These groundbreaking essays by internationally renowned anthropologists advance a simple argument--that native Amazonian societies are highly dynamic. Change and transformation define the indigenous history of the Amazon from before European conquest to the present. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork and firsthand analysis of indigenous history, this collection examines the concepts of time and change as they played out in areas ranging from religion, cosmology, and mortuary practices to attitudes toward ethnic difference and the treatment of animals. Without imposing traditionally Western notions of what "time" and "change" mean, the collection looks at how native Amazonians experienced forms of cultural memory and at how their narratives of the past helped construct their sense of the present and, inevitably, their own identity. The volume offers some of the most interesting and nuanced discussions to date on Amazonian conceptualizations of temporality and change .
Author(s): Carlos Fausto and Michael Heckenberger (editors)
Edition: 1st
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Year: 2007
Language: English
Pages: 340
Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 2
ISBN......Page 3
Contents......Page 4
Figures......Page 5
Foreword......Page 6
Introduction......Page 8
I Appropriating Transformarions......Page 30
Time Is Disease, Suffering, and Oblivion......Page 31
If God Were a Jaguar......Page 45
Animal Mastets and the Ecological Embedding of History among the Avila Runa of Ecuador......Page 61
II Altering Bodies, Connecting Names......Page 73
Sick of Hisrory......Page 74
Cultural Change as Body Metamorphosis......Page 92
"Ex-Cocama"......Page 105
III Remembering Ancestraliry......Page 117
Faces from the Past......Page 118
Bones, Flutes, and the Dead......Page 130
Xinguano Heroes, Ancestors, and Others......Page 152
Contributors......Page 166
General Index......Page 167
Index of Indigenous Peoples......Page 170
