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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.

Anthropological work in Amazonia has traditionally focused on Amerindian societies --and more recently, development projects, colonists, and the resource base represented in the humid neotropics. Receiving far less attention is the Amazonia of caboclos (people of mixed Brazilian Indian, European, and African ancestry), river traders, rum distillers, immigrant communities of Lebanese, Japanese, and Jews, quilombos (settlements formed by escaped slaves), ornamental fish trappers,and others whose long presence in the region defies the stereotypes of a frontier inferno verde. These other Amazonians present a vivid refutation of stereotypical views about the social landscape. This book brings to light the diversity of Amazonian societies and contributes to the extension of anthropological work beyond its traditional limits.
Contributors include Rosa Elizabeth Acevedo Marin, Edna De Castro, and David McGrath (Nucleo de Altos Estudos Amazonicos, Federal University of Para, Brazil), Scott Anderson (Tide-Energy Project in the Amazon), Neide Esterci (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Deborah Lima (Fluminense Federal University), Raymundo Heraldo Maues (Federal University of Para, Brazil), and Gregory Prang (Wayne State University).