Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia: Anthropological Perspectives

"Brings together an international collection of leading Amazonia specialists to rethink some of the most fundamental categories through which anthropologists have traditionally conceptualized history and change. The result is a sophisticated interrogation of the ways we normally think about indigenous Amazonian cultures and a productive challenge to anthropology as a whole."--Donald Pollock, State University of New York, Buffalo These groundbreaking essays by internationally renowned anthropologists advance a simple argument--that native Amazonian societies are highly dynamic. Change and transformation define the indigenous history of the Amazon from before European conquest to the present. Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork and firsthand analysis of indigenous history, this collection examines the concepts of time and change as they played out in areas ranging from religion, cosmology, and mortuary practices to attitudes toward ethnic difference and the treatment of animals. Without imposing traditionally Western notions of what "time" and "change" mean, the collection looks at how native Amazonians experienced forms of cultural memory and at how their narratives of the past helped construct their sense of the present and, inevitably, their own identity. The volume offers some of the most interesting and nuanced discussions to date on Amazonian conceptualizations of temporality and change . Carlos Fausto is associate professor of anthropology at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Museu Nacional. Michael Heckenberger is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida.