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This book rescues photographs of interpreters: from the 19th century, French diplomat and sinologist, Arnold Vissière, and Julius Meyer, a Jewish trader in Wyoming and interpreter for native American groups; John Brown, the African-American who interpreted for travellers to the Putamayo region in Peru, witness of the mistreatment of indigenous rubber extractors in the “Devil’s Paradise”; Viktor Sukhodrev, Russian diplomatic interpreter, whom Richard Nixon trusted more than his own White House staff. From Brazil there are the boy interpreters from the Xetá indigenous group; Euvaldo Gomes making the first contact with the Xavante in 1949, after the participants in previous attempts were killed; the first communication with the Korubo in the Amazon in 1996; the familiar figures of Raoni and his interpreter, Megaron; and General Vernon Walters, the American military attaché and linguist, a key actor in the 1964 military coup. Photographs are analyzed as a formal visual composition; a performance; an act of interpreting, a moment in history that expresses geopolitical and economic power, social habits, and fashions; and salvaging lives lost in the sea of history.
Describes the culture of the Parakanã, a little-known indigenous people of Amazonia, focusing on conflict and ritual.
This edited volume offers a collection of twelve interlinear texts reflecting the vast linguistic diversity of Amazonia as well as the rich verbal arts and oral literature traditions of Amazonian peoples. Contributions to the volume come from a variety of geographic regions and represent the Carib, Jê, Tupi, East Tukano, Nadahup, and Pano language families, as well as three linguistic isolates. The selected texts exemplify a variety of narrative styles recounting the origins of constellations, crops, and sacred cemeteries, and of travel to worlds beyond death. We hear tales of tricksters and of encounters between humans and other beings, learn of battles between enemies, and gain insight in...
Around the year 1800, independent Native groups still effectively controlled about half the territory of the Americas. How did they maintain their political autonomy and territorial sovereignty, hundreds of years after the arrival of Europeans? In a study that spans the eighteenth to twentieth centuries and ranges across the vast interior of South America, Heather F. Roller examines this history of power and persistence from the vantage point of autonomous Native peoples in Brazil. The central argument of the book is that Indigenous groups took the initiative in their contacts with Brazilian society. Rather than fleeing or evading contact, Native peoples actively sought to appropriate what w...
Contains essays on food and material culture presented at the 2013 Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.
The discovery of the New World offered European civilisation the chance to generate a process of circulation of its own cultural values – the “spiritual conquest” – that has no comparable precedents. The missionary orders played an important role during this “Westernisation of the world,” not only as key players in the spread of Christian values, but also as mediators between different worlds. Indeed, missionary practices imposed the dominating culture’s values and institutions on the vanquished peoples. At the same time, they also promoted the circulation of new knowledge and the negotiation between different cultures during the age of a global integration of space. This book ...
Cultural understandings of well-being often differ from scientific measures such as health, happiness, and affluence. For the Indigenous A'uwẽ (Xavante) people in the tropical savannas of Brazil, special forms of intimate and antagonistic social relations, camaraderie, suffering, and engagement with the environment are fundamental aspects of community wellness Anthropologist James R. Welch transparently presents ethnographic insights from his long-term fieldwork in two A'uwẽ communities. He addresses how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change. Welch shows how A'uwẽ perspectives on t...
This book raises the question of what an Indigenous church is and how its members define their ties of affiliation or separation. Establishing a pioneering dialogue between Amazonian and Gran Chaco studies on Indigenous Christianity, the contributions address historical processes, cosmological conceptions, ritual practices, leadership dynamics, and material formations involved in the creation and diversification of Indigenous churches. Instead of focusing on the study of missionary ideologies and praxis, the book explores Indigenous peoples' interpretations of Christianity and the institutional arrangements they make to create, expand, or dismantle their churches. In doing so, the volume offers a South American contribution to the theoretical project of the anthropology of Christianity, especially as it relates to the issue of denominationalism and inter-denominational relations.
In Art Effects Brazilian anthropologist Carlos Fausto explores the agency of indigenous artifacts and images in order to offer a new understanding of the pragmatics and ontology of ritual contexts.