The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador (Interp Culture New Millennium) - Softcover

Uzendoski, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252072553 ISBN 13: 9780252072550

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2005

Synopsis

Michael Uzendoski's theoretically informed work analyzes value from the perspective of the Napo Runa people of the Amazonian Ecuador. 

Based upon historical and archival research, as well as the author's years of fieldwork in indigenous communities, The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuadorpresents theoretical issues of value, poetics, and kinship as linked to the author's intersubjective experiences in Napo Runa culture. Drawing on insights from the theory of gift and value, Uzendoski argues that Napo Runa culture personifies value by transforming things into people through a process of subordinating them to human relationships. While many traditional exchange models treat the production of things as inconsequential, the Napo Runa understand production to involve a relationship with natural beings (plants, animals, and spirits of the forest) that they believe share spiritual substance, or samai. Value is the outcome of a complicated poetics of transformation by which things and persons are woven into kinship forms that define daily social and ritual life.

About this title

About the Author

Michael A. Uzendoski is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, History, and Humanities at the Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO), Ecuador, and the author of The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252072553
• ISBN 13: 9780252072550
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 216