Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
"Culture" and Culture
"Increasingly today, intellectual rights over traditional knowledge are fiercely contested and have revived debates about culture in major ways. But how should we make sense of the politics and meaning of culture, knowledge and authorship? What are the unexamined assumptions over the regimes of knowledge that ground the increasingly pervasive legal constructs on intellectual property? What are we to make of inconsistencies that surface in cultural claims? As the Brazilian anthropologist Manuela Carneiro da Cunha highlights in this pamphlet, it is no easy task. By distinguishing "culture" from culture, the former being a reflexive notion that purportedly speaks about the latter, da Cunha shows how such inconsistencies are inherent to any reflexive system. She asks: What are the cognitive as well as pragmatic consequences of the coexistence of "culture" and culture? In answer, da Cunha explains how the loan word "culture," as imported from anthropological jargon, is mobilized by indigenous people to effectively separate interpretive regimes and avoid contradictions." --Book Jacket.
Ayahuasca Shamanism in the Amazon and Beyond
Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Clancy Cavnar offer an in-depth exploration of the spread of indigenous shamanic rituals of the Amazon to Western societies, looking at how indigenous, mestizo, and cosmopolitan cultures have engaged with and transformed these forest traditions. The authors focus on the use of ayahuasca, a psychoactive drink essential in many indigenous shamanic rituals.
Constellations of Inequality
Introduction: relaunching Alcântara -- Mimetic convergence and complementary hierarchy -- Alcântara in space and time -- Interpreting an explosion -- Expertise and inequality -- Racialization and race-based law -- The making of race and class -- Space at the edge of the Amazon -- Conclusion: space and utopia
Learning and Everyday Life
An incisive study of situated learning, analyzed through a critical theory of social practice as transformational change in everyday life.
Amazonian Routes
This book reconstructs the world of eighteenth-century Amazonia to argue that indigenous mobility did not undermine settlement or community. In doing so, it revises longstanding views of native Amazonians as perpetual wanderers, lacking attachment to place and likely to flee at the slightest provocation. Instead, native Amazonians used traditional as well as new, colonial forms of spatial mobility to build enduring communities under the constraints of Portuguese colonialism. Canoeing and trekking through the interior to collect forest products or to contact independent native groups, Indians expanded their social networks, found economic opportunities, and brought new people and resources ba...
The Party of Order
This study focuses on the Brazilian Empire's Conservative Party and its success and failure in constructing a representative, constitutional monarchy to defend a slaveholding plantation society.
Guaraná
In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters impa...
The Guaraní and Their Missions
The thirty Guaraní missions of the Río de la Plata were the largest and most prosperous of all the Catholic missions established throughout the frontier regions of the Americas to convert, acculturate, and incorporate indigenous peoples and their lands into the Spanish and Portuguese empires. But between 1768 and 1800, the mission population fell by almost half and the economy became insolvent. This unique socioeconomic history provides a coherent and comprehensive explanation for the missions' operation and decline, providing readers with an understanding of the material changes experienced by the Guaraní in their day-to-day lives. Although the mission economy funded operations, sustaine...
Brazilian Authoritarianism
"This book, written in the aftermath of the 2018 election of the right-wing populist politician Jair Bolsonaro, is a historically-grounded analysis of authoritarianism in Brazil. In the tradition of Zola's J'accuse, Lilia Schwarcz takes up and debunks the popular and cherished national myth of Brazil as a tolerant, open, peaceful, and racially-harmonious society. In that country's history textbooks even Brazil's centuries of slavery have been described as an ultimately benign, paternalistic order in which the races freely mixed and the cruelty of the U.S. slave experience was absent. This, Schwarcz argues, papers over centuries of racially-motivated violence, cruelty, and exploitation. These...
The Forbidden Lands
This study concerns a pivotal but unexamined surge in frontier violence that engulfed the eastern forests of eighteenth-century Brazil. It focuses on social, cultural, and racial relations among settlers, slaves, and native peoples accused of cannibalism.
