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Book The Native Population of the Americas in 1492

Download or read book The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 written by William M. Denevan and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1992-03-01 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William M. Denevan writes that, "The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world." Research by some scholars provides population estimates of the pre-contact Americas to be as high as 112 million in 1492, while others estimate the population to have been as low as eight million. In any case, the native population declined to less than six million by 1650. In this collection of essays, historians, anthropologists, and geographers discuss the discrepancies in the population estimates and the evidence for the post-European decline. Woodrow Borah, Angel Rosenblat, William T. Sanders, and others touch on such topics as the Indian slave trade, diseases, military action, and the disruption of the social systems of the native peoples. Offering varying points of view, the contributors critically analyze major hemispheric and regional data and estimates for pre- and post-European contact. This revised edition features a new introduction by Denevan reviewing recent literature and providing a new hemispheric estimate of 54 million, a foreword by W. George Lovell of Queen's University, and a comprehensive updating of the already extensive bibliography. Research in this subject is accelerating, with contributions from many disciplines. The discussions and essays presented here can serve both as an overview of past estimates, conflicts, and methods and as indicators of new approaches and perspectives to this timely subject.

Book Foundations of Human Sociality

Download or read book Foundations of Human Sociality written by Joseph Henrich and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2004-03-25 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What motives underlie the ways humans interact socially? Are these the same for all societies? Are these part of our nature, or influenced by our environments? Over the last decade, research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus. Literally hundreds of experiments suggest that people care not only about their own material payoffs, but also about such things as fairness, equity and reciprocity. However, this research left fundamental questions unanswered: Are such social preferences stable components of human nature; or, are they modulated by economic, social and cultural environments? Until now, experimental research could not address this question because virtually all subjects had been university students, and while there are cultural differences among student populations throughout the world, these differences are small compared to the full range of human social and cultural environments. A vast amount of ethnographic and historical research suggests that people's motives are influenced by economic, social, and cultural environments, yet such methods can only yield circumstantial evidence about human motives. Combining ethnographic and experimental approaches to fill this gap, this book breaks new ground in reporting the results of a large cross-cultural study aimed at determining the sources of social (non-selfish) preferences that underlie the diversity of human sociality. The same experiments which provided evidence for social preferences among university students were performed in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of social, economic and cultural conditions by experienced field researchers who had also done long-term ethnographic field work in these societies. The findings of these experiments demonstrated that no society in which experimental behaviour is consistent with the canonical model of self-interest. Indeed, results showed that the variation in behaviour is far greater than previously thought, and that the differences between societies in market integration and the importance of cooperation explain a substantial portion of this variation, which individual-level economic and demographic variables could not. Finally, the extent to which experimental play mirrors patterns of interaction found in everyday life is traced. The book starts with a succinct but substantive introduction to the use of game theory as an analytical tool and its use in the social sciences for the rigorous testing of hypotheses about fundamental aspects of social behaviour outside artificially constructed laboratories. The results of the fifteen case studies are summarized in a suggestive chapter about the scope of the project.

Book Puyo Runa

    Book Details:
  • Author : Norman E. Whitten
  • Publisher : University of Illinois Press
  • Release : 2022-08-15
  • ISBN : 0252054199
  • Pages : 338 pages

Download or read book Puyo Runa written by Norman E. Whitten and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2022-08-15 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Andean nation of Ecuador derives much of its revenue from petroleum that is extracted from its vast Upper Amazonian rain forest, which is home to ten indigenous nationalities. Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten have lived among and studied one such people, the Canelos Quichua, for nearly forty years. In Puyo Runa, they present a trenchant ethnography of history, ecology, imagery, and cosmology to focus on shamans, ceramic artists, myth, ritual, and political engagements. Canelos Quichua are active participants in national politics, including large-scale movements for social justice for Andean and Amazonian people. Puyo Runa offers readers exceptional insight into this cultural world, revealing its intricacies and embedded humanisms.

Book Forest  Field  and Fallow

Download or read book Forest Field and Fallow written by Antoinette M.G.A. WinklerPrins and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-12 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume aims to present the essential work of geographer and historical ecologist William M. Denevan to explain the impact and influence his thinking had on the conceptual advancement not only in his own discipline, but in a range of related disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, and environmental history. The book is organized around eight themes, demonstrating Denevan’s early and profound insights on topics that remain of current relevance today, and the scholarly impact his writing had on subsequent scholarship. The book is unique because it offers commentary from active scholars who address the impacts of Prof. Denevan's thinking and work on contemporary environmental and ecological issues, with a focus on several groundbreaking themes (e.g. historical demography, agricultural landforms, cultural plant geography, human environmental impacts, indigenous agro-ecology, tropical agriculture, livestock and landscape, and synthetic contributions). This book will be of interest to a range of scholars in geography, anthropology, archaeology, history, and ecology, as well as to environmental managers and practitioners, especially those working for non-profit organizations and government organizations tasked with finding ways to adapt to global environmental change.

Book The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso  Culture and History in the Upper Amazon

Download or read book The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso Culture and History in the Upper Amazon written by Blanca Muratorio and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Blanca Muratorio's book, we are introduced to Rucuyaya Alonso, an elderly Quichua Indian of the Upper Ecuadorean Amazon. Alonso is a hunter, but like most Quichuas, he has done other work as well, bearing loads, panning gold, tapping rubber trees, and working for Shell Oil. He tells of his work, his hunting, his marriage, his fights, his fears, and his dreams. His story covers about a century because he incorporates the oral tradition of his father and grandfather along with his own memories. Through his life story, we learn about the social and economic life of that region. Chapters of Alonso's life history and oral tradition alternate with chapters detailing the history of the world around him--the domination of missionaries, the white settlers' expropriation of land, the debt system workers were subjected to, the rubber boom, the world-wide crisis of the 1930s, and the booms and busts of the international oil market. Muratorio explains the larger social, economic, and ideological bases of white domination over native peoples in Amazonia. She shows how through everyday actions and thoughts, the Quichua Indians resisted attacks against their social identity, their ethnic dignity, and their symbolic systems. They were far from submissive, as they have often been portrayed.

