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How are spiritual power and self-transformation cultivated in street ministries? This book provides an in-depth analysis of Pentecostal ministries in Puerto Rico that were founded and run by self-identified “ex-addicts,” ministries that are also widespread in poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. mainland. The book melds cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Through the stories of ministry converts, the book examines key elements of Pentecostalism: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the idea of other-worldliness. It then reconstructs the ministries' strategies of spiritual victory over addiction: transformation techniques to build spiritual strength and authority through pain and discipline; cultivation of alternative masculinities based on male converts' reclamation of domestic space; and radical rupture from a post-industrial “culture of disposability.” By contrasting the ministries' logic of addiction with that of biomedicine, the book rethinks roads to recovery, discovering unexpected convergences with biomedicine while revealing the allure of street corner ministries.

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, the book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material not previously published. It brings together intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. The book provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, it discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. The book then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius.

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.

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, the book explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that the book calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. This book explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

This book offers a depth of ethnographic work that makes the following theoretical interventions: (a) to emphasize the significance of Brazil in the formation of the African Diaspora with specific attention to black women as social and political agents; (b) to highlight the political life of black communities, specifically those in urban contexts oftentimes represented as socially pathological and politically bankrupt; and (c) to offer a corrective perspective on how we think about politics by focusing on grassroots social movements in neighborhoods as key sites of struggle. The book describes in great detail the neighborhood association in Gamboa de Baixo located on the coast in the city-center of the northeastern city of Salvador. Local activists have been key in the city-wide movement for land and housing rights, and the geographic location of the neighborhood is crucial for understanding the gendered racial aspects of urban renewal and the formation of black women-led social movements. It makes connections between the local, national and international politics of race, gender and the modernization of global cities and provides an example of the kinds of resistance movements that have emerged as a result.

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.

For two years, fieldwork was carried out in regions of Colombia where leftist guerillas, right-wing paramilitary groups, the army, and drug traffickers made their presence felt in the lives of unarmed civilians. This book tells the story of the ways in which people living in the shadow of these armed intruders use community radio, television, video, digital photography, and the Internet to shield their communities from armed violence’s negative impacts. Citizens’ media are most effective, the book posits, when they understand communication as performance rather than simply as persuasion or the transmission of information. Grassroots media that are deeply embedded in the communities they serve and responsive to local needs strengthen the ability of community members to productively react to violent incursions. The book demonstrates how citizens’ media privilege aspects of community life not hijacked by violence, providing people with the tools and the platform to forge lives for themselves and their families that are not entirely colonized by armed conflict and its effects. Ultimately, the book shows that unarmed civilian communities that have been cornered by armed conflict can use community media to repair torn social fabrics, reconstruct eroded bonds, reclaim public spaces, resolve conflict, and sow the seeds of peace and stability.

In 1996, against the backdrop of Alberto Fujimori's increasingly corrupt national politics, an older woman in Lima, Peru—part of a group of women street sweepers protesting the privatization of the city's cleaning services—stripped to the waist in full view of the crowd that surrounded her. Lima had just launched a campaign to revitalize its historic districts, and this shockingly transgressive act was just one of a series of events that challenged the norms of order, cleanliness, and beauty that the renewal effort promoted. In this book, the author employs an interweaving of essays and field diary entries as she analyzes the ramifications of this act within the city's conflicted history and across its class divisions. She builds on the work of Georges Bataille to explore the relation between taboo and transgression, while Peruvian novelist and anthropologist José María Arguedas's writings inspire her to reflect on her return to her native city in movingly intimate detail. With its multiple perspectives—personal, sociological, historical, and theoretical—this book is a pioneering work on the cutting edge of ethnography.

Throughout Brazil, Afro-Brazilians face widespread racial prejudice. Many turn to religion, with Afro-Brazilians disproportionately represented among Protestants, the fastest-growing religious group in the country. Officially, Brazilian Protestants do not involve themselves in racial politics. Behind the scenes, however, the community is deeply involved in the formation of different kinds of blackness—and its engagement in racial politics is rooted in the major new cultural movement of black music. This book explores the complex ideas about race, racism, and racial identity that have grown up among Afro-Brazilians in the black music scene. It pushes our understanding of racial identity and the social effects of music in new directions. Delving into the everyday music-making practices of these scenes, the book shows how the creative process itself shapes how Afro-Brazilian artists experience and understand their racial identities. This book challenges much of what we thought we knew about Brazil's Protestants, provoking us to think in new ways about their role in their country's struggle to combat racism.

This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. The book includes analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas—as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. It presents an approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that aims to illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond.

This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter. This work is a new chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements, chronicling the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.

