Results by title
155 books match the query 'Indians of South America' and 12 start with r
RETHINKING HISTORY
Indigenous South American Perspectives on the PastEdited by Jonathan D. Hill
University of Illinois Press, 2000
Examining specific cultural and linguistic traditions that shape the social consciousness of native South Americans, the authors show that historical and mythic consciousness work together in forming new symbolic strategies that allow indigenous peoples to understand their societies as at least partially autonomous groups within national and global power structures. This complex process is used to interpret the history of interethnic relations, allowing both individuals and groups to change themselves and alter their own circumstances.
Racial Revolutions
Antiracism and Indian Resurgence in BrazilJonathan W. Warren
Duke University Press, 2001
The growing number of pardos who claim Indian identity represents a radical shift in the direction of Brazilian racial formation. For centuries, the predominant trend had been for Indians to shed tribal identities in favor of non-Indian ones. Warren argues that many factors—including the reduction of state-sponsored anti-Indian violence, intervention from the Catholic church, and shifts in anthropological thinking about ethnicity—have prompted a reversal of racial aspirations and reimaginings of Indianness. Challenging the current emphasis on blackness in Brazilian antiracist scholarship and activism, Warren demonstrates that Indians in Brazil recognize and oppose racism far more than any other ethnic group.
Racial Revolutions fills a number of voids in Latin American scholarship on the politics of race, cultural geography, ethnography, social movements, nation building, and state violence.
Designated a John Hope Franklin Center book by the John Hope Franklin Seminar Group on Race, Religion, and Globalization.
Regional Archaeology in the Valle de la Plata, Colombia/Arqueología Regional en el Valle de la Plata, Colombia
Edited by Robert D. Drennan
University of Michigan Press, 1985
Reinvention and History Making in Huarochirí
A Local Narrative of Colonialism in the Peruvian AndesCarla Hernández Garavito
University of Arizona Press, 2026
Using archaeological and historical datasets and spatial modeling, this book centers on local memory and experience throughout colonized landscapes as the thread that connects the long history of Indigenous engagement with expanding colonial empires and the emergent Peruvian nation. The author builds on Andean epistemological frameworks to argue that in the face of drastic sociopolitical changes, the people of Huarochirí turned to their own history. They created analogies and shared spaces between local and Inka landscapes and materiality and incorporated written representations and ideas of settled lives to validate their claims.
This exciting new work moves the field of Andean archaeology into conversations with decolonial and decolonizing methodologies and shows how Indigenous communities captured and made sense of their long history, reframing colonialism as a local experience.
Remembering the Hacienda
Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland EcuadorBy Barry J. Lyons
University of Texas Press, 2006
From the colonial period through the mid-twentieth century, haciendas dominated the Latin American countryside. In the Ecuadorian Andes, Runa—Quichua-speaking indigenous people—worked on these large agrarian estates as virtual serfs. In Remembering the Hacienda: Religion, Authority, and Social Change in Highland Ecuador, Barry Lyons probes the workings of power on haciendas and explores the hacienda's contemporary legacy.
Lyons lived for three years in a Runa village and conducted in-depth interviews with elderly former hacienda laborers. He combines their wrenching accounts with archival evidence to paint an astonishing portrait of daily life on haciendas. Lyons also develops an innovative analysis of hacienda discipline and authority relations. Remembering the Hacienda explains the role of religion as well as the reshaping of Runa culture and identity under the impact of land reform and liberation theology.
This beautifully written book is a major contribution to the understanding of social control and domination. It will be valuable reading for a broad audience in anthropology, history, Latin American studies, and religious studies.
Resilient Memories
Amerindian Cognitive Schemas in Latin American ArtArij Ouweneel
The Ohio State University Press, 2018
Exploring works ranging in popularity, from Alfonso Cuarón’s Y Tu Mamá También to the paintings of Peruvian artists Claudia Coca and Jorge Miyagui, and from Mexican Zapatistas to hip-hop, Ouweneel details the ways in which artists interact with the embodied memory of the community but also assert their own place within it as crucial, furthering their audiences’ understanding of and interaction with existing cultural schemas. In this way, Ouweneel shows that memories must serve the present or they will be forgotten.
