Product Description
Explores the interwoven effects of writing, witchcraft, magic, and religion in social and political areas for the SalasacasThis is a case study of the interwoven effects of writing, witchcraft, magic, and religion on power such as birth certificates, baptism records, land titles, and tax records are very much a part of the same world in which witches keep lists of people to kill or save, the Church keeps lists of ancestors to honor, and God Himself keeps books of the living and the dead. The many aspects of this view of the quasi-magical uses of writing not only reinforce the subordination of nonelite groups with respect to the bureaucratic elites who control archival power, but also define the self-identity of the individuals within the nonelite groups. The book will therefore appeal to those interested in anthropology, literacy, power, or Latin America. ... Read more

Product Description
As indigenous peoples in Latin America have achieved greater prominence and power, international agencies have attempted to incorporate the agendas of indigenous movements into development policymaking and project implementation. Transnational networks and policies centered on ethnically-aware development paradigms have emerged with the goal of supporting indigenous cultures while enabling indigenous peoples to access the ostensible benefits of economic globalization and institutionalized participation. Focused on the Andean countries of Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous Development in the Andes is a nuanced examination of the complexities involved in designing and executing "culturally appropriate" development agendas. Robert Andolina, Nina Laurie, and Sarah A. Radcliffe illuminate a web of relations among indigenous villagers, social movement leaders, government officials, NGO workers, and staff of multilateral agencies such as the World Bank.

The authors argue that this reconfiguration of development policy and practice permits Ecuadorian and Bolivian indigenous groups to renegotiate their relationship to development as subjects who contribute and participate. Yet it also recasts indigenous peoples and their cultures as objects of intervention and largely fails to address fundamental concerns of indigenous movements, including racism, national inequalities, and international dependencies. Andean indigenous peoples are less marginalized, but they face ongoing dilemmas of identity and agency as their fields of action cross national boundaries and overlap with powerful institutions. Focusing on the encounters of indigenous peoples with international development as they negotiate issues related to land, water, professionalization, and gender, Indigenous Development in the Andes offers a comprehensive analysis of the diverse consequences of neoliberal development, and it underscores crucial questions about globalization, governance, cultural identities, and social movements. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Costume And Identity In Highland Ecuador offersparticular insight into the role of costume--clothing, jewelry,hairstyles, and bodily adornment--in a society changing from asubsistence to a wage-based economy.In some highland regionscostumes are still relatively conservative; in others, machine-madecloth has replaced handmade cloth or distinctive costumes aredisappearing altogether.

This work is the first detailed survey of Ecuadorian costume and willbecome a standard reference and a much-needed model for other areas ofSouth America. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Although "levantamientos indigenas" (Indian uprisings) have taken place for 500 years, the contemporary indigenous movement in Latin American was signaled by mobilizations in Ecuador, the first in 1990, as resistance to celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. Their slogan then was: "We will not dance on our grandparent's tombs". In 1999 indigenous people ruled Equador, if only for a few hours. In January 2000, the indigenous people of Equador walked into the capital, Quito, where they demanded - and got - the registration of President Jamil Mahuad. This volume contains topical articles covering the "levantamientos" of 1999 and 2000 and interviews with indigenous leaders to provide a unique insight into one of the strongest movements in Latin America. The selection of essays and background information on the problems facing indigenous people make this this a fascinating introduction to Ecuador. The text also covers environmental issues, health and education, political representation, the effect of gentically-modified foods, the patenting of indigenous seeds and the taking of blood samples of indigenous people without their consent.A background and history of indigenous people and black and white photographs are also included. ... Read more

Product Description
Forty years ago the world was shocked by the news that Auca Indians had martyred Jim Elliot and four other American missionaries in the jungles of Ecuador. That was the first chapter of one of the most breathtaking stories of the 20th century. This book tells the story in text and pictures of Elisabeth Elliot's venture into Auca territory to live with the same Indians who had killed her husband. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (11)

Fascinating
If you have read "Through Gates of Splendor" by Elisabeth Elliot you are eager to find out what happened after the 5 missionaries got killed by the Waodani (Aucas). This is the book that continues the incredibly inspiring story. This book is very well written and describes very realistically thelife and questions of a missionary. You will love to read this book from start to finish and then you want to know more. Continue with the book by Steve Saint "The End of the Spear" which is also a great book.

