Browse

This book explores how young women navigate everyday moral dilemmas, develop understandings of self, and negotiate hierarchies of power, as they endeavor to “make life better” for themselves and their children. The ethnography is based on sixteen months of qualitative research (2009-2010, 2013, 2014) in an international NGO-run residence for young mothers and their children in the highland Andean region of Cusco, Peru. Drawing on feminist intersectionality theory, anthropological scholarship on reproduction and relatedness, and perspectives on the dialogical, or joint, production of social life and experience, this ethnography enriches understandings of ordinary life as the site of moral experience, and positions young women’s everyday practices, subjectivities, and hopes for the future at the story’s center. These mostly poor and working-class indigenous and mestiza girls care for their children and are positioned simultaneously as youth in need of care. As they seek to create a “good life” and future for themselves, these young women frame themselves as moral and modern individuals. Bringing attention to various dimensions of caring for, and caring by, young women illuminates broad social and political economic processes (deeply rooted gender inequalities, systemic racism, global humanitarianism) that shape their experiences and aspirations for the future. Tracing the micro-politics, everyday talk, and creative expression illuminates the dynamic processes through which individuals develop complex and changing senses of self, sociality, and morality.

This book examines how Bolivia's hesitant courtship with globalization manifested in the visceral and emotional diseases that afflicted many of its women. Drawing on case studies conducted among market- and working-class women in the provincial town of Punata, the book examines how headaches and debilidad, so-called normal bouts of infant diarrhea, and the malaise oppressing whole communities were symptomatic of profound social suffering. The book approaches the narratives of emotional distress caused by poverty, domestic violence, and the failure of social networks as constituting the knowledge that shaped their understandings of well-being. At the crux of the analysis is the idea that individual health perceptions, actions, and practices cannot be separated from local cultural narratives or from global and economic forces. Evocative and compassionate, the book gives voice to the human costs of the ongoing neoliberal experiment.

In 1956, a group of Waorani men killed five North American missionaries in Ecuador. The event cemented the Waorani's reputation as “wild Amazonian Indians” in the eyes of the outside world. It also added to the myth of the violent Amazon created by colonial writers and still found in academia and the state development agendas across the region. This book examines contemporary violence in the context of political and economic processes that transcend local events. The book explores how popular imagery of Amazonian violence has become part of Waorani social memory in oral histories, folklore performances, and indigenous political activism. As Amazonian forms of social memory merge with constructions of masculinity and other intercultural processes, the Waorani absorb missionaries, oil development, and logging depredations into their legacy of revenge killings and narratives of victimhood. The book shows that these memories of past violence form sites of negotiation and cultural innovation, and thus violence comes to constitute a central part of Amazonian sociality, identity, and memory.

As cultural mediators, Chamelco's market women offer a model of contemporary Q'eqchi' identity grounded in the strength of the Maya historical legacy. Guatemala's Maya communities have faced nearly five hundred years of constant challenges to their culture, from colonial oppression to the instability of violent military dictatorships and the advent of new global technologies. In spite of this history, the people of San Juan Chamelco, Guatemala, have effectively resisted significant changes to their cultural identities. Chamelco residents embrace new technologies, ideas, and resources to strengthen their indigenous identities and maintain Maya practice in the 21st century, a resilience that sets Chamelco apart from other Maya towns. Unlike the region's other indigenous women, Chamelco's Q'eqchi' market women achieve both prominence and visibility as vendors, dominating social domains from religion to local politics. These women honor their families' legacies through continuation of the inherited, high-status marketing trade. This book describes how market women gain social standing as mediators of sometimes conflicting realities, harnessing the forces of global capitalism to revitalize Chamelco's indigenous identity. Working at the intersections of globalization, kinship, gender, and memory, the book presents a firsthand look at Maya markets as a domain in which the values of capitalism and indigenous communities meet.

With its rich mix of cultures, European influences, colonial tensions, and migration from bordering nations, Ecuador has long drawn the interest of ethnographers, historians, and political scientists. This book delivers a highly detailed, thought-provoking examination of the racial, sexual, and social complexities of Afro-Ecuadorian culture, as revealed through the annual Festival of the Kings. During the Festival, the people of various villages and towns of Esmeraldas—Ecuador's province most associated with blackness—engage in celebratory and parodic portrayals, often donning masks, cross-dressing, and disguising themselves as blacks, indigenous people, and whites, in an obvious critique of local, provincial, and national white, white-mestizo, and light-mulatto elites. The book shows that this festival, as performed in different locations, reveals each time a specific location's perspective on the larger struggles over identity, class, and gender relations in the racial-spatial order of Esmeraldas, and of the Ecuadorian nation in general.

This book offers the first theoretical and experiential translation of Napo Runa mythology in English. It presents and analyzes lowland Quichua speakers in the Napo province of Ecuador through narratives, songs, curing chants, and other oral performances, so readers may come to understand and appreciate Quichua aesthetic expression. Like many other indigenous peoples, the Napo Runa create meaning through language and other practices that do not correspond to the communicative or social assumptions of Western culture. Language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape. In the Napo Runa worldview, storytellers are shamans who use sound and form to create relationships with other people and beings from the natural and spirit worlds. Guiding readers into Quichua ways of thinking and being—in which language itself is only a part of a communicative world that includes plants, animals, and the landscape—the book weaves exacting translations into an interpretive argument with theoretical implications for understanding oral traditions, literacy, new technologies, and language.

This book blends convincing historical analysis with sophisticated contemporary theory in this ethnography of the Mapuche people of southern Chile. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book takes readers to the indigenous reserves where many Mapuche have been forced to live since the beginning of the twentieth century. In addition to accounts of the intimacies of everyday kinship and friendship, the book also offers the first complete ethnographic analyses of the major social events of contemporary rural Mapuche life—eluwün funerals, the ritual sport of palin, and the great ngillatun fertility ritual. The volume includes a glossary of terms in Mapudungun. The book explores the ways rural Mapuche people in one part of southern Chile create social relations, and are in turn themselves products of such relations.