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.
In Praise of the Ancestors
In Praise of the Ancestors is a revisionist interpretation of early colonial accounts and sources that reveal incongruities in accepted knowledge among the Indigenous peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the North American Great Lakes regions, and the Andes.
Woven Stories
The Quechua people of southern Peru are both agriculturalists and herders who maintain large herds of alpacas and llamas. But they are also weavers, and it is through weaving that their cultural traditions are passed down over the generations. Owing to the region's isolation, the textile symbols, forms of clothing, and technical processes remain strongly linked to the people's environment and their ancestors. Heckman's photographs convey the warmth and vitality of the Quechua people and illustrate how the land is intricately woven into their lives and their beliefs. Quechua weavers in the mountainous regions near Cuzco, Peru, produce certain textile forms and designs not found elsewhere in t...
Heads of State
Addresses the importance of the human head in political, ritual and symbolic contexts in the ancient and modern Andes.
Social Sciences
Beginning with volume 41 (1979), the University of Texas Press became the publisher of the Handbook of Latin American Studies, the most comprehensive annual bibliography in the field. Compiled by the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress and annotated by a corps of more than 130 specialists in various disciplines, the Handbook alternates from year to year between social sciences and humanities. The Handbook annotates works on Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean and the Guianas, Spanish South America, and Brazil, as well as materials covering Latin America as a whole. Most of the subsections are preceded by introductory essays that serve as biannual evaluations of the literature and research under way in specialized areas. The Handbook of Latin American Studies is the oldest continuing reference work in the field. Katherine D. McCann is acting editor for this volume. The subject categories for Volume 57 are as follows: Electronic Resources for the Social Sciences Anthropology Economics Geography Government and Politics International Relations Sociology
Growing Up in a Culture of Respect
Far from the mainstream of society, the pastoral community of Chillihuani in the high Peruvian Andes rears children who are well-adjusted, creative, and curious. They exhibit superior social and cognitive skills and maintain an attitude of respect for all life as they progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood without a troubled adolescence. What makes such child-rearing success even more remarkable is that "childhood" is not recognized as a distinct phase of life. Instead, children assume adult rights and responsibilities at an early age in order to help the community survive in a rugged natural environment and utter material poverty. This beautifully written ethnography provides the fir...
The Cord Keepers
None of the world’s “lost writings” have proven more perplexing than the mysterious script in which the Inka Empire kept its records. Ancient Andean peoples encoded knowledge in knotted cords of cotton or wool called khipus. In The Cord Keepers, the distinguished anthropologist Frank Salomon breaks new ground with a close ethnography of one Andean village where villagers, surprisingly, have conserved a set of these enigmatic cords to the present day. The “quipocamayos,” as the villagers call them, form a sacred patrimony. Keying his reading to the internal life of the ancient kin groups that own the khipus, Salomon suggests that the multicolored cords, with their knots and lavishly...
The Two Faces of Inca History
The historical narratives of the Inca dynasty, known to us through Spanish records, present several discrepancies that scholarship has long attributed to the biases and agendas of colonial actors. Drawing on a redefinition of royal descent and a comparative literary analysis of primary sources, this book restores the pre-Hispanic voices embedded in the chronicles. It identifies two distinctive bodies of Inca oral traditions, each of which encloses a mutually conflicting representation of the past that, considered together, reproduces patterns of Cuzco’s moiety division. Building on this new insight, the author revisits dual representations in the cosmology and ritual calendar of the ruling elite. The result is a fresh contribution to ethnohistorical works that have explored native ways of constructing history.
Creating Context in Andean Cultures
A major concern in current anthropological thinking is that the method of recording or translating into writing a society's cultural expressions--dance, rituals, pottery, the social use of space, et al--cannot help but fundamentally alter the meaning of the living words and deeds of the culture in question. Consequently, recent researchers have developed more dialogic methods for collecting, interpreting, and presenting data. These new techniques have yielded much success for anthropologists working in Latin America, especially in their efforts to understand how economically, politically, and socially subordinated groups use culture and language to resist the dominant national culture and to assert a distinct historical identity. This collection addresses these issues of "texts" and textuality as it explores various Latin American languages and cultures.
Craft and the Kingly Ideal
In ancient Mediterranean cultures, diamonds were thought to endow their owners with invincibility. In contemporary United States culture, a foreign-made luxury car is believed to give its owner status and prestige. Where do these beliefs come from? In this study of craft production and long-distance trade in traditional, nonindustrial societies, Mary W. Helms explores the power attributed to objects that either are produced by skilled artisans and/or come from "afar." She argues that fine artisanship and long-distance trade, both of which are more available to powerful elites than to ordinary people, are means of creating or acquiring tangible objects that embody intangible powers and energies from the cosmological realms of gods, ancestors, or heroes. Through the objects, these qualities become available to human society and confer honor and power on their possessors. Helms’ novel approach equates trade with artistry and emphasizes acquisition rather than distribution. She rejects the classic Western separation between economics and aesthetics and offers a new paradigm for understanding traditional societies that will be of interest to all anthropologists and archaeologists.
The Inka Empire
Massive yet elegantly executed masonry architecture and andenes (agricultural terraces) set against majestic and seemingly boundless Andean landscapes, roads built in defiance of rugged terrains, and fine textiles with orderly geometric designs—all were created within the largest political system in the ancient New World, a system headed, paradoxically, by a single, small minority group without wheeled vehicles, markets, or a writing system, the Inka. For some 130 years (ca. A.D. 1400 to 1533), the Inka ruled over at least eighty-six ethnic groups in an empire that encompassed about 2 million square kilometers, from the northernmost region of the Ecuador–Colombia border to northwest Arge...