Praise God
The book came on time and was very encouraging to read.Its awesome how God can change people who have never heard of Jesus into worshipers of Him.

Fantastic Journey
Betty Elliot goes back to the primitive Amazon tribe who murdered her husband and four other missionaries.She lives with them, with her three-year-old daughter, for a year.She laboriously learns their language (altho her daughter learns it quicker).She isn't sure that she is particularly the better human being.

Great Book
I really enjoyed this book.I read "Through Gates of Splendor" before I read this book.After I finished this book I read "At the end of the Spear" by Nate Saint.I was encouraged to again focus on what God has planned for my life after reading these three books.I recommend this book to all.

Very Good!
This book definitely teaches so clear, in a practical way, how to love our neighbor. Elisabeth Elliot not just lost her husband but also she was willing to love those who took her husband's life. Wonderful story of love. I suggest if you have not read "Shadow of the Almighty: The Life and Testament of Jim Elliot" and "Through Gates of Splendor", you should start with those two. Everything will make more sensed at the end. ... Read more

Product Description
A profile of the Huaorani nation of hunter-gatherers in the Ecuadorian Amazon describes their fierce battle to preserve their homeland from oil-greedy governments and the destruction of the rain forests. 40,000 first printing. Tour.Amazon.com Review
In this impressive, funny and moving work, Joe Kane tells the storyof the Huaorani, a tribe living in the deepest part of the Amazonian rainforest in Ecuador. The Huaorani have only in the last generation been exposedto such items as the wristwatch. But the modern world is reaching themquickly; for better or worse--usually worse--they live astride some ofEcuador's richest oilfields. Oil production in the Amazon has opened theforest to colonization and industrialization, often with alarming results:about 17 million gallons, of raw crude, more than in the Valdez spill inAlaska, were spilled from a Amazon pipeline between 1972 and 1989. Kane, wholived with the Huaorani for months, immaculately reports on the tribes'connections with the old world and its battles with the new one. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (23)

The Dark Side of Ecaudor
I was a slap-happy travel writer looking forward to experiencing the most bio-diverse country on the plant for its size. Ecaudor is touted as a paradise for nature lovers with 46 different eco-systems, home to 1,600 bird species, 250 mammals, 358 amphibians 345 reptiles and 4,500 butterflies. Then I read Joe Kane's horrifying expose of what has been taking place in the Amazon forests of Ecuador in a region called the Oriente since the 1970's.Oil companies have systematically been destroying the forests, polluting the rivers with toxins that are destroying the beauty of the place and literally killing the indigenous people with toxic wastes and oil spills. The Trans-Ecuadorian Pipeline has suffered more than 60 major ruptures since 1972, spilling 614,000 barrels of oil into rivers and streams--more than two Exxon Valdez tankers' worth. How can this be happening in the poster child for eco-tourism? How can this continue in a world that is supposedly enlightened to the fact that the forests are the lungs of the planet and hold untapped medicinal knowledge? Kane lived with the Hourani Indians in their villages, and befriended their greatest leaders, while maintaining a journalist's objectivity. His book is a sensitive, caring, thoroughly researched, deep look into the abuses of the oil companies. His account ends in 1996, but the travesties live on. "If oil exploration continues at the current rate, in another 30 years oil reserves will be exhausted, the last ancient Amazon cultures decimated and there won't be any wilderness left." Thomas Cook, Traveller's Guide, 2008. I am now saddened beyond words, but still looking forward to seeing what remains of Ecuador's glorious bounty.If the United States, the chief exploiter of Ecuador's natural resources, weans itself off oil there could be hope of a recovery before the entire Ecaudorian Amazon forest is fouled and the Indians way of life gone forever.
[..]

