Witness to Sovereignty

"This book spans more than 30 years of history, the same three decades in which indigenous sovereignty' emerged from five centuries of banishment as an unauthorized and unspeakable taboo to become a major topic of national political contention. Varese is both the author of this fascinating chronicle and a key actor in the very process and transformations that he narrates. The arenas of these political practices have an impressive scope: denouncement in international forums of repression against indigenous peoples; work on international legal instruments for indigenous rights; a pioneering land titling program for indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon; innovative bilingual-transcultural education and cultural worker' training in Oaxaca; work with transnational organizations of indigenous immigrants in California. This book also breaks ground theoretically, by offering a creative fusion of a political economy' analytical frame with ethnography sensitive to the meaning, premises, politics and imaginaries of indigenous peoples' cultural production and resources--what might be called indigenous hermeneutics. This book allows the reader to become a witness to sovereignty, by following Varese's 30-year odyssey of politically engaged scholarship on and with indigenous movements of Latin America." --Charles R. Hale, University of Texas, Austin, President, Latin American Studies Association

Stefano Varese is a Peruvian anthropologist with many years' experience in Peru's Amazonian region, southeastern Mexico, Central America, and the trans-border region of Mexico and California. His publications include Salt of the Mountain, Indgenas y Educacin en Mxico, Proyectos Etnicos y Proyectos Nacionales, Pueblos indios, soberana y globalismo, and La Ruta Mixteca. Varese is currently professor and chair of the Department of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis and director of the Indigenous Research Centers of the Americas at UC Davis.