Rhythms of the Pachakuti
Indigenous Uprising and State Power in BoliviaRaquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
Duke University Press, 2014
"In Rhythms of the Pachakuti we can sense the reverberations of an extraordinary historical process that took place in Bolivia at the start of the twenty-first century. The book is the product of Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar's political engagement in that historical process. . . . Though of Mexican nationality, [she] was intimately involved in Bolivian politics for many years and acquired a quasi-legendary status there as an intense, brilliant activist and radical intellectual. . . . [Her account is] . . . itself a revolutionary document. . . . Rhythms of the Pachakuti deserves to stand as a key text in the international literature of radicalism and emancipatory politics in the new century."—Sinclair Thomson, from the foreword
Ritual Sacrifice in Ancient Peru
Edited by Elizabeth P. Benson and Anita G. Cook
University of Texas Press, 2001
Propitiating the supernatural forces that could grant bountiful crops or wipe out whole villages through natural disasters was a sacred duty in ancient Peruvian societies, as in many premodern cultures. Ritual sacrifices were considered necessary for this propitiation and for maintaining a proper reciprocal relationship between humans and the supernatural world.
The essays in this book examine the archaeological evidence for ancient Peruvian sacrificial offerings of human beings, animals, and objects, as well as the cultural contexts in which the offerings occurred, from around 2500 B.C. until Inca times just before the Spanish Conquest. Major contributions come from the recent archaeological fieldwork of Steve Bourget, Anita Cook, and Alana Cordy-Collins, as well as from John Verano's laboratory work on skeletal material from recent excavations. Mary Frame, who is a weaver as well as a scholar, offers rich new interpretations of Paracas burial garments, and Donald Proulx presents a fresh view of the nature of Nasca warfare. Elizabeth Benson's essay provides a summary of sacrificial practices.
Ritual Violence in the Ancient Andes
Reconstructing Sacrifice on the North Coast of PeruEdited by Haagen D. Klaus and J. Marla Toyne
University of Texas Press, 2016
Traditions of sacrifice exist in almost every human culture and often embody a society’s most meaningful religious and symbolic acts. Ritual violence was particularly varied and enduring in the prehistoric South American Andes, where human lives, animals, and material objects were sacrificed in secular rites or as offerings to the divine. Spectacular discoveries of sacrificial sites containing the victims of violent rituals have drawn ever-increasing attention to ritual sacrifice within Andean archaeology. Responding to this interest, this volume provides the first regional overview of ritual killing on the pre-Hispanic north coast of Peru, where distinct forms and diverse trajectories of ritual violence developed during the final 1,800 years of prehistory.
Presenting original research that blends empirical approaches, iconographic interpretations, and contextual analyses, the contributors address four linked themes—the historical development and regional variation of north coast sacrifice from the early first millennium AD to the European conquest; a continuum of ritual violence that spans people, animals, and objects; the broader ritual world of sacrifice, including rites both before and after violent offering; and the use of diverse scientific tools, archaeological information, and theoretical interpretations to study sacrifice. This research proposes a wide range of new questions that will shape the research agenda in the coming decades, while fostering a nuanced, scientific, and humanized approach to the archaeology of ritual violence that is applicable to archaeological contexts around the world.
Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes
Rachel Corr
University of Arizona Press, 2010
In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley.
Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsiders—conquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insider’s perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this people’s great ability to adapt.
Rituals of the Past
Prehispanic and Colonial Case Studies in Andean ArchaeologySilvana Rosenfeld
University Press of Colorado, 2017
Rituals of the Past explores the various approaches archaeologists use to identify ritual in the material record and discusses the influence ritual had on the formation, reproduction, and transformation of community life in past Andean societies. A diverse group of established and rising scholars from across the globe investigates how ritual influenced, permeated, and altered political authority, economic production, shamanic practice, landscape cognition, and religion in the Andes over a period of three thousand years.
Contributors deal with theoretical and methodological concerns including non-human and human agency; the development and maintenance of political and religious authority, ideology, cosmologies, and social memory; and relationships with ritual action. The authors use a diverse array of archaeological, ethnographic, and linguistic data and historical documents to demonstrate the role ritual played in prehispanic, colonial, and post-colonial Andean societies throughout the regions of Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. By providing a diachronic and widely regional perspective, Rituals of the Past shows how ritual is vital to understanding many aspects of the formation, reproduction, and change of past lifeways in Andean societies.
Contributors: Sarah Abraham, Carlos Angiorama, Florencia Avila, Camila Capriata Estrada, David Chicoine, Daniel Contreras, Matthew Edwards, Francesca Fernandini, Matthew Helmer, Hugo Ikehara, Enrique Lopez-Hurtado, Jerry Moore, Axel Nielsen, Yoshio Onuki, John Rick, Mario Ruales, Koichiro Shibata, Hendrik Van Gijseghem, Rafael Vega-Centeno, Verity Whalen
Rubble
The Afterlife of DestructionGastón R. Gordillo
Duke University Press, 2014