Book Amazonian Ecuador

Download or read book Amazonian Ecuador written by Norman Earl Whitten (Jr.) and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Monograph using a social and cultural anthropology approach to interethnic relations among amazonian indigenous peoples and other ethnic groups in Ecuador - discusses ethnic community resistance to cultural change and social integration emanating from national level economic and social development policies, and describes efforts to preserve traditional culture and social structure through ecological and ritual practices, etc. Bibliography pp. 69 to 80, maps and photographs.

Book Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador

Download or read book Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador written by Linda A. Newson and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 532 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Historical demography for 16th- and 17th-century Ecuador. The book's regional framework reveals major differences in mortality rates. Calculates that depopulation in the Sierra during the 16th century was four times that of the Coast"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57.

Book The New Latin American Mission History

Download or read book The New Latin American Mission History written by Erick Langer and published by U of Nebraska Press. This book was released on 1995-01-01 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The subject of missions-formal efforts at religious conversion of native peoples of the Americas by colonizing powers-is one that renders the modern student a bit uncomfortable. Where the mission enterprise was actuated by true belief it strikes the modern sensibility as fanaticism; where it sprang from territorial or economic motives it seems the rankest sort of hypocrisy. That both elements-greed and real faith-were usually present at the same time is bewildering. In this book seven scholars attempt to create a "new" mission history that deals honestly with the actions and philosophic motivations of the missionaries, both as individuals and organizations and as agents of secular powers, and with the experiences and reactions of the indigenous peoples, including their strategies of accommodation, co-optation, and resistance. The new mission historians examine cases from throughout the hemisphere-from the Andes to northern Mexico to California-in an effort to find patterns in the contact between the European missionaries and the various societies they encountered. Erick Langer is associate professor of history at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the author of Economic Change and Rural Resistance in Southern Bolivia, 1880-1930 and editor, with Zulema Bass Werner de Ruiz, of Historia de Tarija: Corpus Documental. Robert H. Jackson is the author of Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840 and Regional Markets and the Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia Cochabamba, 1539-1960. He is an assistant professor in the Department of History and Geography at Texas Southern University.

Book The Meeting of Two Worlds

Download or read book The Meeting of Two Worlds written by Warwick Bray and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 1993 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Columbus's discovery of the New World resulted in biological and cultural exchanges unprecedented in the history of human populations. Eleven scholars, from both sides of the Atlantic and from the disciplines of history, archaeology, anthropology, geography and biology, discuss the nature of the European conquest and its wide-ranging consequences.

Book The Indians of Central and South America

Download or read book The Indians of Central and South America written by James S. Olson and published by Greenwood. This book was released on 1991-06-17 with total page 548 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a juncture in history when much interest and attention is focused on Central and South American political, ecological, social, and environmental concerns, this dictionary fills a major gap in reference materials relating to Amerindian tribes. This one-volume reference collects important information about the current status of the indigenous peoples of Central and South America and offers a chronology of the conquest of the Amerindian tribes; a list of tribes by country; and an extensive bibliography of surviving American Indian groups. Historical as well as contemporary descriptions of approximately 500 existing tribes or groups of people are provided along with several bibliographic citations at the conclusion of each entry. The focus of the volume is on those Indian groups that still maintain a sense of tribal identity. For the vast majority of his entries, James S. Olson draws material from the Smithsonian Institution's seven-volume Handbook of South American Indians as well as other classic resources of a broad, general nature. Much attention is also focused on the complicated question of South American languages and on the definition of what constitutes an Indian. Olson's introduction cites dozens of valuable reference works relating to these topics. Following the introduction, this survey of surviving Amerindians is divided into sections that contain entries for each existing tribe or group; an appendix listing tribes by country; the Amerindian conquest chronology; and a bibliographical essay. This unique reference work should be an important item for most public, college, and university libraries. It will be welcomed by reference librarians, historians, anthropologists, and their students.

Book Born to Die

    Book Details:
  • Author : Noble David Cook
  • Publisher : Cambridge University Press
  • Release : 1998-02-13
  • ISBN : 9780521627306
  • Pages : 272 pages

Download or read book Born to Die written by Noble David Cook and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-02-13 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The biological mingling of the Old and New Worlds began with the first voyage of Columbus. The exchange was a mixed blessing: it led to the disappearance of entire peoples in the Americas, but it also resulted in the rapid expansion and consequent economic and military hegemony of Europeans. Amerindians had never before experienced the deadly Eurasian sicknesses brought by the foreigners in wave after wave: smallpox, measles, typhus, plague, influenza, malaria, yellow fever. These diseases literally conquered the Americas before the sword could be unsheathed. From 1492 to 1650, from Hudson's Bay in the north to southernmost Tierra del Fuego, disease weakened Amerindian resistance to outside domination. The Black Legend, which attempts to place all of the blame of the injustices of conquest on the Spanish, must be revised in light of the evidence that all Old World peoples carried, though largely unwittingly, the germs of the destruction of American civilization.

Book A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed

Download or read book A Rich Realm of Nature Destroyed written by David G. Sweet and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Latin American Population History Newsletter

Download or read book Latin American Population History Newsletter written by and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book Resource Management by the Runa Indians of the Eduadorian Amazon

Download or read book Resource Management by the Runa Indians of the Eduadorian Amazon written by Dominique Irvine and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 656 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: