The Metamorphosis of Heads

The Metamorphosis of Heads PDF

Author: Denise Y. Arnold

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre

Published: 2006-05-07

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 082297102X

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Since the days of the Spanish Conquest, the indigenous populations of Andean Bolivia have struggled to preserve their textile-based writings. This struggle continues today, both in schools and within the larger culture. The Metamorphosis of Heads explores the history and cultural significance of Andean textile writings—weavings and kipus (knotted cords), and their extreme contrasts in form and production from European alphabet-based texts. Denise Arnold examines the subjugation of native texts in favor of European ones through the imposition of homogenized curricula by the Educational Reform Law. As Arnold reveals, this struggle over language and education directly correlates to long-standing conflicts for land ownership and power in the region, since the majority of the more affluent urban population is Spanish speaking, while indigenous languages are spoken primarily among the rural poor. The Metamorphosis of Heads acknowledges the vital importance of contemporary efforts to maintain Andean history and cultural heritage in schools, and shows how indigenous Andean populations have incorporated elements of Western textual practices into their own textual activities.Based on extensive fieldwork over two decades, and historical, anthropological, and ethnographic research, Denise Arnold assembles an original and richly diverse interdisciplinary study. The textual theory she proposes has wider ramifications for studies of Latin America in general, while recognizing the specifically regional practices of indigenous struggles in the face of nation building and economic globalization.

De-Colonization, Heritage, and Advocacy

De-Colonization, Heritage, and Advocacy PDF

Author: Svanibor Pettan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2019-02-20

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 0190885742

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The nine ethnomusicologists who contributed to this volume present a diverse range of views, approaches, and methodologies that address indigenous peoples, immigrants, and marginalized communities. Discussing participatory action research, social justice, empowerment, and critical race theory in relation to ethnomusicology, De-Colonization, Heritage, and Advocacy is the second of three paperback volumes derived from the original Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology. The Handbook can be understood as an applied ethnomusicology project: as a medium of getting to know the thoughts and experiences of global ethnomusicologists, of enriching general knowledge and understanding about ethnomusicologies and applied ethnomusicologies in various parts of the world, and of inspiring readers to put the accumulated knowledge, understanding, and skills into good use for the betterment of our world.

Heads of State

Heads of State PDF

Author: Denise Y Arnold

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-07

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 1315427567

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The human head has had important political, ritual and symbolic meanings throughout Andean history. Scholars have spoken of captured and trophy heads, curated crania, symbolic flying heads, head imagery on pots and on stone, head-shaped vessels, and linguistic references to the head. In this synthesizing work, cultural anthropologist Denise Arnold and archaeologist Christine Hastorf examine the cult of heads in the Andes—past and present—to develop a theory of its place in indigenous cultural practice and its relationship to political systems. Using ethnographic and archaeological fieldwork, highland-lowland comparisons, archival documents, oral histories, and ritual texts, the authors draw from Marx, Mauss, Foucault, Assadourian, Viveiros del Castro and other theorists to show how heads shape and symbolize power, violence, fertility, identity, and economy in South American cultures.

Art and Vision in the Inca Empire

Art and Vision in the Inca Empire PDF

Author: Adam Herring

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015-05-22

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1316300420

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In 1500 CE, the Inca empire covered most of South America's Andean region. The empire's leaders first met Europeans on November 15, 1532, when a large Inca army confronted Francisco Pizarro's band of adventurers in the highland Andean valley of Cajamarca, Peru. At few other times in its history would the Inca royal leadership so aggressively showcase its moral authority and political power. Glittering and truculent, what Europeans witnessed at Inca Cajamarca compels revised understandings of pre-contact Inca visual art, spatial practice, and bodily expression. This book takes a fresh look at the encounter at Cajamarca, using the episode to offer a new, art-historical interpretation of pre-contact Inca culture and power. Adam Herring's study offers close readings of Inca and Andean art in a variety of media: architecture and landscape, geoglyphs, sculpture, textiles, ceramics, featherwork and metalwork. The volume is richly illustrated with over sixty color images.

Knots like Stars

Knots like Stars PDF

Author: Roberto Forns-Broggi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2016-08-17

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1443898368

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Knots like Stars: The ABCs of the Ecological Imagination in Our Americas is an encyclopedia of essays and aphorisms, at times personal, at times speculative and analytical, that invites readers to understand and enjoy an ecological perspective on Latin American literature and arts. It is simultaneously a summons to join creative forces with the non-human world. Through 43 key, interdependent entries from diverse environmental traditions, writing becomes a meditation on the poetry, films, and visual artistic traditions that sustain life, while opposing the actual destruction of Mesoamerican, Andean, and Amazonian biodiversity. The book will appeal to all people wanting to understand how poetic, artistic, and critical endeavors can enrich, rather than impoverish, the imperiled world around us. Since the Hispanic population and influence have increased dramatically in recent years, a better understanding of the complexity of this diverse culture will be an important asset for a sustainable and more interconnected future. This book invites its readers to expand their horizons and enjoy connections in order to build a sustainable community by integrating ecological perspectives in literature, film, and other arts.

