Download or read book The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America written by Paul Valentine and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-05-09 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Foremost scholars of indigenous Amazonia explore the vast and interesting gap between rules and practice, demonstrating how sociocultural systems endure and even prosper due to the flexibility, creativity, and resilience of the people within them."--Jeremy M. Campbell, author of Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon "A landmark volume and a major contribution to the study of kinship and marriage in Amazonian societies, an area of the world that has been pivotal to our understanding of the biocultural dimensions of cousin marriage and polygamy."--Nancy E. Levine, author of The Dynamics of Polyandry: Kinship, Domesticity, and Population on the Tibetan Border This volume reveals that individuals in Amazonian cultures often disregard or reinterpret the marriage rules of their societies—rules that anthropologists previously thought reflected practice. It is the first book to consider not just what the rules are but how people in these societies negotiate, manipulate, and break them in choosing whom to marry. Using ethnographic case studies that draw on previously unpublished material from well-known indigenous cultures, The Anthropology of Marriage in Lowland South America defies the tendency to focus only on the social structure of kinship and marriage that is so common in kinship studies. Instead, the contributors to this volume examine the people that conform to or deviate from that structure and their reasons for doing so. They look not only at deviations in kinship behavior motivated by gender, economics, politics, history, ecology, and sentimentality but also at how globalization and modernization are changing the ancestral norms and values themselves. This is a richly diverse portrayal of agency and individual choice alongside normative kinship and marriage systems in a region that has long been central to anthropological studies of indigenous life. Paul Valentine is professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of East London. Stephen Beckerman is adjunct professor at the University of Utah. Together, Valentine and Beckerman have coedited Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America and Cultures of Multiple Fathers: The Theory and Practice of Partible Paternity in Lowland South America. Catherine Alès is director of research at the National Center for Scientific Research, Paris, and is the author of Yanomami, l’ire et le désir.
Download or read book Marriage Practices in Lowland South America written by Kenneth M. Kensinger and published by Urbana : University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Dualism and Hierarchy in Lowland South America written by Alf Hornborg and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Cultures of Multiple Fathers written by Stephen Beckerman and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Rarely does a book suddenly thrust open a door, giving us a striking new view of a certain aspect of the field of anthropology. Cultures of Multiple Fathers does just that. . . . Pretty soon we can expect other volumes to appear documenting partible paternity in Africa, Australia, Melanesia, etc. But this volume will have been the first one."--Robert L. Carneiro, curator of South American Ethnology, American Museum of Natural History This book is the first to explore the concept of partible paternity, the aboriginal South American belief that a child can have more than one biological father--in other words, that all men who have sex with a woman during her pregnancy contribute to the formation of her baby and may assume social responsibilities for the child after its birth. The contributors, all Amazonian ethnologists with varied anthropological backgrounds and arguably the world's experts on this little-known phenomenon, explore how partible paternity works in several aboriginal societies in the South American lowlands. Many findings in this book challenge long-held dogma in such fields as evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology and sociology. For example, under some circumstances, children with multiple putative fathers have higher prospects for surviving than do children ascribed to only a single father. Among several ethnic groups, a strong case can be made for a pregnant woman's having a lover so that her child will have more than one father and provider. The study goes well beyond presenting the fact of belief in partible paternity, placing it in an extensive matrix of kinship, marriage, and associated features of social life. Each author discusses a particular society's beliefs about such related issues as conception and fetal development, domestic group composition and kin terminology, determining which males supply and distribute fish and game to the group, and the fate of children whose fathers die or depart. Stephen Beckerman is associate professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Paul Valentine is senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of East London, U.K.
Download or read book Revenge in the Cultures of Lowland South America written by Stephen Beckerman and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This extraordinary ethnography is the first devoted to the study of revenge. The contributors describe this social phenomenon in fourteen tribal societies, comparing its violent manifestations as well as its more idiosyncratic forms. Blood revenge at spear point is common in certain regions of aboriginal lowland South America; in other areas revenge is implicated in seemingly unrelated areas of daily life, from child naming to explanations for sickness. Revenge is a universal human motive that reveals fundamental social structure as do few other aspects of culture. The contributors discuss the origins, manifestations, and consequences of vengeance. They illustrate not only how revenge lays bare crucial boundaries and is bound to myth and ritual as well as to survival but also show the profound consequences of revenge for reproduction and the daily workings of society.
Download or read book Islam and the Americas written by Aisha Khan and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-01-10 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A tour de force that underwrites and shifts the petrified image of Islam disseminated by mainstream media."--Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity "Gives us an entirely different picture of Muslims in the Americas than can be found in the established literature. A complex glimpse of the rich diversity and historical depth of Muslim presence in the Caribbean and Latin America."--Katherine Pratt Ewing, editor of Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the United States since 9/11 "Finally a broad-ranging comparative work exploring the roots of Islam in the Americas! Drawing upon fresh historical and ethnographic research, this book asks important questions about the politics of culture and globalization of religion in the modern world."--Keith E. McNeal, author of Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean In case studies that include the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past three centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims’ lived experiences and examine the ways Islam has been shaped in the "Muslim minority" societies in the New World, including the Gilded Age’s fascination with Orientalism, the gendered interpretations of doctrine among Muslim immigrants and local converts, the embrace of Islam by African American activist-intellectuals like Malcolm X, and the ways transnational hip hop artists re-create and reimagine Muslim identities. Together, these essays challenge the typical view of Islam as timeless, predictable, and opposed to Western worldviews and value systems, showing how this religious tradition continually engages with local and global issues of culture, gender, class, and race.