Huaoranis understood
I found this book very readable and as I was reading it I started to feel like I knew the Huaoranis and feel their pain.Joe Kane may be an anthropologist but he does not write in a manner that makes you think that the Huaoranis are his studysubjects. By the time I finished the book I felt like I had been there with them and certainly understood them much better than before.I also became very aware of the horrific destruction caused by the oil companies.

Jaw-Dropper
He paints the Huaorani people in a very human light. The Huaorani are a people very misunderstood; they are portrayed by others as vicious, savage, and ignorant people and are exploited by powerful outside forces.This book has opened my eyes to a culture that I never knew existed, one which I now love and am deeply fascinated by.I would whole-heartedly recommend this book to anyone looking for more than an adventure.Be prepared to have your horizons widened.

Offers some compelling points
I had to read this book for a geology class in college and it definitely raises some interesting points about oil companies, labor abuse laws, poverty, monopoly, and how the people of the land are affected by drilling.The book is all over the place at some points, however, as pages upon pages of detail are given about a boat expedition leading to nowhere while important facts about the oil companies are limited to concise paragraph descriptions.

While I enjoyed the book overall, I wish Kane would have focused more on the importance of what he was tring to say.I understand he had to be objective, but there's not much to be objective about involving the wipeout of an entire culture.Reccomended for those interested in environmental science and human rights.

What is a Savage?
Joe Kane, author of best selling 'Running the Amazon', has tackled a subject often thought of as being the job of anthropologists and the like.As a reporter, Kane has done a good job of relaying details such as the environment the Huaorani live in and the details of the oil industry that looms over their part of the Ecuadorian Amazon.As mentioned in another review, the anthropological insite Kane offers in response to Huaorani culture and how it has changed and adapted to its situation leaves something to be desired.That said, I do not find this to be a problem. Kane is writing for an audience that would probably find most anthropological scholarly texts dry and unintersting, but he has managed to explain the conflict that has arisen due to oil exploitation in the rainforest, all the while demonstrating the effects this exploitation has on humans in the area.I wa spleased to see that Kane demonstrated how the Huaorani have formed a sort of resistance to the destruction of the environment they call home by using conduits provided by external political groups, thus demonstrating how the marginalized make themselves known. The book is engagingly written and Kane, while unable to hide his anti-corporate and anti-oil exploitation sentiments (with which I agree), has made a worthy case for the halting of oil exploitation at the level it was (and still is) being carried on in the Amazon. ... Read more

Product Description
Serving as both a narrative account and a general explanatory framework for understanding violence, this case study on the psychological and cultural dynamics of violence focuses on explaining the roots of violence in Waorani society while developing a theoretical model to explain violence in other societies. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A Wise Book About Human Choices and Society
The Huaorani/Waorani tribe of Ecuador first came to world-wide attention in 1956 when they were known as Aucas (Quichua for "savage"): five American missionaries were speared to death upon trying to establish peaceful contacts with them. Subsequent books by missionaries (e.g., Elisabeth Elliot's "Through Gates of Splendor") and journalists (e.g., Joe Kane's "Savages"), along with the discovery of major oil deposits underneath traditional Waorani homeland brought the knowledge of this tribe to a wider audience.In 2004 a documentary film, "Beyond the Gates of Splendor" was made, looking at the lives of many Waorani and those of the martyred missionaries.In that film, anthropologists Clayton and Carole Robarchek gave articulate, knowledgeable interviews that enhanced the quality of the documentary.This book, "Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War" is the full-length treatment about their time living with the Waorani and the conclusions they drew about them (which formed the basis for the comments made in the film).

The Robarcheks spent time living with the Waorani in 1987 and again on a follow-up trip in 1993.They had previously spent time living with the Semai tribe in Malaysia, quite similar to the Waorani in many respects - hunting with blowguns and darts, cultivating manioc, similar systems of descent, living deep in a rainforest with primitive technology - and yet for all the similarities, the Semai were some of the most peaceful people around whereas the Waorani were one of (if not the) most violent societies on earth.What made the difference?And why did the Waorani murder rate suddenly drop 90% in the early 1960s? These are part of what this book explores.

