In Amazonia

Author : Hugh Raffles
Publisher : Princeton University Press
ISBN 13 : 1400865271
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.77/5 ( download)

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Download or read book In Amazonia written by Hugh Raffles and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-09-15 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Author : Neil L. Whitehead
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
ISBN 13 : 9780803248052
Total Pages : 272 pages
Book Rating : 4.59/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Histories and Historicities in Amazonia written by Neil L. Whitehead and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 2003-01-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead presents a collection of recent fieldwork and the latest theoretical perspectives that illuminate how a range of Native communities in the Amazon River basin, and those they encounter, use the past to make sense of their world and themselves. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of the role the past plays in the construction of culture and identity. Not only can the past be represented and codified overtly in various ways and media as a history, it also operates more fundamentally and pervasively in cultures as a mode of consciousness or way of thinking about the world, a historicity. ø In addition to examining the particular foundations and significance of history and historicity in such communities as the Guaj¾, Wapishana, Dekuana, and Patamuna, the contributors to this volume consider more broadly how different natural and cultural features can help shape historical consciousness: landscape and territory; rituals such as feasting; genealogy and kinship; and even the practice of archaeology. Also of interest are activist uses of historicity to promote and legitimize the cultural integrity and political agendas of Native communities, especially in contact situations past and present where multiple and often competing forms of history and historicity play important political roles in articulating relations between colonizers and the colonized. ø As this volume makes clear, understanding the powerful cultural role of the past helps scholars better appreciate the inherent dynamic quality of all cultures and recognize a rich resource of agency that can be used both to comprehend and to transform the present

Author : Kei Otsuki
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1136179623
Total Pages : 194 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Sustainable Development in Amazonia written by Kei Otsuki and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book argues against the assumption that sustainability and environmental conservation are naturally the common goal and norm for everyone in Amazonia. This is the first book focusing on agency, reflexivity and social development to address sustainable development in the region. It discusses the importance of looking into societal dynamics in order to deal with deforestation and sustainable development policies through the ethnography of an Amazonian settlement named New Paradise. This book demystifies utopian and overtly conservationist views that depict the Amazon rainforest as a troubled paradise. Engaging with social theory of practice with particular focus on emergentist perspectives and Foucault’s analysis of ‘heterotopia’, the author shows that Amazonia is a set of settlement heterotopias in which various local and external initiatives interact to make up real, lived-in places. The settlers’ placemaking continually rearranges power and material relations while the process usually emphasises utopian developmentalist and conservationist policy intervention. This book explores in detail how, as power relations are arranged and governance reshaped, sustainable development and construction of a green society also need to become a goal for the settlers themselves. The book’s insights on the relationship between the sustainable development frameworks used in environmental policy, and ongoing societal development on the ground inform debate both within Amazonia, and in comparable communities worldwide. It also offers institutional pathways to realise new, more engaging, policy intervention for development professionals and policy makers.

Author : Spike Gildea
Publisher : John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN 13 : 9027206708
Total Pages : 329 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Ergativity in Amazonia written by Spike Gildea and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents a typological/theoretical introduction plus eight papers about ergative alignment in 16 Amazonian languages. All are written by linguists with years of fieldwork and comparative experience in the region, all describe details of the synchronic systems, and several also provide diachronic insight into the evolution of these systems. The five papers in Part I focus on languages from four larger families with ergative patterns primarily in morphology. The typological contribution is in detailed consideration of unusual splits, changes in ergative patterns, and parallels between ergative main clauses and nominalizations. The three papers in Part II discuss genetically isolated languages. Two present dominant ergative patterns in both morphology and syntax, the other a syntactic inverse system that is predominantly ergative in discourse. In each, the authors demonstrate that identification of traditional grammatical relations is problematic. These data will figure in all future typological and theoretical debates about grammatical relations.

Author : Marianne Schmink
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780231513883
Total Pages : 436 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Contested Frontiers in Amazonia written by Marianne Schmink and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1992-06-24 with total page 436 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An interdisciplinary analysis of the process of frontier change in one region of the Brazilian Amazon, the southern portion of the state of Pará.

Author : Maria Antonia Tigre
Publisher : BRILL
ISBN 13 : 9004313508
Total Pages : 604 pages
Book Rating : 4.07/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Regional Cooperation in Amazonia written by Maria Antonia Tigre and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-08-28 with total page 604 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Regional Cooperation in Amazonia: A Comparative Environmental Law Analysis, Maria Antonia Tigre investigates efforts in regional cooperation for the protection of the Amazonian ecosystem by the eight countries in which the world’s largest rainforest lies.

Author : Thomas Gregor
Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520228529
Total Pages : 403 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia written by Thomas Gregor and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2001-11 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amazonia and Melanesia are half a world in distance, yet their cultures bear similarities in the areas of sex and gender. This work looks at ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized.

Author : Carlos Fausto
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1107020069
Total Pages : 369 pages
Book Rating : 4.61/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia written by Carlos Fausto and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-19 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the culture of the Parakanã, a little-known indigenous people of Amazonia, focusing on conflict and ritual.

Author : Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780199257850
Total Pages : 406 pages
Book Rating : 4.5X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Language Contact in Amazonia written by Aleksandra I︠U︡rʹevna Aĭkhenvalʹd and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the contact between Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the Vaupés river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing is resisted for ideological reasons. The book considers which parts of the language categories are likely to be borrowed. This study also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic effects of language obsolescence.

Author : Cecilia McCallum
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000184188
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.81/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Gender and Sociality in Amazonia written by Cecilia McCallum and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-11 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to focus directly on gender in Amazonia for nearly thirty years. Research on gender and sexual identity has become central to social science during that time, but studies have concentrated on other places and people, leaving the gendered experiences of indigenous Amazonians relatively unexplored. McCallum explores little-known aspects of the day-to-day lives of Amazonian peoples in Brazil and Peru. Taking a closer look at the lives of the Cashinahua people, the book provides fascinating insights into conception, pregnancy and birth; naming rituals and initiation ceremonies; concepts of space and time; community and leadership; exchange and production practices; and the philosophy of daily life itself. Through this prism it shows that in fact gender is not merely an aspect of Amazonian social life, but its central axis and driving force. Gender does not just affect personal identity, but has implications for the whole of community life and social organization. The author illustrates how gender is continually created and maintained, and how social forms emerge from the practices of gendered persons in interaction. Throughout their lives, people are 'being made' in this part of the Amazon, and the whole of social organization is predicated on this conception. The author reveals the complex inter-relationships that link gender distinctions with the body, systems of exchange and politics. In so doing, she develops a specific theoretical model of gender and sociality that reshapes our understanding of Amazonian social processes. Building on the key works from past decades, this book challenges and extends current understandings of gender, society and the indigenous people of Amazonia.