Download or read book Trekking Through History written by Laura M. Rival and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rival presents a comprehensive academic study of the Huaorani, correcting distorted portrayals of them by journalists, missionaries, environmentalists, and tour guides as 'Ecuador's last savages'.
Download or read book Kosher Feijoada and Other Paradoxes of Jewish Life in S o Paulo written by Misha Klein and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2012-04-15 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Being Jewish in Brazil--the world's largest Catholic country--is fraught with paradoxes, and living in São Paulo only amplifies these vivid contradictions. The metropolis is home to Jews from over 60 countries of origin, and to the Hebraica, the world’s largest Jewish athletic and social club. Jewish identity is rooted in layered experiences of historical and contemporary dispersal and border crossings. Brazil is famously tolerant of difference but less understanding of longings for elsewhere. Celebrating both Carnival and the High Holidays is but one example of how Jews in São Paulo hold themselves together as a community in the face of the forces of assimilation. Misha Klein’s fascinating ethnography reveals the complex intertwining of Jewish and Brazilian life and identity.
Download or read book Black Seminoles in the Bahamas written by Rosalyn Howard and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2023-05-01 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent case study of a little-studied and poorly known community experiencing the processes of identity formation and culture change."--Brent R. Weisman, University of South Florida This is the first full-length ethnography of a unique community within the African diaspora. Rosalyn Howard traces the history of the isolated "Red Bays" community of the Bahamas, from their escape from the plantations of the American South through their utilization of social memory in the construction of new identity and community. Some of the many African slaves escaping from southern plantations traveled to Florida and joined the Seminole Indians, intermarried, and came to call themselves Black Seminoles. In 1821, pursued and harassed by European Americans through the First Seminole War, approximately 200 members of this group fled to Andros Island, where they remained essentially isolated for nearly 150 years. Drawing on archival and secondary sources in the United States and the Bahamas as well as interviews with members of the present-day Black Seminole community on Andros Island, Howard reconstructs the story of the Red Bays people. She chronicles their struggles as they adapt to a new environment and forge a new identity in this insular community and analyzes the former slaves' relationship with their Native American companions. Black Seminoles in contemporary Red Bays number approximately 290, the majority of whom are descended directly from the original settlers. As part of her research, Howard lived for a year in this small community, recording its oral history and analyzing the ways in which that history informed the evolving identity of the people. Her treatment dispels the air of mystery surrounding the Black Seminoles of Andros and provides a foundation for further anthropological and historical investigations.
Download or read book Rethinking History and Myth written by American Anthropological Association. Annual Meeting and published by Urbana : University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rethinking History and Myth explores narrative and ritual expressions of mythic and historical modes of consciousness among indigenous peoples of the Andean, Amazonian, and intermediate lowland regions of South America. Focusing on indigenous perspectives of South American interaction with Western colonial and national societies, the authors trace the interrelationships between myth and history to demonstrate how these peoples have developed a dynamic interpretive framework that enables them to understand their past. Examining specific cultural and linguistic traditions that shape the social consciousness of native South Americans, the authors show that historical and mythic consciousness work together in forming new symbolic strategies that allow indigenous peoples to understand their societies as at least partially autonomous groups within national and global power structures. This complex process is used to interpret the history of interethnic relations, allowing both individuals and groups to change themselves and alter their own circumstances.
Download or read book Marriage Practices in Lowland South America written by Kenneth M. Kensinger and published by Urbana : University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1984 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia written by Alf Hornborg and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2011-10-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A major contribution to Amazonian anthropology, and possibly a direction changer." -J. Scott Raymond,University of Calgary A transdisciplinary collaboration among ethnologists, linguists, and archaeologists, Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia traces the emergence, expansion, and decline of cultural identities in indigenous Amazonia. Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--essentialist notions of ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area. Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.
