Culture and Customs of Ecuador

Culture and Customs of Ecuador
Author: Michael Handelsman
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2000-03-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 031309585X

Culture and Customs of Ecuador celebrates the extraordinary cultural, geographic, and ethnic diversity that has made this small country one of Latin America's most unique. Through this overview of its history, religious institutions, literature, social customs, cinema, media, and visual and performing arts, Ecuador emerges as a vibrant microcosm of Latin America. Students and other readers will learn how Ecuadorian society blends pre-Colombian, colonial, modern, and postmodern cultural forces. The underlying themes of Ecuador's continuous struggles with multiculturalism and national identity are presented with unprecedented clarity. Ecuador is a land of drama and paradox with abundant natural resources and a boom and bust economy that has prolonged dependence and instability. Despite many of the economic and social obstacles typical of developing nations, Ecuador has developed a dynamic culture. This multicultural society comes alive through engaging chapters on everything from history to performing arts. A chronology and glossary supplement the text.

Culture Shock! Ecuador

Culture Shock! Ecuador
Author: Nicholas Crowder
Publisher: Graphic Arts Books
Total Pages: 310
Release: 2006-05
Genre: Travel
ISBN: 9781558689664

Whether you're conducting business, traveling for pleasure, or even relocating abroad, one mistake with customs or etiquette can leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. International travelers, now more than ever, are not just individuals from the United States, but ambassadors and impression makers for the country as a whole. Newly updated, redesigned, and resized for maximum shelf appeal for travelers of all ages, Culture Shock! country and city guides make up the most complete reference series for customs and etiquette you can find. These are not just travel guides; they are guides for a way of life.

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes

Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes
Author: Rachel Corr
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2010-03-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816501114

Not every world culture that has battled colonization has suffered or died. In the Ecuadorian Andean parish of Salasaca, the indigenous culture has stayed true to itself and its surroundings for centuries while adapting to each new situation. Today, indigenous Salascans continue to devote a large part of their lives to their distinctive practices—both community rituals and individual behaviors—while living side by side with white-mestizo culture. In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archives—including never-before-published documents—Corr’s book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsiders—conquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insider’s perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this people’s great ability to adapt.

Huasipungo

Huasipungo
Author: Jorge Icaza
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 244
Release: 1973
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780809306534

The Villagers is a story of the ruthless exploitation and extermination of an Indian village of Ecuador by its greedy landlord. First published in 1934, itis here available for the first time in an authorized English translation. A realistic tale in the best tradition of the novels of social protest of Zola, Dosto­evsky, José Eustasio Rivera, and the Mexican novels of the Revolution, The Villagers (Huasipungo) shocked and horrified its readers, and brought its author mingled censure and acclaim, when itwas first published in 1934. Deeply moving in the dramatic intensity of its relentless evolution and stark human suffering, Icaza's novel has been translated into eleven foreign languages, including Russian and Chinese, and has gone through numerous editions in Spanish, including a revised and enlarged edition in 1953, on which this translation is based, but ithas never before been authorized for translation into English. His first novel, but not his first published work, The Villagers is still considered by most critics as Icaza's best, and itis widely acclaimed as one of the most significant works in contemporary Latin American literature. Thirty years after its original publication in Ecuador, The Villagers still carries a powerful message for the contemporary world and an urgent warning. The conditions here portrayed prevail in these areas, even today. The Villagers is an indictment of the latifundista system and a caustic picture of the native worker who, with little expectation from life, finds himself a victim of an antiquated feudal system aided and abetted by a grasping clergy and an indifferent govern­ment.