The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology

The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology PDF

Author: Svanibor Pettan

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2015-07-01

Total Pages: 784

ISBN-13: 0199351716

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Applied studies scholarship has triggered a not-so-quiet revolution in the discipline of ethnomusicology. The current generation of applied ethnomusicologists has moved toward participatory action research, involving themselves in musical communities and working directly on their behalf. The essays in The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, edited by Svanibor Pettan and Jeff Todd Titon, theorize applied ethnomusicology, offer histories, and detail practical examples with the goal of stimulating further development in the field. The essays in the book, all newly commissioned for the volume, reflect scholarship and data gleaned from eleven countries by over twenty contributors. Themes and locations of the research discussed encompass all world continents. The authors present case studies encompassing multiple places; other that discuss circumstances within a geopolitical unit, either near or far. Many of the authors consider marginalized peoples and communities; others argue for participatory action research. All are united in their interest in overarching themes such as conflict, education, archives, and the status of indigenous peoples and immigrants. A volume that at once defines its field, advances it, and even acts as a large-scale applied ethnomusicology project in the way it connects ideas and methodology, The Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology is a seminal contribution to the study of ethnomusicology, theoretical and applied.

Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America

Theorizing Relations in Indigenous South America PDF

Author: Marcelo González Gálvez

Publisher: Berghahn Books

Published: 2022-05-13

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1800733313

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Whether invented, discovered, implicit, or directly addressed, relations remain the main focus of most anthropological inquiries. These relations, once conceptualized in ethnographic fieldwork as self-evident connections between discrete social units, have been increasingly explored through local ontological theories. This collected volume explores how ethnographies of indigenous South America have helped to inspire this analytic shift, demonstrating the continued importance of ethnographic diversity. Most importantly, this volume asserts that comparative ethnographic research can help illustrate complex questions surrounding relations vis-à-vis the homogenizing effects of modern coloniality.

Inka Bird Idiom

Inka Bird Idiom PDF

Author: Claudia Brosseder

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2025-07-15

Total Pages: 757

ISBN-13: 0822989654

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From majestic Amazonian macaws and highland Andean hawks to tiny colorful tanagers and tall flamingos, birds and their feathers played an important role in the Inka empire. Claudia Brosseder uncovers the many meanings that Inkas attached to the diverse fowl of the Amazon, the eastern Andean foothills, and the highlands. She shows how birds and feathers shaped Inka politics, launched wars, and initiated peace. Feathers provided protection against unpredictable enemies, made possible communication with deities, and brought an imagined Inka past into a political present. Richly textured contexts of feathered objects recovered from Late Horizon archaeological records and from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century accounts written by Spanish interlocutors enable new insights into Inka visions of interspecies relationships, an Inka ontology, and Inka views of the place of the human in their ecology. Inka Bird Idiom invites reconsideration of the deep intellectual ties that connected the Amazon and the mountain forests with the Andean highlands and the Pacific coast.

The History and Environmental Impacts of Hunting Deities

The History and Environmental Impacts of Hunting Deities PDF

Author: Richard J. Chacon

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2023-12-02

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 3031375033

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This edited volume analyzes the belief in supernatural gamekeepers and/or animal masters of wildlife from a cross-cultural perspective. It documents the antiquity and widespread occurrence of the belief in supernatural gamekeepers at the global level. This interdisciplinary volume documents both the antiquity and the widespread geographical distribution of this belief along with surveying the various manifestations of this cosmology by way of studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North and South America. Some chapters explore the manifestations of this belief as they appear in petroglyphs/pictographs and other forms of material culture. Others focus on the environmental impacts of these beliefs/rituals and prescribed foraging restrictions by analyzing how they affect game harvests. The internationally recognized scholars in this volume assess the efficacy of this particular form of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and investigate if adherence to the belief in animal masters actually causes hunters to refrain from overharvesting wild game and thereby contributes to sustainable hunting practices. This volume is of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists and other social scientists researching traditional ecological knowledge (TEK), indigenous conservation, biodiversity, and sustainability practices, and animal deities.