Download or read book Rescuing Our Roots written by Andrea J. Queeley and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2017-05-16 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Contributes new perspectives on historical black identity formation and contemporary activism in Cuba."--Choice "Provides invaluable insight into the histories and lives of Cubans who trace their origins to the Anglo-Caribbean."--Robert Whitney, author of State and Revolution in Cuba: Mass Mobilization and Political Change, 1920-1940 "Adds a missing piece to the existing literature about the renewal of black activism in Cuba, all the while showing the links and fractures between pre- and post-1959 society."--Devyn Spence Benson, Davidson College In the early twentieth century, laborers from the British West Indies immigrated to Cuba, attracted by employment opportunities. The Anglo-Caribbean communities flourished, but after 1959, many of their cultural institutions were dismantled: the revolution dictated that in the name of unity there would be no hyphenated Cubans. This book turns an ethnographic lens on their descendants who--during the Special Period in the 1990s--moved to "rescue their roots" by revitalizing their ethnic associations and reestablishing ties outside the island. Based on Andrea J. Queeley's fieldwork in Santiago and Guantánamo, Rescuing Our Roots looks at local and regional identity formations as well as racial politics in revolutionary Cuba. Queeley argues that, as the island experienced a resurgence in racism due in part to the emergence of the dual economy and the reliance on tourism, Anglo-Caribbean Cubans revitalized their communities and sought transnational connections not just in the hope of material support but also to challenge the association between blackness, inferiority, and immorality. Their desire for social mobility, political engagement, and a better economic situation operated alongside the fight for black respectability. Unlike most studies of black Cubans, which focus on Afro-Cuban religion or popular culture, Queeley's penetrating investigation offers a view of strategies and modes of black belonging that transcend ideological, temporal, and spatial boundaries. A volume in the series Contemporary Cuba, edited by John M. Kirk
Download or read book Queer Natives in Latin America written by Fabiano S. Gontijo and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-11-06 with total page 80 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book defies long standing assumptions about indigenous societies in the Americas and shows that non-heteronormative sexualities were already present among native peoples in different regions of what is now Latin America before the arrival of European colonizers. Presenting data collected from both literature and field research, the authors give examples of native queer traditions in different cultural regions, such as Mesoamerica, the Amazon and the Andes, and analyze how colonization gradually imposed the models of sexuality and family organization considered as normal by the European settlers using methods such as forced labor, physical punishments and forced marriages. Building upon post-colonial and queer theories, Queer Natives in Latin America: Forbidden Chapters of Colonial History reveals a little known aspect of the colonization of the Americas: how a bureaucratic-administrative, political and psychological apparatus was created and developed to normalize indigenous sexuality, shaping them to the colonial order.
Download or read book The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador written by Michael Uzendoski and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michael Uzendoski's theoretically informed work analyzes value from the perspective of the Napo Runa people of the Amazonian Ecuador. Based upon historical and archival research, as well as the author's years of fieldwork in indigenous communities, The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuadorpresents theoretical issues of value, poetics, and kinship as linked to the author's intersubjective experiences in Napo Runa culture. Drawing on insights from the theory of gift and value, Uzendoski argues that Napo Runa culture personifies value by transforming things into people through a process of subordinating them to human relationships. While many traditional exchange models treat the production of things as inconsequential, the Napo Runa understand production to involve a relationship with natural beings (plants, animals, and spirits of the forest) that they believe share spiritual substance, or samai. Value is the outcome of a complicated poetics of transformation by which things and persons are woven into kinship forms that define daily social and ritual life.
Download or read book Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination written by Kenneth Routon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its hard-nosed emphasis on the demystifying realism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the political imagery of the Cuban revolution--and the state that followed--conjures up its own magical seductions and fantasies of power. In this fascinating account, Kenneth Routon shows how magic practices and political culture are entangled in Cuba in unusual and intimate ways. Routon describes not only how the monumentality of the state arouses magical sensibilities and popular images of its hidden powers, but he also explores the ways in which revolutionary officialdom has, in recent years, tacitly embraced and harnessed vernacular fantasies of power to the national agenda. In his brilliant analysis, popular culture and the state are deeply entangled within a promiscuous field of power, taking turns siphoning the magic of the other in order to embellish their own fantasies of authority, control, and transformation. This study brings anthropology and history together by examining the relationship between ritual and state power in revolutionary Cuba, paying particular attention to the roles of memory and history in the construction and contestation of shared political imaginaries.
Download or read book The Anglo Saxon Warrior Ethic written by John M. Hill and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 174 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "A consistently informative and often impressively detailed analysis of Anglo-Saxon heroic stories (especially Beowulf, Brunanburh, Maldon), this study pulls them out from under the pall of pseudo-mystical Germani-schism that has shrouded them for generations and returns them to something of their own historical, and especially political, origins."--R. A. Shoaf, University of Florida Anglo-Saxon poems and fragments seem to preserve a long-standing Germanic code of heroic values, but John Hill shows that these values are probably not much older than the poems that record and advance them. In the first book-length application of anthropological research to Old English heroic literature, Hill demonstrates that the loyalties and values celebrated in "The Battle of Brunanburh," "The Battle of Maldon," and numerous other heroic episodes in Old English literature are not aspects of an archaic or ancient ethical life but instead political models serving the interests of West Saxon kingship and hegemony. Using the much more complicated Beowulf as an illuminating counterpoint, Hill works out the development in the heroic literature of these new ideals. Employing anthropological and psychoanalytic perspectives, Hill reopens for study an important subject of Old English literature long thought settled, and he provides a window onto the process of Anglo-Saxon state formation that should appeal to medievalists in both literary studies and history. John M. Hill is professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of several books, including Chaucerian Belief and The Cultural World in Beowulf.
