Berghahn Books, 2018. — 378 p. Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies...
Photographs by Diego Samper — Smithsonian Books, 1993. — 192 p. Throughout their history, the Makuna have withstood the social and environmental stresses inflicted upon them by European arrival, the Amazonian rubber boom at the turn of the century, and a black-market demand for coca leaves during the 1970s and 1980s. Most recently, gold mining is threatening to destroy their...
Duke University Press Books, 2010. — 320 p. For more than fifteen years, Mario Blaser has been involved with the Yshiro people of the Paraguayan Chaco as they have sought to maintain their world in the face of conservation and development programs promoted by the state and various nongovernmental organizations. In this ethnography of the encounter between modernizing visions of...
University of California Press, 2005. — 418 p. "Yanomami" raises questions central to the field of anthropology--questions concerning the practice of fieldwork, the production of knowledge, and anthropology's intellectual and ethical vision of itself. Using the Yanomami controversy - one of anthropology's most famous and explosive imbroglios - as its starting point, this book...
Berghahn Books, 2016. — 284 p. The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been...
University Alabama Press, 2006. — 220 p. An outstanding and innovative study on hunting, gardening, and love magic among the Aguaruna... [It is] both highly useful ethnographically and an important contribution to the understanding of a how a primitive culture conceptualizes its transactions with nature. The book touches on cosmology and religion as well as the ethnoecology of...
Harvard University Press, 2014. — 336 p. In this remarkable story of one man’s encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 - renowned for their pugnacity and fierce independence - remain determined, against long odds, to live life on their own terms. When Brown took...
University of Texas Press, 2018. — 302 p. Oil is one of the world’s most important commodities, but few people know how its extraction affects the residents of petroleum-producing regions. In the 1960s, the Texaco corporation discovered crude in the territory of Ecuador’s indigenous Cofán nation. Within a decade, Ecuador had become a member of OPEC, and the Cofán watched as...
Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1974. — 270 p. Chagnon goes into detail in this book and tells much more vivid and personal stories in this book than he did in the "Fierce People". This book is a must for anthropology students but also anyone interested stone-age tribes and how western social scientists study them.
Wadsworth Publishing, 2012. — 336 p. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork, this classic ethnography, now publishing in a legacy 6th edition, focuses on the Yanomamo. These truly remarkable South American people are one of the few primitive sovereign tribal societies left on earth. This new edition includes events and changes that have occurred since 1992, including a...
3rd edition. — New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1983. — 224 p. The classic and still controversial ethnography of the the Yanomamo people of the Amazon.
University of Texas Press, 1996. — 207 p. The Wanano Indians of the northwest Amazon have a social system that differs from those of most tropical forest tribes. Neither stratified by wealth nor strictly egalitarian, Wanano society is "ranked" according to rigidly bound descent groups. In this pioneering ethnographic study, Janet M. Chernela decodes the structure of Wanano...
Columbia University Press, 2003. — 234 p. Intrigued by a slide showing a woman breast-feeding a monkey, anthropologist Loretta A. Cormier spent fifteen months living among the Guajá, a foraging people in a remote area of Brazil. The result is this ethnographic study of the extraordinary relationship between the Guajá Indians and monkeys. While monkeys are a key food source for...
University Of Chicago Press, 1992. — 428 p. — (translated by Catherine V. Howard) The Araweté are one of the few Amazonian peoples who have maintained their cultural integrity in the face of the destructive forces of European imperialism. In this landmark study, anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro explains this phenomenon in terms of Araweté social cosmology and ritual...
The New Press, 1996. — 446 p. "The Spears of Twilight" chronicles the experiences of Philippe Descola, student of Claude Lvi-Strauss, among the legendary Achuar Indians of South America. Combining ethnography, travelogue, and personal meditation, "The Spears of Twilight" is an engrossing account of the resilient and complex Achuar people, as well as an intimate and often poetic...
University of Texas Press, 1976. — 178 p. This ethnographic study of the Panare Indians of Venezuela is the first extensive look at a tribe of this region of the Amazonia. It is an important book not only because it delves into the myth-filled Panare culture, but also because the author has used a modified version of the structural analysis of Claude Lévi-Strauss in examining...
Cambridge University Press, 2009. — 344 p. In 1913, ethnologist and explorer William Curtis Farabee set out to document the Arawak tribes of northern Brazil and southern British Guiana, a three-year journey that led him far into the unmapped regions of the Amazon River basin. His meticulous observations comprise The Central Arawaks, first published in 1918 and still one of the...
