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Peter Gow unites the ethnographic data collected by the fieldwork methods invented by Malinowski with Levi-Strauss's analyses of the relations between myth and time. His book is an analysis of a century of social transformation in an indigenous Amazonian society, the Piro people of PeruvianAmazonia, taking as its starting point a single myth told to the author by a Piro man. Gow explores Piro history and ethnography outwards into the domains of myth-telling in general, and following the logic of certain important myths, further out into important domains of Piro experience such asvisual art, shamanry and girls' initiation ritual. All of these domains, like the myths themselves, have been dem...
Of Mixed Blood is an ethnography of the native people of the Bajo Urubamba river in Peruvian Amazonia. The people of this region appear very acculturated when compared to better-known indigenous Amazonian peoples. Peter Gow's analysis focuses on features of social organization which would seem to demonstrate this most clearly: the role of schools and recent land reform laws in the definition of the community, and native people's claim to be 'of mixed blood'. By stressing that these claims are made by native people themselves, he challenges the dominant vision of them as passive victims of history. Dr Gow argues that when native people's claims are viewed from the perspective of their own values, and in the context of their creation of life through the productive transformation of the forest and the commodity economy, they can be seen to form a coherent part of kinship. Historical change is thus revealed as interior to the ongoing creation of kinship for native people, rather than alien to it. This study offers a new approach to the issue of historical and ethnographic analysis of Amazonian cultures.
Nine case studies of shamanic practice in widely different cultures
Now an inspector, George Watters finds himself in the middle of another puzzling case. It is 1870 in Dundee, and Watters is ordered to solve a railway robbery. After Lord Balmuir’s factor is found unconscious and robbed of His Lordship’s rent money, Watters begins a search for two mysterious gentlemen who seem to be linked to the case. His life is further complicated by a gruesome murder of a near recluse in Broughty Ferry. Not used to delegating responsibility, Watters has to alternate between ordering his men into dangerous situations and investigating the duet of complicated cases. Can Watters prove himself worthy of his new rank and solve the Broughty Ferry murder?
In the first half of the twentieth century, a charismatic Peruvian Amazonian indigenous chief, José Carlos Amaringo Chico, played a key role in leading his people, the Ashaninka, through the chaos generated by the collapse of the rubber economy in 1910 and the subsequent pressures of colonists, missionaries, and government officials to assimilate them into the national society. Slavery and Utopia reconstructs the life and political trajectory of this leader whom the people called Tasorentsi, the name the Ashaninka give to the world-transforming gods and divine emissaries that come to this earth to aid the Ashaninka in times of crisis. Fernando Santos-Granero follows Tasorentsi’s transform...
Questions the very foundations of western sociological thought. A fascinating work that contains case studies from across South America and discussions on topics such as the efficacy of laughter.