This book takes as a starting premise the insight that non-humans have agency, which was established predominantly in the field of science studies. It argues that rituals engage not “supernatural ...beings” but humans with other-than-humans. Other-than-humans are entities characterized by an entanglement of the human and the non-human aspects of the world. The book rejects the label “supernatural beings” since it implies a realm of nature as a pre-given universal reality outside and independent of human observation. These other-than-humans are entities stabilized through iterative ritual enactments that have acquired names, personalities and narratives that embody both aspects of the non-human place and aspects of the human collectivities in that place. Using the insights of one of the founding figures of quantum mechanics, Niels Bohr, and his theory of complementarity as interpreted by physicist-cum-philosopher Karen Barad, the
book argues that neither time, space, or nature are universal pre-givens. Rather, these come into being through specific acts of observation. The book argues that rituals are akin to quantum experimental acts of observation insofar as they enact or perform a particular instance of the real. Ritual action is iterative because it aims at stabilizing enacted worlds that are inherently dynamic; rituals seek to establish the continuity of those enacted worlds as livable worlds. This view challenges the understanding of ritual as involving an imaginative projection on the part of humans onto the non-human and/or social human world, a move that is both anthropocentric and dualist. It also offers an alternative to the onto-epistemology of representationalism that divides the representing human mind from the represented world.
The people of Taquile Island on the Peruvian side of beautiful Lake Titicaca, the highest navigable lake in the Americas, are renowned for the hand-woven textiles that they both wear and sell to ...outsiders. One thousand seven hundred Quechua-speaking peasant farmers, who depend on potatoes and the fish from the lake, host the forty thousand tourists who visit their island each year. Yet only twenty-five years ago, few tourists had even heard of Taquile. InWeaving a Future: Tourism, Cloth, and Culture on an Andean Island, Elayne Zorn documents the remarkable transformation of the isolated rocky island into a community-controlled enterprise that now provides a model for indigenous communities worldwide.
Over the course of three decades and nearly two years living on Taquile Island, Zorn, who is trained in both the arts and anthropology, learned to weave from Taquilean women. She also learned how gender structures both the traditional lifestyles and the changes that tourism and transnationalism have brought. In her comprehensive and accessible study, she reveals how Taquileans used their isolation, landownership, and communal organizations to negotiate the pitfalls of globalization and modernization and even to benefit from tourism. This multi-sited ethnography set in Peru, Washington, D.C., and New York City shows why and how cloth remains central to Andean society and how the marketing of textiles provided the experience and money for Taquilean initiatives in controlling tourism.
The first book about tourism in South America that centers on traditional arts as well as community control,Weaving a Futurewill be of great interest to anthropologists and scholars and practitioners of tourism, grassroots development, and the fiber arts.
Uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the transcultural phenomenon of the devil in early modern Peru. This work demonstrates that the interaction between the Christian and the Andean ...worlds was far more complex than any interpretation that posits a clear dichotomy between conversion and resistance would suggest.
On October 3, 1968, a military junta led by General Juan Velasco Alvarado took over the government of Peru. In striking contrast to the right-wing, pro–United States/anti-Communist military ...dictatorships of that era, however, Velasco’s “Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces" set in motion a left-leaning nationalist project aimed at radically transforming Peruvian society by eliminating social injustice, breaking the cycle of foreign domination, redistributing land and wealth, and placing the destiny of Peruvians into their own hands. Although short-lived, the Velasco regime did indeed have a transformative effect on Peru, the meaning and legacy of which are still subjects of intense debate. The Peculiar Revolution revisits this fascinating and idiosyncratic period of Latin American history. The book is organized into three sections that examine the era’s cultural politics, including not just developments directed by the Velasco regime but also those that it engendered but did not necessarily control; its specific policies and key institutions; and the local and regional dimensions of the social reforms it promoted. In a series of innovative chapters written by both prominent and rising historians, this volume illuminates the cultural dimensions of the revolutionary project and its legacies, the impact of structural reforms at the local level (including previously understudied areas of the country such as Piura, Chimbote, and the Amazonia), and the effects of state policies on ordinary citizens and labor and peasant organizations.
The origin of the first Andean imperial state has been the subject of lively debate for decades. Archaeological sites dating to the Peruvian Middle Horizon time period, A.D. 540 to 900, appear to ...give evidence for the emergence of an expansive empire that set the stage for the development of the later Inca state. This archaeological investigation of Pikillacta, the largest provincial site of Peru's pre-Inca Wari empire, provides essential background for interpreting the empire's political and cultural organization.