University Press of Florida, 2013. — 336 p. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork and firsthand analysis of indigenous history, this collection examines the concepts of time and change as they played out in areas ranging from religion, cosmology, and mortuary practices to attitudes toward ethnic difference and the treatment of animals. Without imposing traditionally Western...
Sense Publishers, 2014. — 246 p. "Mapping Time, Space and the Body: Indigenous Knowledge and Mathematical Thinking in Brazil" brings people, land and numbers together in the fight for justice. On this extraordinary voyage through ancestral territories in central and southern Brazil, the Xavante, Suyá, Kayabi, and other local nations use mapping as a tool to protect their human...
Columbia University Press, 2001. — 256 p. This book addresses two important and related questions: does participation in a market economy help or hurt indigenous peoples and how does it affect the conservation of tropical rainforest flora and fauna? Oddly, there have been few quantitative studies that have addressed these issues. Ricardo Godoy's research takes an important step...
Columbia University Press, 2004. — 488 p. The societies of the Vaupés region are now among the most documented indigenous cultures of the New World, in part because they are thought to resemble earlier civilizations lost during initial colonial conflict. Here at last is the eagerly awaited publication of a posthumous work by the man widely regarded as the preeminent authority...
Dey Street Books, 2015. — 288 p. Rooted in two vastly different cultures, a young man struggles to understand himself, find his place in the world, and reconnect with his mother -and her remote tribe in the deepest jungles of the Amazon rainforest - in this powerful memoir that combines adventure, history, and anthropology. For much of his young life, David Good was torn...
Oxford University Press, 2001. — 360 p. — (Oxford Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology). Uniting the ethnographic data collected by the fieldwork methods invented by Malinowski with Levi-Strauss's analyses of the relations between myth and time, this book analyzes a century of social transformation of the indigenous Piro people of Peruvian Amazonia. It is an important...
London: Robert Hale & Co., 1972. — 233 p. This ethnography is one of the classics in the field of South America. The Jivaro (Shuar) represent one of the most important and political well-organized groups of South American Indians, and Harner's work, reissued here, will become the major introduction in English to these people for future students. The Jivaro: Background...
Routledge, 2004. — 432 p. — (Critical Perspectives in Identity, Memory & the Built Environment). In 1884 a community of Brazilians was "discovered" by the Western world. The Ecology of Power examines these indigenous people from the Upper Xingu region, a group who even today are one of the strongest examples of long-term cultural continuity. Drawing upon written and oral...
Yale University Press, 1982. — 263 p. Henley's account of the Panare is admirably well documented and provides the kind of detail that makes it an important addition to this area of study. "Encapsulating the results of nearly two years of field research in Venezuela, Paul Henley's monograph is a valuable addition to Carib literature. The ethnography is of high standard; the...
University of Illinois Press, 2008. — 224 p. Made-from-Bone provides the first complete set of English translations of narratives about the mythic past and its transformations from the indigenous Arawak-speaking Wakuénai of southernmost Venezuela. The central character throughout these primordial times is a trickster-creator, Made-from-Bone, who survives a prolonged series of...
American Museum of Natural History, 1969. — 294 p. Nomads of the Longbow is a book by Allan R Holmberg, an anthropologist who studied Peruvian and other South American indigenous peoples. The book concerns itself with the indigenous Bolivians, the Sirionó people, whom he determined to be rather backward and undeveloped in terms of culture and civilization. This determination...
University Press of Colorado, 2011. — 408 p. A transdisciplinary collaboration among ethnologists, linguists, and archaeologists, Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia traces the emergence, expansion, and decline of cultural identities in indigenous Amazonia. Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology - essentialist notions of ethnic identities -...
University of California Press, 2003. — 275 p. The idea of a family level society, discussed and disputed by anthropologists for nearly half a century, assumes moving, breathing form in "Families of the Forest". According to Allen Johnson’s deft ethnography, the Matsigenka people of southeastern Peru cannot be understood or appreciated except as a family level society; the...
University of New Mexico Press, 2014. — 304 p. The earliest European accounts of Brazil’s indigenous inhabitants focused on the natives’ startling appearance and conduct - especially their nakedness and cannibalistic rituals - and on the process of converting them to clothed, docile Christian vassals. This volume contributes to the unfinished task of moving beyond such...
