Kategoria BISAC: History >> Latin America - South America

In republican Colombia, salt became an important source of revenue not just to individuals, but to the state, which levied taxes on it and in some cases controlled and profited from its production. The salt trade consistently accounted for roughly ten percent of government income.

In the town of la Salina de Chita, in Boyaca province, thermal springs offered vast amounts of salt, and its procurement and distribution was placed under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Finance. Focusing his study on la Salina, Joshua M. Rosenthal presents a fascinating glimpse into the workings of the...

First published in 1555, Cabeza de Vaca's narrative of his South American expeditions is a detailed account of his five years as governor of Spain's province of the Rio de la Plata in South America. Cabeza de Vaca was already a celebrated explorer by the time he went to La Plata, known for his great trek across North America in the 1520s and 1530s and for the Relaci n he wrote about that journey. His tales of his river and forest explorations in South America show that he had lost none of his early curiosity and drive. He was the great secular champion of the native peoples of the New...

While doing fieldwork in Peguche, Ecuador, Linda D'Amico found herself working with and befriending Rosa Lema, a woman who had previously worked with anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons. One of the founding mothers of anthropology, Parsons's 1940 fieldwork in Peguche laid foundations for the development of feminist anthropology and ethnic studies. Lema, while unknown to most Americans, is an indigenous woman whose efforts to bring changes to her village and her country--most notably as ambassador for Galo Plaza's government's Cultural Mission to promote economic integration--afford a unique...

In this concise, accessible addition to Oxford's What Everyone Needs to Know(R) series, Miguel Tinker Salas -- a native of Venezuela who has written extensively about the country -- takes a broadly chronological approach that focuses especially on oil and its effects on...

Of Cannibals and Kings collects the very earliest accounts of the native peoples of the Americas, including selections from the descriptions of Columbus's first two voyages; documents reflecting the initial colonial occupation in Haiti, Venezuela, and Guyana; and the first ethnographic account of the Tainos by the missionary Ramon Pane. This primal anthropology directly guided a rapacious discovery of the lands of both wild cannibals and golden kings.

This study of the German community of early twentieth-century Buenos Aires is a major contribution to the literature on Argentine history and on the New World immigrant experience. Beginning with the first wave of immigration in the late nineteenth century and continuing to the outbreak of World War II, Ronald C. Newton reconstructs the growth, development, and influence of a powerful foreign population in what was then the largest city in South America.

In the three decades before World War I, Argentina became a major food-producing and exporting country. Through the port of Buenos...

"Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador" chronicles the changing forms of indigenous engagement with the Ecuadorian state since the early nineteenth century that, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, had facilitated the growth of the strongest unified indigenous movement in Latin America.
Built around nine case studies from nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ecuador, "Highland Indians and the State in Modern Ecuador" presents state formation as an uneven process, characterized by tensions and contradictions, in which Indians and other subalterns actively participated....

Dimensions of Development traces the 'development' of Allpachico, a village in the Peruvian central highlands. Susan Vincent examines four aid projects in the area, each following distinct international trends, that took place between 1984 and 2008 within the context of wider state and global political and economic systems.

A unique historical ethnography, Dimensions of Development illustrates how state and NGO projects have drawn Allpachique?os deeper into capitalism and have brought about challenges to the local political structure, the comunidad campesina. While...