The authors are quite frank in declaring (and demonstrating through the data they collected and carefully analyzed) that they have fundamental disagreements with two popular paradigms for explaining human behavior: sociobiology and ecological determinism. For those who might have read E.O. Wilson's or Jared Diamond's works that touch on these issues, "Waorani: The Contexts of Violence and War" offers a thoughtful alternative viewpoint.(And for those who have read Napoleon Chagnon's theories on tribal violence, this book politely disputes his conclusions.)

The main premise of this book is this, that "People's behavior is not the determined result of ecological or biological or socioeconomic forces acting on them but, rather, is motivated by what they want to achieve in their world as they perceive and understand it.Within their experienced reality, people make choices based on the information available to them - information about themselves, about the world around them, and about possible goals and objectives in that world."

At 202 pages, this book is long enough to give more than a superficial account of the daily life and history of the Waorani but short enough not to drag on and on.There are maps and black & white photos sprinkled throughout the text, the writing is not overly technical, and their careful analysis of numerous interviews and geneological data are fair.When they disagree with a viewpoint, it is politely (though firmly) done.As someone who has lived in Ecuador many years and visited with the Waorani, I can also say that they have done a fine job of capturing the flavor of both the country and the Waorani themselves.I thoroughly enjoyed this book and plan to give it many more readings in the future.

Violence and Culture
This book is an absolute "must read" for anyone interested in human violence.The Waorani were perhaps the most violent people on earth until peace was brokered by missionaries.They were the terror of theirneighbors, but they also killed each other; peace may have saved them fromself-destruction.The Robarcheks had previously studied the Semai Senoi ofMalaysia, who lived in a similar way--by shifting cultivation in tropicalrainforest--but were virtually without any violence, ranking as probablythe most peaceful of humans.The Robarcheks sought to see why such similarsocieties (which even raise their children in broadly similar ways) hadsuch extreme differences in violence level.The most important finding wasthat both groups were menaced by, and afraid of, stronger neighbors.TheWaorani could fight back, but could be secure only if they could trulyterrorize their stronger enemies; the Semai could only flee, and learned todeal with danger by flight rather than by fight. The two cultures developedmany social and psychological mechanisms for reinforcing these differences.The Robarcheks use these examples to reject naive theories that claimhumans are violent or aggressive by nature. In fact, human cultures varyenormously in their approaches toward violence, and humans vary theirbehavior accordingly.Implications for dealing with violence are discussedin the book, and are of obvious importance for the world. ... Read more

Product Description
We are what we eat: our food defines us as individual women and men, as families and communities, and as members of our race, our class, and our nation. In this book, Mary Weismantel uses four different facets of the social life of food--diet, cuisine, discourse, and practice--to draw a richly detailed and compelling portrait of one South American community during the 1980s. The foods eaten in Zumbagua, an indigenous parish of highland Ecuador, are key to understanding what holds this distinctive people together in the face of tremendous economic and cultural challenges, as well as what divides them. The detailed discussion of diet is surprisingly revealing. Ancient histories emerge from the origins of staple crops like barley and potatoes, while recent trends, such as the substitution of purchased candies and colas for too-expensive fruits and vegetables, expose an ongoing ecological and economic crisis. In her discussion of cuisine--the cultural rules by which foods become meals--Weismantel shows how the everyday work of women preparing food transforms a mundane physical necessity, into a deeply meaningful symbolic act. Differences between local and national cultures, everyday and special occasions, men and women, adults and children, family and friends are only some of the cultural messages transmitted through snacks and means. Further, this culinary language is a highly expressive political idiom. By analyzing conversations and arguments about food, this book shows how an apparently apolitical community engaged in agonized debates about survival in the face of endemic racism and accelerating poverty. Cooking oil and wild mustard, bread and gruel, white rice and brown barley all appear as highly charged symbols of assimilation or resistance. Lastly, the book moves into the kitchen itself, where kinship, generation and gender shape--and are shaped by--the practical work of feeding the family. Social changes, such as the feminization of agriculture, continually alter labor demands within and outside of the kitchen, creating new tensions and conflicts within the family. By retaining close attention to the food itself as it is prepared and consumed, this book explores these intimate family issues without ever losing sight of the larger forces involved. The kitchen stove is a final nexus between production, exchange, and consumption. In the end, the delicate balance between the labor and products that go out of the house, and the goods that come back in, determines economic survival. And it is by choosing what to allow in and what to exclude, and how to shape the finished product for their own consumption, that the people of Zumbagua exert a precarious cultural autonomy in the face of daunting difficulties. This book is both a richly specific document of their lives, and a significant theoretical statement about the anthropology of food. ... Read more

