E-grāmata: Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia

Calling their effort an ethnography of empowerment, Norman (emeritus anthropology) and Dorothea (Latin American and Caribbean studies, both U. of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign) present a series of essays illuminating the lives and conceptions of the Puyo Runa people of Canelos Quichua culture in Amazonian Peru. It is among the many cultures in Latin America that tend to be distinguished from modern then ignored except as academic exotica. They explain how the people are in fact deeply embedded in the forces of history and modernity. Annotation ©2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) A longitudinal ethnography of a changing indigenous culture in Ecuador 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.