Since independence from Spain the trope of an endless antagonism pitting civilization against barbarism has remained pervasive in Latin America’s republican imaginary. This book apprehends that trope not just as the phantasmatic projection of postcolonial elites fearful of the popular sectors, but also as a symptom of a stubborn historical predicament: the cyclical insistence with which the subaltern populations return to the nation’s public spaces in the form of crowds. Focused on Venezuela but relevant to Latin America, Dancing Jacobins is a genealogical investigation of the populist “monumental governmentality” that in response to this predicament began to take shape in that nation at the time of independence. Informed by a Bolivarian political theology, the nation’s representatives, or “dancing Jacobins,” recursively draw on the repertoire of busts, portraits, and equestrian statues of national heroes scattered across Venezuela in a montage of monuments and dancing—or universal and particular. They monumentalize themselves on the stage of the polity as a ponderously statuesque yet occasionally riotous reflection of the nation’s general will. To this day, the nervous oscillation between crowds and peoplehood intrinsic to this form of government has inflected the republic’s institutions and constructs, from the sovereign “people” to the nation’s heroic imaginary, its constitutional texts, representative figures, parliamentary structures, and last, but not least, its army. Through this movement of collection and dispersion these institutions are at all times haunted and imbued from within by the crowds that they otherwise set out to mould, enframe, and address.

This book provides an innovative approach to the study of contemporary Bolivia, moving telescopically between social, political, legal, and discursive analyses, and drawing from a range of disciplinary traditions. Based on a decade of research, it offers an account of local encounters with law and liberalism. The book presents, through a series of finely grained readings, a window into the lives of people in rural areas of Latin America who are playing a crucial role in the emergence of postcolonial states. The book contends that the contemporary Bolivian experience is best understood by examining historical patterns of intention as they emerge from everyday practices. It provides a compelling case study of the appropriation and reconstruction of transnational law at the local level, and gives key insights into this important South American country.

This book tells the stories of tequila and mezcal, two of Mexico’s most iconic products, to investigate the politics of protecting local products in a global market. As people have yearned to connect with the people and places that produce their food, the concept of terroir—the taste of place—has become increasingly salient. Tequila and mezcal are both protected by denominations of origin (DOs), legal designations based on the notion of terroir. The DOs link production to particular regions, while quality standards guarantee each product’s safety and authenticity. Advocates argue that the DOs and the standards ensure the reputation of Mexico’s national spirits, expand market opportunities, and protect Mexico’s cultural heritage. But the institutions that regulate tequila and mezcal ultimately protect the interests of a small group of powerful global elites more than anyone else. The growing global demand for tequila and mezcal has led to fame and fortune for a handful of people, while excluding and marginalizing many others. The cases analyzed in this book illustrate the limitations of relying on alternative markets to protect food cultures and rural livelihoods. Because arguments about how to define and regulate tequila and mezcal have been conducted within the parameters of the global marketplace, they have privileged consumers while largely ignoring the perspectives of producers, farmers, workers, and communities. There is a need to move beyond market-based models to create more democratic, participatory, and inclusive ways of protecting and valuing local foods and drinks, as well as the people who make them.

In the two decades since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Mexico has seen an epidemic of diet-related illness. While globalization has been associated with an increase in chronic disease around the world, in Mexico, the speed and scope of the rise has been called a public health emergency. The shift in Mexican foodways is happening at a moment when the country’s ancestral cuisine is now more popular and appreciated around the world than ever. What does it mean for their health and well-being when many Mexicans eat fewer tortillas and more instant noodles, while global elites demand tacos made with handmade corn tortillas? This book examines the transformation of the Mexican food system since NAFTA and how it has made it harder for people to eat as they once did. The book contextualizes NAFTA within Mexico’s approach to economic development since the Revolution, noticing the role envisioned for rural and low-income people in the path to modernization. Examination of anti-poverty and public health policies in Mexico reveal how it has become easier for people to consume processed foods and beverages, even when to do so can be harmful to health. The book critiques Mexico’s strategy for addressing the public health crisis generated by rising rates of chronic disease for blaming the dietary habits of those whose lives have been upended by the economic and political shifts of NAFTA.

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.

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region's “coming of age”? This is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, the author shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, the book is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

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.

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? This book takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. The book's sweeping interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces—in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico—the book links ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.

The idea of a family level society, discussed and disputed by anthropologists for nearly half a century, assumes moving, breathing form in this book. According to this ethnography, the Matsigenka people of southeastern Peru cannot be understood or appreciated except as a family level society; the family level of sociocultural integration is for them a lived reality. Under ordinary circumstances, the largest social units are individual households or small extended-family hamlets. In the absence of such “tribal” features as villages, territorial defense and warfare, local or regional leaders, and public ceremonials, these people put a premium on economic self-reliance, control of aggression within intimate family settings, and freedom to believe and act in their own perceived self-interest. The book shows how the Matsigenka, whose home is the Amazon rainforest, are able to meet virtually all their material needs with the skills and labor available to the individual household. They try to raise their children to be independent and self-reliant, yet in control of their emotional, impulsive natures, so that they can get along in intimate, cooperative living groups. Their belief that self-centered impulsiveness is dangerous and self-control is fulfilling anchors their moral framework, which is expressed in abundant stories and myths. Although, as the book points out, such people are often described in negative terms as lacking in features of social and cultural complexity, it finds their small-community lifestyle efficient, rewarding, and very well adapted to their environment.