Product Description
Deep in the jungles of Ecuador live the Cofan people, a so-called primitive clan little changed over the centuries. Their leader has led the Cofan in a cagey, media-wise, and sometimes hostile struggle against an uninvited new neighbor - Big Oil. This leader, this "Amazon Stranger," is an American named Randy Borman. Author Mike Tidwell spent many months with the Cofan people and with Borman - and has returned with this riveting tale. Amazon Stranger is the story of a man obsessed with the jungle and desperate to save it and its people. It is an unforgettable book, written with vividness and drama by a superb investigative reporter. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

vivid, fascinating, heartbreaking and hopeful
This book is at once an adventure story, a profile of a fascinating individual, a heartbreaking account of one of the greatest environmental crimes taking place in the world today (the destruction by oil companies of one of the world's richest ecosystems, Ecuador and Colombia containing the greatest biodiversity of the entire Amazon Basin) and a David-and-Goliath story of a tiny Amazonian tribe, the Cofan, battling for survival against multinational corporations.As all of those things, it bears comparison with Joe Kane's "Savages," but the Cofan have already dealt with much more destruction than have the Waorani, and this book spends more time on first-hand descriptions of both the riches of the Ecuadorian rain forest and the consequences of oil exploration.(I would recommend this book not only to activists who are trying to save the Amazon, but also to those who are working to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil exploitation, to explode to smithereens the notion that oil exploitation would not devastate the ecology there.)

The editorial reviews here cover just about everything else I would say about this book, so I won't repeat their comments, just direct the reader to them.

...One factual error this book makes repeatedly that I would like to correct: although they speak the same language as the Indians of the Andean highlands, and although they expanded northward into Cofan territory relatively recently, the Amazonian Quichua are NOT migrants from the highlands and NOT newcomers to the rainforest. They are true Amazonian people, distinct syncretic cultures created from the remnants of various destroyed Amazonian tribes who blended together and adopted their lingua franca (Quichua) as their first language.Though the Amazonian Quichua have been influenced (=weakened) by missionaries for much longer than the Cofan, their roots in the rainforest are every bit as deep. ... Read more

Product Description
This work explores educational and community efforts to revitalize the Quichua language in two indigenous Andean communities of southern Ecuador. Analyzing the linguistic, social, and cultural processes of positive language shift, this book contributes to our understanding of formal and informal educational efforts to revitalize threatened languages. ... Read more

Product Description
The Huaorani of Ecuador lived as hunters and gatherers in the Amazonian rainforest for hundred of years, largely undisturbed by western civilization. Since their first encounter with North American missionaries in 1956, they have held a special place in journalistic and popular imagination as "Ecuador's last savages." Trekking Through History is the first description of Huaorani society and culture according to modern standards of ethnographic writing. Through her comprehensive study of their extraordinary tradition of trekking, Laura Rival shows that the Huaorani cannot be seen merely as anachronistic survivors of the Spanish Conquest. Her critical reappraisal of the notions of agricultural regression and cultural devolution challenges the universal application of the thesis that marginal tribes of the Amazon Basin represent devolved populations who have lost their knowledge of agriculture. Far from being an evolutionary event, trekking expresses cultural creativity and political agency. Through her detailed comparative discussion of native Amazonian representations of history and the environment, Rival illustrates the unique way the Huaorani have socialized nature by choosing to depend on resources created in the past -highlighting the unique contribution anthropology makes to the study of environmental history. ... Read more