The Interoceanic Highway is many things to many people: an emblematic project during a period focused on integration, a dream realized for an isolated region, a symbol of the profound fragility of state institutions, a key cause of political corruption, and a major driver of ecological and cultural devastation. This highway links the Andean highlands with the Amazonian lowlands in southern Peru, offering an outlet for Brazil's emergent economy. While it finally brought an end to the isolation of Madre de Dios and other parts of southern Peru and the western Amazon, it was made possible by political corruption revealed in the Lava Jato scandal, and it permitted the spread of criminal business activities. But the Interoceanic Highway's deeper history must be appreciated in order to fully understand why it was built and the impacts it has generated. The Road to the Land of the Mother of God explores more than five hundred years of the history of Peru's Interoceanic Highway, showing how the purposes, portrayals, and importance of roads change fundamentally over time, and thus how roads bring significantly more impacts and costs than their advocates and critics generally anticipate. By taking a deeper look at infrastructure history, Stephen G. Perz and Jorge Luis Castillo Hurtado portray infrastructure as an integrative optic for understanding changes in local livelihoods, regional development, and social conflicts.

One of the most fascinating books on pre-Columbian and early colonial Peru was written by a Peruvian Indian named Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala. This book, The First New Chronicle and Good Government, covers pre-Inca times, various aspects of Inca culture, the Spanish conquest, and colonial times up to around 1615 when the manuscript was finished. Now housed in the Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark, and viewable online at www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm, the original manuscript has 1,189 pages accompanied by 398 full-page drawings that constitute the most accurate graphic depiction of Inca and colonial Peruvian material culture ever done. Working from the original manuscript and consulting with fellow Quechua- and Spanish-language experts, Roland Hamilton here provides the most complete and authoritative English translation of approximately the first third of The First New Chronicle and Good Government. The sections included in this volume (pages 1–369 of the manuscript) cover the history of Peru from the earliest times and the lives of each of the Inca rulers and their wives, as well as a wealth of information about ordinances, age grades, the calendar, idols, sorcerers, burials, punishments, jails, songs, palaces, roads, storage houses, and government officials. One hundred forty-six of Guaman Poma's detailed illustrations amplify the text.

An exploration of the diverse experiments in digital futures as they advance far from the celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. In Networking Peripheries, Anita Chan shows how digital cultures flourish beyond Silicon Valley and other celebrated centers of technological innovation and entrepreneurship. The evolving digital cultures in the Global South vividly demonstrate that there are more ways than one to imagine what digital practice and global connection could look like. To explore these alternative developments, Chan investigates the diverse initiatives being undertaken to “network” the nation in contemporary Peru, from attempts to promote the intellectual property of indigenous artisans to the national distribution of digital education technologies to open technology activism in rural and urban zones. Drawing on ethnographic accounts from government planners, regional free-software advocates, traditional artisans, rural educators, and others, Chan demonstrates how such developments unsettle dominant conceptions of information classes and innovations zones. Government efforts to turn rural artisans into a new creative class progress alongside technology activists' efforts to promote indigenous rights through information tactics; plans pressing for the state wide adoption of open source–based technologies advance while the One Laptop Per Child initiative aims to network rural classrooms by distributing laptops. As these cases show, the digital cultures and network politics emerging on the periphery do more than replicate the technological future imagined as universal from the center.

The Inca civilization of Peru was one of the gratest of the ancient civilizations of the Americas. Famous for their massive temples and fortresses built from huge blocks of stone and decorated with sheets of pure gold, the Incas also developed a system of government, capable of holding a vast area of territory together, and an extensive system of roads, connecting administrative centres, which acted as a means of colonization. Their religion of human sacrifice, worshipping Inti, the Sun God, was forcibly imposed throughout the empire. The population in 1500 numbered between six and seven million, but in the 1530s the Spanish, led by conquistador Pizarro, arrived in Peru. In their search for gold they devastated the Inca culture, destroying its treasures, killing its leaders and bringing to an end the infrastructure of its empire. By the 1570s, native American control in Peru had been completely lost and the civilization was no more. With Pizarro came Mansio Serra de Leguizamon, who became the last of the Spanish conquistadors to die. This book tells his story. After crossing the Atlantic when still in his teens, he played a central part in the conquest of the Incas, survived imprisonment and torture, took an Inca princess as his lover, abandoned his wife for the gaming tables of Lima, and spent the rest of his life in Peru. He died at the age of 78, leaving a famous apology for the conquest in his will. This book takes this document as its starting point, weaving a tale of the vicious subjugation of the Inca civilization.

"This book offers a historic and anthropological perspective from which to understand the fragility of isolated indigenous groups in the face of contact with outside society. It helps us appreciate the importance, in terms of cultural and biological diversity, of safeguarding their territories for both their future and that of the human race." "Drawing on scientific and legal principles, international agreements, and primarily from the perspective of human rights, Beatriz Huertas Castillo presents solid arguments concerning the urgent need for national and international efforts to defend the territories, cultural integrity and life ways of isolated indigenous peoples."--BOOK JACKET.