Creating Context in Andean Cultures

Creating Context in Andean Cultures
Author: Rosaleen Howard-Malverde
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 270
Release: 1997-04-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0195355180

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.

Knowledge and Learning in the Andes

Knowledge and Learning in the Andes
Author: Henry Stobart
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2003-05-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1781386846

The aim of this book is to explore the current research into the ways in which Andean peoples create, transmit, maintain and transform their knowledge in culturally significant ways, and how processes of teaching and learning relate to these. The contributions, from eminent researchers in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and linguistics, include cross-disciplinary approaches, and cover a diverse geographic area from Ecuador to Peru, Bolivia and Northern Chile. The case studies reflect on the variously harmonious and conflictive relationships between knowledge, power, communicative media and cultural identities in Andean societies, from within local, national and global perspectives.

The Andean World

The Andean World
Author: Linda J. Seligmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 1412
Release: 2018-11-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317220773

This comprehensive reference offers an authoritative overview of Andean lifeways. It provides valuable historical context, and demonstrates the relevance of learning about the Andes in light of contemporary events and debates. The volume covers the ecology and pre-Columbian history of the region, and addresses key themes such as cosmology, aesthetics, gender and household relations, modes of economic production, exchange, and consumption, postcolonial legacies, identities, political organization and movements, and transnational interconnections. With over 40 essays by expert contributors that highlight the breadth and depth of Andean worlds, this is an essential resource for students and scholars alike.

Anthropos and the Material

Anthropos and the Material
Author: Penny Harvey
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 175
Release: 2019-05-09
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1478003316

The destructive effects of modern industrial societies have shaped the planet in such profound ways that many argue for the existence of a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. This claim brings into relief a set of challenges that have deep implications for how relations between the human, the material, and the political affect contemporary social worlds. The contributors to Anthropos and the Material examine these challenges by questioning and complicating long-held understandings of the divide between humans and things. They present ethnographic case studies from across the globe, addressing myriad topics that range from labor, economics, and colonialism to technology, culture, the environment, agency, and diversity. In foregrounding the importance of connecting natural and social histories, the instability and intangibility of the material, and the ways in which the lively encounters between the human and the nonhuman challenge conceptions of liberal humanism, the contributors point to new understandings of the capacities of people and things to act, transform, and adapt to a changing world.

A Culture of Stone

A Culture of Stone
Author: Carolyn Dean
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2010-10-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822393174

A major contribution to both art history and Latin American studies, A Culture of Stone offers sophisticated new insights into Inka culture and the interpretation of non-Western art. Carolyn Dean focuses on rock outcrops masterfully integrated into Inka architecture, exquisitely worked masonry, and freestanding sacred rocks, explaining how certain stones took on lives of their own and played a vital role in the unfolding of Inka history. Examining the multiple uses of stone, she argues that the Inka understood building in stone as a way of ordering the chaos of unordered nature, converting untamed spaces into domesticated places, and laying claim to new territories. Dean contends that understanding what the rocks signified requires seeing them as the Inka saw them: as potentially animate, sentient, and sacred. Through careful analysis of Inka stonework, colonial-period accounts of the Inka, and contemporary ethnographic and folkloric studies of indigenous Andean culture, Dean reconstructs the relationships between stonework and other aspects of Inka life, including imperial expansion, worship, and agriculture. She also scrutinizes meanings imposed on Inka stone by the colonial Spanish and, later, by tourism and the tourist industry. A Culture of Stone is a compelling multidisciplinary argument for rethinking how we see and comprehend the Inka past.

Andean Expressions

Andean Expressions
Author: George F. Lau
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Total Pages: 366
Release: 2011-04-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1587299747

Flourishing from A.D. 1 to 700, the Recuay inhabited lands in northern Peru just below the imposing glaciers of the highest mountain chain in the tropics. Thriving on an economy of high-altitude crops and camelid herding, they left behind finely made artworks and grand palatial buildings with an unprecedented aesthetic and a high degree of technical sophistication. In this first in-depth study of these peoples, George Lau situates the Recuay within the great diversification of cultural styles associated with the Early Intermediate Period, provides new and significant evidence to evaluate models of social complexity, and offers fresh theories about life, settlement, art, and cosmology in the high Andes. Lau crafts a nuanced social and historical model in order to evaluate the record of Recuay developments as part of a wider Andean prehistory. He analyzes the rise and decline of Recuay groups as well as their special interactions with the Andean landscape. Their coherence was expressed as shared culture, community, and corporate identity, but Lau also reveals its diversity through time and space in order to challenge the monolithic characterizations of Recuay society pervasive in the literature today. Many of the innovations in Recuay culture, revealed for the first time in this landmark volume, left a lasting impact on Andean history and continue to have relevance today. The author highlights the ways that material things intervened in ancient social and political life, rather than being merely passive reflections of historical change, to show that Recuay public art, exchange, technological innovations, warfare, and religion offer key insights into the emergence of social hierarchy and chiefly leadership and the formation, interaction, and later dissolution of large discrete polities. By presenting Recuay artifacts as fundamentally social in the sense of creating and negotiating relations among persons, places, and things, he recognizes in the complexities of the past an enduring order and intelligence that shape the contours of history.

