This book was intended as a guide for students and researchers who begin to study indigenous populations in Mexico. It addresses core questions that authors identified as needing further dissemination during their experience as researchers and as faculty at the National University of Mexico (UNAM). The book presents a succinct but rigorous overview of 100 questions related with indigenous populations, using references form varied academic sources, as well as form governmental and non-governmental organizations on matters as policy and politics, anthropology, sociodemographic issues, linguistics, juridical processes, and others.

Well-written, loaded with information, and with a rich assortment of illustrations, each Discoveries RM volume is a look at one facet of art, archaeology, music, history, philosophy, popular culture, science, or nature. These innovatively designed, affordably priced, compact paperbacks bring ideas to life and amplify our understanding of civilization in a new way.

This books presents Maya culture read from their own historical reality. It contains a critical reading, based on historical materialism as theoretical framework.

Spanning the years of civil war in Guatemala, Unfinished Conquest portrays an embattled country facing the third cycle of a conquest that began when the conquistadors arrived in the sixteenth century. As personal narrative weaves with reportage and oral testimony, we meet the victims, champions, and villains of a society torn apart by violence and injustice.

Indigenous allies helped the Spanish gain a foothold in the Americas. What did these Indian conquistadors expect from the partnership, and what were the implications of their involvement in Spain's New World empire? Laura Matthew's study of Ciudad Vieja, Guatemala--the first study to focus on a single allied colony over the entire colonial period--places the Nahua, Zapotec, and Mixtec conquistadors of Guatemala and their descendants within a deeply Mesoamerican historical context. Drawing on archives, ethnography, and colonial Mesoamerican maps, Matthew argues that the conquest cannot be fully understood without considering how these Indian conquistadors first invaded and then, of their own accord and largely by their own rules, settled in Central America. ...Throughout "Memories of Conquest," Matthew charts the power of colonialism to reshape and restrict Mesoamerican society--even for those most favored by colonial policy and despite powerful continuities in Mesoamerican culture.

"This book explores local notions of public wealth in indigenous Amazonia, placing particular importance in how indigenous views of wealth are linked to the creation of strong, productive, and moral individuals and collectivities, providing thought-provoking new approaches to understanding wealth in non-capitalist, kin-based societies"--Provided by publisher.

This book compiles essays that address issues relevant to examine native populations and environment in the Amazon region, from the perspective of human and political ecology

This book draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. The book suggests a natural history where humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

The societies of the Vaupés region are now among the most documented indigenous cultures of the New World, in part because they are thought to resemble earlier civilizations lost during initial colonial conflict. Here at last is the eagerly awaited publication of a posthumous work by the man widely regarded as the preeminent authority on Vaupés Amazonian societies. Cubeo Hehénewa Religious Thought will be the definitive account of the religious worldview of a significant Amazonian culture. Cubeo religious thought incorporates ideas about the nature of the cosmos, society, and human life; the individual's orientation to the world; the use of hallucinogenic substances; and a New World metaphysics. This volume was substantially completed before Irving Goldman's death, but Peter Wilson has edited it for publication, providing a thorough introduction to Goldman's work.

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies--a realm that need not abide by binary logics--reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work.  

This volume compiles 14 essays concerning the evolution of Inca languages throughout their history. The book addresses first the "puquina", a language native to the Andean high-plateau. Then, the book covers the Aymara and Quechua languages, which are native from the center of the Andes. These essays are studies of historical-linguistic and applied philology, based on ethno-history and ethno-archaeology data from the Andean region. These studies seek to challenge existing theories concerning Inca cultural history and linguistic history.

This book provides a sociological and historical analysis of Brazil's colonial history and its connections with the social composition of contemporary Brazil. This is one of the most important classical analysis of Latin American identity.
An electronic version of this material is also available.

Presenting a study of the civilizations which ruled the Andean regions before the arrival of the Spanish, this book describes how the diversity of the Andean landscape has stamped a special character on its mysterious cities, which followed sacred geometry and were places for religious worship.

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is the first comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a fascinating story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, Charles Stanish's book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material that has not yet been published. This landmark work brings the author's intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. Stanish provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, he discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. He then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of first Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius. The provocative data and interpretations of this book will also make us think anew about the rise and fall of other civilizations throughout history.

Studies representing the following languages: Paumarí, Cubeo, Tucano, Kayabí and Suruí, spoken in Brazil, and Coguí, Guahibo, and Coreguaje, spoken in Colombia.

Novel, narrating the story of a family that makes a journey through Venezuela to learn more about the indigenous peoples of the territory.

The book presents the life of the communities of the Chaco region in the Argentine north, through the images of photographer Pablo Lasansky. The black and white photographs are the result of two years of work with communities of the Wichi. Toba, and Chorate peoples, organized in the Lhaka Honhat Association of Native Communities. The work is part of a campaign by the indigenous organization to create awareness of the existence of these communities and of their demands for the legalization of their traditional territories. Pablo Lasansky is head of the photography department of the Noticias Argentinas agency and works with IWGIA to produce images of the various indigenous peoples of South America. He was involved as a photographer and editor in the "Argentinian Photojournalism" exhibitions that documented the transition to democracy in Argentina and has had photos published in Democracia Vigilada, Argentina En Fotos, and Argentina, Patrimonio. He won the Interpress Photo prize in Moscow in 1985. Francisco Perez is the president of Lhaka Honhat and coordinator of the Association of Aboriginal Communities. Morita Carrasco is an anthropologist.

This book is an archaeological study of early pre-colonial inhabitants of the Argentinian Andes and Patagoina.

This book analyses the forced subjugation of indigenous communities from the Argentinian Patagonia, during the historical process of creation and establishment of the modern and capitalist Nation-State.

This book presents an study of Mapuche communities, covering both, their recent and violent colonization (only in the late 1800s) and their present reality as a struggling community in defense of their identity.
(Summary from Librería Desnivel database)

This book is a study of the representations of the conquistador, the native inhabitants, and the landscape in two accounts of the conquest of Chile - Pedro de Valdivia's Cartas de relacón written to the Emperor Charles V between 1545 and 1552 and Gerónimo de Vivar's chronicle completed in 1558. Having had access to Valdivia's letters, Vivar transformed the conquistador's images of the conquest to suit his very different purpose for writing, his audience, and the genre in which he wrote. In order to set forth their different interpretations of this historic event, both writers availed themselves of rhetorical devices and techniques as well as familiar modes of narrative construction.

The first English translation of this an masterpiece of Chilean poetry.
The Spanish version is also available at the library:
"La Araucana" Call Number: PQ6389 .A2 1993