Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia

by Hornborg, Alf; Hill, Jonathan D.

• ISBN13: 9781607320944
• ISBN10: 1607320940
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2011-11-11
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Colorado

Summary

A transdisciplinary collaboration among ethnologists, linguists, and archaeologists, Ethnicity in Ancient Amazoniatraces the emergence, expansion, and decline of cultural identities in indigenous Amazonia. Hornborg and Hill argue that the tendency to link language, culture, and biology--the notion of essentialist ethnic identities--is a Eurocentric bias that has characterized largely inaccurate explanations of the distribution of ethnic groups and languages in Amazonia. The evidence, however, suggests a much more fluid relationship among geography, language use, ethnic identity, and genetics. In Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia, leading linguists, ethnographers, ethnohistorians, and archaeologists interpret their research from a unique nonessentialist perspective to form a more accurate picture of the ethnolinguistic diversity in this area. Revealing how ethnic identity construction is constantly in flux, contributors show how such processes can be traced through different ethnic markers such as pottery styles and languages. Scholars and students studying lowland South America will be especially interested, as will anthropologists intrigued by its cutting-edge, interdisciplinary approach.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
List of Maps	p. xiii
tList of Tables	p. xv
Preface	p. xvii
Introduction: Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia	p. 1
Archeology	p. x
Archaeological Cultures and Past Identities in the Pre-colonial Central Amazon	p. 31
Deep History, Cultural Identities, and Ethnogenesis in the Southern Amazon	p. 57
Deep Time, Big Space: An Archaeologist Skirts the Topic at Hand	p. 75
Generic Pots and Generic Indians: The Archaeology of Ethnogenesis in the Middle Orinoco	p. 99
An Attempt to Understand Panoan Ethnogenesis in Relation to Long Term Patterns and Transformations of Regional Interaction in Western	p. 129
Lingustics
Amazonian Ritual Communication in Relation to Multilingual Social Networks	p. 155
The Spread of the Arawakan Languages: A View from Structural Phylogenetics	p. 173
Comparative Arawak Linguistics: Notes on Reconstruction, Diffusion, and Amazonian Prehistory	p. 197
Linguistic Diversity Zones and Cartographic Modeling: GIS as a Method for Understanding the Prehistory of Lowland South America
Nested Identities in the Southern Guyana-Surinam Corner	p. 225
Change, Contact, and Ethnogenesis in Northern Quechua: Structural Phylogenetic Approaches to Clause-Embedding Predicates	p. 237
Ethinohistory
Sacred Landscapes as Environmental Histories in Lowland South America	p. 259
Constancy in Continuity? Native Oral History, Iconography, and Earthworks on the Upper Purus River	p. 279
Ethnogenesis at the Interface of the Andes and the Amazon: Re examining Ethnicity in the Piedmont Region of Apolobamba, Bolivia
Ethnogenesis and Interculturality in the "Forest of Canelos" The Wild and the Tame Revisited	p. 321
Captive Identities, or the Genesis of Subordinate Quasi-Ethnic Collectivities in the American Tropics	p. 335
fterword: Ethnicity in Ancient Amazonia	p. 349
List of Contributors	p. 359
Index	p. 369
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

A major contribution to Amazonian anthropology, and possibly a direction changer.
--J. Scott Raymond, University of Calgary