-speaking Indians and was a pioneer of modern Quechua poetry.

The present anthology brings his work to the attention of broader audiences by pulling together diverse scholarly views on Arguedas’s aesthetic and multicultural contributions to the contemporary and political archipelago. It is a synthesis of his views on cultural change as it impinges upon considerations and theories of Latin American cultural studies.