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First edition in English. Includes index and 36 black & white photographs. Previous owner's bookplate on the front pastedown (inside front cover), else clean and undamaged inside and out. The dust jacket is price-clipped, lightly soiled with a tape repair at the top edge of the spine. It also has wear to top and bottom edges including a few tiny chips and tears, none of which exceed about 1/8". The attractive illustration of an Andean flute player is still clean and bright (see photographs). Book and dust jacket will be bubble-wrapped and carefully packed in a sturdy box to ensure safe transit. "Two young Frenchmen, students of ethnology, browsing among the book-shelves of the famous Musee de l'Homme in Paris, came upon a work about the Indian village communities of South America, written in the 1920s by a Belgian ethnologist. The organization of these communities clearly dated back into the incalculable past; they had been respected by the Incas and later, had successfully resisted the violent efforts of the Spanish conquistadores to destroy them. There they were at the present time, these ancestral and persistent patterns of Indian life, about which very little was known. Bernard Delong and Jean-Luc Javal decided there and then to investigate this ethnological curiosity, and planned their journey to Bolivia and Peru; in spite of tedious delays--they were determined that theirs should be an officially accredited mission--and not a little jocularity from their friends, off they went in 1953 to the fabulous land of the Andes, the vast Altiplano, Lake Titicaca, into which the Inca emperors, cheated by the Spaniards, were alleged to have cast their wealth and art treasures for safe-keeping. This book concerns the personal, rather than the scientific part of their journey and introduces us to many Indian personalities, simple villagers as well as ilacatas or chiefs, to their sexual and religious customs and social laws, to the rites of sorcery and of marriage and death. We travel with the authors by air, jeep, gondola (a bus running to schedule), and by balsa on the huge South American rivers in an altogether new adventure, freshly told." -- the publishers. Seller Inventory # ABH4055
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