Non-Humans in Amerindian South America

Non-Humans in Amerindian South America
Author: Juan Javier Rivera Andía
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 396
Release: 2018-11-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789200989

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.

Living with the Dead in the Andes

Living with the Dead in the Andes
Author: Izumi Shimada
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 369
Release: 2015-05-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816529779

The Andean idea of death differs markedly from the Western view. In the Central Andes, particularly the highlands, death is not conceptually separated from life, nor is it viewed as a permanent state. People, animals, and plants simply transition from a soft, juicy, dynamic life to drier, more lasting states, like dry corn husks or mummified ancestors. Death is seen as an extension of vitality. Living with the Dead in the Andes considers recent research by archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, ethnographers, and ethnohistorians whose work reveals the diversity and complexity of the dead-living interaction. The book’s contributors reap the salient results of this new research to illuminate various conceptions and treatments of the dead: “bad” and “good” dead, mummified and preserved, the body represented by art or effigies, and personhood in material and symbolic terms. Death does not end or erase the emotional bonds established in life, and a comprehensive understanding of death requires consideration of the corpse, the soul, and the mourners. Lingering sentiment and memory of the departed seems as universal as death itself, yet often it is economic, social, and political agendas that influence the interactions between the dead and the living. Nine chapters written by scholars from diverse countries and fields offer data-rich case studies and innovative methodologies and approaches. Chapters include discussions on the archaeology of memory, archaeothanatology (analysis of the transformation of the entire corpse and associated remains), a historical analysis of postmortem ritual activities, and ethnosemantic-iconographic analysis of the living-dead relationship. This insightful book focuses on the broader concerns of life and death.

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines

The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines
Author: Timothy Insoll
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 961
Release: 2017-04-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0191663093

Figurines dating from prehistory have been found across the world but have never before been considered globally. The Oxford Handbook of Prehistoric Figurines is the first book to offer a comparative survey of this kind, bringing together approaches from across the landscape of contemporary research into a definitive resource in the field. The volume is comprehensive, authoritative, and accessible, with dedicated and fully illustrated chapters covering figurines from the Americas, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australasia and the Pacific laid out by geographical location and written by the foremost scholars in figurine studies; wherever prehistoric figurines are found they have been expertly described and examined in relation to their subject matter, form, function, context, chronology, meaning, and interpretation. Specific themes that are discussed by contributors include, for example, theories of figurine interpretation, meaning in processes and contexts of figurine production, use, destruction and disposal, and the cognitive and social implications of representation. Chronologically, the coverage ranges from the Middle Palaeolithic through to areas and periods where an absence of historical sources renders figurines 'prehistoric' even though they might have been produced in the mid-2nd millennium AD, as in parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The result is a synthesis of invaluable insights into past thinking on the human body, gender, identity, and how the figurines might have been used, either practically, ritually, or even playfully.

Kawsay Vida

Kawsay Vida
Author: Rosaleen Howard
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2014-01-06
Genre: Foreign Language Study
ISBN: 0292754442

Kawsay Vida is a course book and interactive multimedia program on DVD for the teaching and learning of the Quechua language from beginner to advanced levels. The course book is based on contemporary Bolivian Quechua, while the multimedia program contains a section on Bolivian Quechua (beginner to intermediate levels) and a section on southern Peruvian Quechua (advanced level). The book provides a practical introduction to spoken Quechua through the medium of English, while the multimedia program offers a choice of English or Spanish as the medium of instruction. The video clips introduce us to Quechua speakers in the valleys of Northern Potosí (Bolivia) and Cuzco (Peru), giving a sense of immediacy that the printed page cannot achieve, and highlighting the social and cultural settings in which the language is spoken. The DVD is available for both PC and Macintosh platforms. The book contains twenty-two units of study. As students work through these, cross-references take them to relevant sections of the DVD. The Bolivian and Peruvian Quechua sections of the multimedia program are divided into thematically and grammatically ordered modules, which introduce users to different aspects of Andean life, while progressing language learning in a structured way. Users engage with the audio, video, and visual material contained in the DVD through a range of interactive exercises, which reinforce listening and comprehension skills. Once familiarity with the language is acquired, the multimedia program may be used independently from the book.