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The author uses four different facets of the social life of food--diet, cuisine, discourse, & practice--to draw a richly detailed & compelling portrait of one South American community.
Winner of the 2003 Senior Book Prize from the American Ethnological Society. Cholas and Pishtacos are two provocative characters from South American popular culture—a sensual mixed-race woman and a horrifying white killerwho show up in everything from horror stories and dirty jokes to romantic novels and travel posters. In this elegantly written book, these two figures become vehicles for an exploration of race, sex, and violence that pulls the reader into the vivid landscapes and lively cities of the Andes. Weismantel's theory of race and sex begins not with individual identity but with three forms of social and economic interaction: estrangement, exchange, and accumulation. She maps the barriers that separate white and Indian, male and female-barriers that exist not in order to prevent exchange, but rather to exacerbate its inequality. Weismantel weaves together sources ranging from her own fieldwork and the words of potato sellers, hotel maids, and tourists to classic works by photographer Martin Chambi and novelist José María Arguedas. Cholas and Pishtacos is also an enjoyable and informative introduction to a relatively unknown region of the Americas.
More than a thousand years ago on the north coast of Peru, Indigenous Moche artists created a large and significant corpus of sexually explicit ceramic works of art. They depicted a diversity of sex organs and sex acts, and an array of solitary and interconnected human and nonhuman bodies. To the modern eye, these Moche “sex pots,” as Mary Weismantel calls them, are lively and provocative but also enigmatic creations whose import to their original owners seems impossible to grasp. In Playing with Things, Weismantel shows that there is much to be learned from these ancient artifacts, not merely as inert objects from a long-dead past but as vibrant Indigenous things, alive in their own hum...
Encompassing Amazonian rainforests, Andean peaks, coastal lowlands, and the Galápagos Islands, Ecuador’s geography is notably diverse. So too are its history, culture, and politics, all of which are examined from many perspectives in The Ecuador Reader. Spanning the years before the arrival of the Spanish in the early 1500s to the present, this rich anthology addresses colonialism, independence, the nation’s integration into the world economy, and its tumultuous twentieth century. Interspersed among forty-eight written selections are more than three dozen images. The voices and creations of Ecuadorian politicians, writers, artists, scholars, activists, and journalists fill the Reader, f...
“[S]heds light not only on the obstacles to making motherhood safer, but to improving the health of poor populations in general.”—Social Anthropology Since 1987, when the global community first recognized the high frequency of women in developing countries dying from pregnancy-related causes, little progress has been made to combat this problem. This study follows the global policies that have been implemented in Sololá, Guatemala in order to decrease high rates of maternal mortality among indigenous Mayan women. The author examines the diverse meanings and understandings of motherhood, pregnancy, birth and birth-related death among the biomedical personnel, village women, their famil...
With studies of China, India, West Africa, South America and Europe, this book provides a global perspective on food consumption in the modern world. Combing ethnographic, historical and comparative analyses, the volume celebrates the contributions of Jack Goody to the anthropology of food.
"The first humanistic portrait of life among southern Ecuador's Saraguros, this work includes a meditative self-reflection on the author's role as anthropologist, the role of cross-cultural understanding in the Andean Highlands and beyond, and the meaning of the good life in different cultural contexts; it further considers how contemporary globalization shapes people's lives and thought"--
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A unique collaboration between archaeologists and a range of specialists in ritual and religion, looking at the role of religion in early human societies.