Time and Memory in Indigenous Amazonia — Anthropological Perspectives

“Broadens and deepens the anthropological project of understanding histories and historicities in Lowland South America that has emerged as a central theme in recent decades. . . . The outstanding quality and ethnographic richness of the nine case studies included in the volume are a tribute to just how far Amazonian ethnology has come since the 1980s.”—Journal of Anthropological Research

“Explores the native Amazonian sense of history in a way that enriched previous debates about ‘cold’ and ‘hot’ societies. The book does more than simply engage ethnography with temporality; it demonstrates that ‘historicity’ and ‘identity’ are mutually constitutive.”—Tipiti: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

“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

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, associate professor of anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, is the author of Warfare and Shamanism in Amazonia. Michael Heckenberger, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Florida, is the author of The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, AD 1000–2000.