Cambridge University Press, 1991. — 216 p. The Yanomami Indians, living in the depths of the Venezuelan forest, are one of the most interesting of the world's tribal peoples. Jacques Lizot lived among them for over fifteen years and has written an account which allows them to speak for themselves, in stories told by Yanomami individuals. The tales are revealing in the insights...
Harvard University Press, 1979. — 348 p. The Ge-speaking tribes of Central Brazil have always been an anomaly in the annals of anthropology; their exceedingly simple technology contrasts sharply with their highly complex sociological and ideological traditions. Dialectical Societies, the outgrowth of extended anthropological research organized by David Maybury-Lewis, at long...
University of Nebraska Press, 2014. — 488 p. The rich storytelling traditions of the Alto Perené Arawaks of eastern Peru are showcased in this bilingual collection of traditional narratives, ethnographic accounts, women’s autobiographical stories, songs, chants, and ritual speeches. The Alto Perené speakers are located in the colonization frontier at the foot of the eastern...
Collected works. — Helsinki: Renvall Institute for Area and Culture Studies; University of Helsinki, 2003. — 201 p. — ISBN: 952-10-1257-9. Surveying cultural and environmental history in a wide geographical context, this book examines some of the ancient cultures of Bolivian, Brazilian and Peruvian Amazonia. It demonstrates that pre-Colonial western Amazonia supported large...
University of Washington Press, 2003. — 232 p. The Yanomami and Kayapó, two indigenous groups of the Amazon rainforest, have become internationally known through their dramatic and highly publicized encounters with “civilization.” Both groups struggle to transcend internal divisions, preserve their traditional culture, and defend their land from depredation, while seeking to...
University of Chicago Press, 1971. — 290 p. In "Amazonian Cosmos", a unique and fascinating contribution to South American ethnography, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff investigates the world view of an isolated Indian tribe, the Desana, of the Northwest Amazon. The author worked with a single informant over a prolonged period, and later checked his findings extensively in the field....
Columbia University Press, 2002. — 256 p. The Huaorani of Ecuador lived as hunters and gatherers in the Amazonian rainforest for hundred of years, largely undisturbed by western civilization. Since their first encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, they have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages". "Trekking Through...
Cambridge University Press, 1984. — 136 p. The Amerindian peoples of Guiana, the geographical region of north-east South America, have long been recognized as forming a distinct variety of the tropical forest culture. In this book, Peter Rivière employs a comparative perspective to reveal that Guianan societies, generally characterized as socially fluid and amorphous, are in...
Cambridge University Press, 1984. — 136 p. The Amerindian peoples of Guiana, the geographical region of north-east South America, have long been recognized as forming a distinct variety of the tropical forest culture. In this book, Peter Rivière employs a comparative perspective to reveal that Guianan societies, generally characterized as socially fluid and amorphous, are in...
Albrecht Knaus Verlag, 2011. — 352 s. Als Kind lebte Catherina Rust in Mashipurimo, einem Urwalddorf am Amazonas. Während ihre Eltern, beide Deutsche, die Lebensweise der Aparai-Wajana-Indianer erforschten, wuchs sie wie eine Indianerin auf - fernab westlichen Komforts, doch aufgehoben in der Gemeinschaft eines Stammes, für den Besitz und Status nichts bedeuten. Harmonie dafür...
University of Arizona Press, 2009. — 288 p. Native peoples of the Amazon view objects, especially human artifacts, as the first cosmic creations and the building blocks from which the natural world has been shaped. In these constructional cosmologies, spears became the stings of wasps, hammocks became spiderwebs, stools became the buttocks of human beings. A view so...
Sao Paulo: Difusao Européia do Livro, 1962. — 190 p. Shaden Egon. Fundamentals of the culture of the Guarani people (in Porto) Indice: Prefácio. A tribo Guaraní e seus representantes em território brasileiro. Aspecto físico. Alguns elementos da cultura material y suas transformaçoes. Principais actividades de subsistencia y organizaçao economica. Indivíduo e família. Estados de...
University of California Press, 2013. — 252 p. What does it mean to be accompanied? How can autonomy and a sense of self emerge through one’s involvement with others? This book examines the formation of self among the Urarina, an Amazonian people of lowland Peru. Based on detailed ethnography, the analysis highlights the role of intimate but asymmetrical attachments and...
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