With engineering skills rivaling those of the builders of Cuzco itself, the Wari at Pikillacta erected more than seven hundred buildings covering nearly two square kilometers, with a fresh water supply and an elaborate underground sewage system but, enigmatically, only seven short streets and a near total lack of windows. In this long-awaited volume, Gordon McEwan and his colleagues report on the labor costs of construction (nearly 6 million man-days), the typology of Pikillacta's enigmatic architecture, and the site's spectacular hydraulic system as well as its ceramics and chronology, human remains, and metal artifacts.
In the final section, building on his years of research and excavation, McEwan develops a hypothetical model of Wari provincial administration in the Cuzco region, arguing that the Wari were innovators of techniques of statecraft that explain the function of and the labor investment in the Pikillacta complex. His book not only substantively contributes to our understanding of when and exactly how and why Pikillacta was built and what it was used for, it also illuminates the political and cultural antecedents of the Inca state.
This multidisciplinary--indeed, transdisciplinary--combination of archaeological, historical, and ethnographic research reveals how the Andean people of southern Peru's Colca Valley experienced and ...responded to successive waves of colonial rule by the Inka and Spanish empires from the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries.
While most research splits the prehispanic and post-conquest eras into separate domains of study, Steven Wernke's perspective explicitly combines archaeological and documentary sources to bridge the Spanish conquest of the Andes. He integrates GIS-based spatial analyses of documentary sources with archaeological survey and the only excavations of an early Spanish doctrinal settlement in the highland Andes to present a local perspective on how new communities and landscapes emerged as part of a continuous process of adapting to consecutive imperial occupations. Wernke's findings show how Spanish ideals of urban order penetrated this rural provincial setting as early as the first generation after the conquest, as well as the ways the integration of Spanish ideals depended on their resonance with prehispanic Andean precedents.
Through integration of empirical research and social theory, this volume contributes to current debates on colonial and postcolonial theory, historical anthropology, and the growing field of colonial archaeology. At ease whether examining religious practice at early Franciscan mission settlements or reconstructing prehispanic Andean land use, Wernke argues that we should avoid thinking of relations within the Inka and Spanish states as a dichotomy between colonizers and colonized; instead he traces how new kinds of communities and landscapes were co-produced at the local scale.
Habsburg peru Bradley, Peter T; Cahill, David
1999., 19991101, 1999, 1999-11-01, Letnik:
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eBook
The reception of the ‘discovery’, conquest and colonisation of Spanish America spawned a rich imaginative literature. The case studies presented in this book represent two distinct types of imagining ...by two diametrically different groups: literate, and in some cases erudite Europeans, and a vanquished native nobility. The former endeavoured to make sense of Spain’s (and Portugal’s) ‘marvellous possessions’ in the New World with the limited conceptual tools at their disposal, the latter to construct a colonial identity based on their shared ancestral memory while incorporating elements from the even more wondrous Hispanic culture that had overwhelmed them.
The Historical Dictionary of Peru contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important ...personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture.
“This is a wonderful book, a brilliant book, one that explains Andean culture in a totally unique and fascinating way. . . . Professor Bolin's truly wonderful powers of observation and her ...sensitivity and receptiveness to Chillihuani culture combine to provide us with a rare opportunity to see and begin to understand a beautiful people whose culture could not be more different from that of the so-called western world.” -Thomas M. Davies, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Latin American History and Director Emeritus, Center for Latin American Studies, San Diego State University “Societal changes have consequences, and how a people choose to raise their children reveals much about their values and spirit of place. Andean children, (though living with material scarcity), are fully entwined in a network of reciprocal obligations, thereby discovering the meaning of being human. It is this culture of respect that Inge Bolin reveals in this splendid and original book.” -Wade Davis, Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society, author of One River and The Serpent and the Rainbow Far from the mainstream of society, the pastoral community of Chillihuani in the high Peruvian Andes rears children who are well-adjusted, creative, and curious. They exhibit superior social and cognitive skills and maintain an attitude of respect for all life as they progress smoothly from childhood to adulthood without a troubled adolescence. What makes such child-rearing success even more remarkable is that childhood is not recognized as a distinct phase of life. Instead, children assume adult rights and responsibilities at an early age in order to help the community survive in a rugged natural environment and utter material poverty. This beautifully written ethnography provides the first full account of child-rearing practices in the high Peruvian Andes. Inge Bolin traces children's lives from birth to adulthood and finds truly amazing strategies of child rearing, as well as impressive ways of living that allow teenagers to enjoy the adolescent stage of their lives while contributing significantly to the welfare of their families and the community. Throughout her discussion, Bolin demonstrates that traditional practices of respect, whose roots reach back to pre-Columbian times, are what enable the children of the high Andes to mature into dignified, resilient, and caring adults.