Oral Literature in the Digital Age

Oral Literature in the Digital Age
Author: Mark Turin
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1909254304

Thanks to ever-greater digital connectivity, interest in oral traditions has grown beyond that of researcher and research subject to include a widening pool of global users. When new publics consume, manipulate and connect with field recordings and digital cultural archives, their involvement raises important practical and ethical questions. This volume explores the political repercussions of studying marginalised languages; the role of online tools in ensuring responsible access to sensitive cultural materials; and ways of ensuring that when digital documents are created, they are not fossilised as a consequence of being archived. Fieldwork reports by linguists and anthropologists in three continents provide concrete examples of overcoming barriers -- ethical, practical and conceptual -- in digital documentation projects. Oral Literature In The Digital Age is an essential guide and handbook for ethnographers, field linguists, community activists, curators, archivists, librarians, and all who connect with indigenous communities in order to document and preserve oral traditions.

The Ecuador Reader

The Ecuador Reader
Author: Carlos de la Torre
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2009-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822390116

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, from José María Velasco Ibarra, the nation’s ultimate populist and five-time president, to Pancho Jaime, a political satirist; from Julio Jaramillo, a popular twentieth-century singer, to anonymous indigenous women artists who produced ceramics in the 1500s; and from the poems of Afro-Ecuadorians, to the fiction of the vanguardist Pablo Palacio, to a recipe for traditional Quiteño-style shrimp. The Reader includes an interview with Nina Pacari, the first indigenous woman elected to Ecuador’s national assembly, and a reflection on how to balance tourism with the protection of the Galápagos Islands’ magnificent ecosystem. Complementing selections by Ecuadorians, many never published in English, are samples of some of the best writing on Ecuador by outsiders, including an account of how an indigenous group with non-Inca origins came to see themselves as definitively Incan, an exploration of the fascination with the Andes from the 1700s to the present, chronicles of the less-than-exemplary behavior of U.S. corporations in Ecuador, an examination of Ecuadorians’ overseas migration, and a look at the controversy surrounding the selection of the first black Miss Ecuador.

Cañar

Cañar
Author: Judy Blankenship
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2005-04-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0292706391

In this book, Blankenship combines her sensitively observed photographs with an inviting text to tell the story of the most recent year she and her husband Michael spent living and working among the people of Canar."--Jacket.

Constitutive Visions

Constitutive Visions
Author: Christa J. Olson
Publisher: Penn State Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0271063637

In Constitutive Visions, Christa Olson presents the rhetorical history of republican Ecuador as punctuated by repeated arguments over national identity. Those arguments—as they advanced theories of citizenship, popular sovereignty, and republican modernity—struggled to reconcile the presence of Ecuador’s large indigenous population with the dominance of a white-mestizo minority. Even as indigenous people were excluded from civic life, images of them proliferated in speeches, periodicals, and artworks during Ecuador’s long process of nation formation. Tracing how that contradiction illuminates the textures of national-identity formation, Constitutive Visions places petitions from indigenous laborers alongside oil paintings, overlays woodblock illustrations with legislative debates, and analyzes Ecuador’s nineteen constitutions in light of landscape painting. Taken together, these juxtapositions make sense of the contradictions that sustained and unsettled the postcolonial nation-state.

Ecotourism and Cultural Production

Ecotourism and Cultural Production
Author: V. Davidov
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2013-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1137355387

Ecotourism is a unique facet of globalization, promising the possibility of reconciling the juggernaut of development with ecological/cultural conservation. Davidov offers a comparative analysis of the issue using a case study of indigenous Kichwa people of Ecuador and their interactions with globalization and transnational systems.

Portrait of a Nation

Portrait of a Nation
Author: Osvaldo Hurtado
Publisher: Government Institutes
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2010-01-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 1568332637

A case study of why Third World countries are still poor, the premise of this book is that while some progress has been made in transforming the political economy of Ecuador, certain behaviors, beliefs and attitudes have kept the country from developing in ways that otherwise would have been possible. As the author asserts, for almost five centuries the cultural habits of Ecuadorian citizens have constituted a stumbling block for individual economic success. Still, he concludes, people's cultural values are not immutable: inconvenient customs can be changed or influenced by the economic success of immigrants. This is the challenge that Ecuador faces in the twenty-first century.