Native Christians reflects on the modes and effects of Christianity among indigenous peoples of the Americas drawing on comparative analysis of ethnographic and historical cases. Christianity in this region has been part of the process of conquest and domination, through the association usually made between civilizing and converting. While Catholic missions have emphasized the 'civilizing' process, teaching the Indians the skills which they were expected to exercise within the context of a new societal model, the Protestants have centered their work on promoting a deep internal change, or 'conversion', based on the recognition of God's existence. Various ethnologists and scholars of indigenous societies have focused their interest on understanding the nature of the transformations produced by the adoption of Christianity. The contributors in this volume take native thought as the starting point, looking at the need to relativize these transformations. Each author examines different ethnographic cases throughout the Americas, both historical and contemporary, enabling the reader to understand the indigenous points of view in the processes of adoption and transformation of new practices, objects, ideas and values.

In Brazil, where forest meets savanna, new towns, agribusiness and hydroelectric plants form a patchwork with the indigenous territories. Here, agricultural work, fishing, songs, feasts and exchanges occupy the Enawenê-nawê for eight months of each year during a season called Yankwa. Vital Diplomacy focuses on this major ceremonial cycle to shed new light on classic Amazonian themes such as kinship, gender, manioc cultivation and cuisine, relations with non-humans and foreigners, and the interplay of myth and practice, exploring how ritual contains and diverts the threat of violence by reconciling antagonistic spirits, coordinating social and gender divides, and channelling foreign relations and resources.

Economic arrangements of Romanies are complexly related to their social position. The authors of this volume explore these complexities, including how economic exchanges forge key social relationships of gender and ethnicity, how economic opportunities are constructed and seized, and how economic success and failure are transformed into attributes of social persons. They explore how, despite — or perhaps because of — their unstable and ambiguous position within the market economy, shared today with a growing number of people facing precarity and informalisation, Roma and Gypsy communities continuously re-create more or less viable economic strategies. The ethnographically based chapters share accounts of socially and economically vulnerable populations that face their situation with self-determination and creativity.

Combining linguistic, ethnological, and historical perspectives, the contributors to this volume draw on a wealth of information gathered from ten Amerindian peoples belonging to seven different linguistic families to identify the basic tenets of what might be called a native Amazonian theory of materiality and personhood.

It has been almost two decades since conditional cash transfer programs first appeared on the agendas of multilateral agencies and politicians. Latin America has often been used as a testing ground for these programs, which consist of transfers of money to subsections of the population upon meeting certain conditions, such as sending their children to school or having them vaccinated. Money from the Government in Latin America takes a comparative view of the effects of this regular transfer of money, which comes with obligations, on rural communities. Drawing on a variety of data, taken from different disciplinary perspectives, these chapters help to build an understanding of the place of conditional cash transfer programsin rural families and households, in individuals’ aspirations and visions, in communities’ relationships to urban areas, and in the overall character of these rural societies. With case studies from Chile, Mexico, Peru, Brazil and Colombia, this book will interest scholars and researchers of Latin American anthropology, sociology, development, economics and politics.

Cultural politics and identity : the public space of recognition / Barbara Weber -- Beyond understanding Rousseau and the beginning of the other / Karlfriedrich Herb -- Lévinas and the problem of mutual recognition of the consumer society and its fears / Barbara Weber -- A phenomenological perspective on the relationship between human rights and recognition / James R. Mensch -- Heidegger, Nietzsche, and the struggle for Europe / Gary E. Aylesworth -- Shared life / James Risser -- A discussion of diachronic identity : the example of the painter Masuji Ono's political transformation in Kazuo Ishiguro's novel 'An artist of the floating world' / Eval Marsal & Takara Dobashi -- The fate of hair and conversation : on moral identity and recognition in The man who wasn't there / Maria Sibylla Lotter -- Jacques Derrida : "No, again, I won't be able to-- " : of cruelty and responsibility / Petra Schweitzer -- The futility of postcolonialism : national victimhood revisited / Benjamin Zachariah -- Hygiene, secual politics, and the gendered other : Chile at the beginning of the twentieth century / Celina Tuozzo -- Anthropology, alterity and (com)motion : the quests for the other and the others' quests / Lisiane Koller Lecznieski -- Confusion of voices : the crucial dilemmas of being a human being : Czeslaw Milosz's poetry and the search for personal identity / Andrew Wiercinski -- Taking selves seriously / Susan T. Gardner -- Educating for civil friendship / Jen Glaser -- Understanding the reality interdisciplinary and arranging it socially and integratively / Maria Anna Bäuml-Rossnagl -- Art and community : aesthetic practice as exposure to the other / Dorota Glowacka -- "Weatherless dialogues," short stories / Tamara Ralis.

The first book to address the classic anthropological theme of property through the ethnography of Amazonia, Ownership and Nurture sets new and challenging terms for anthropological debates about the region and about property in general. Property and ownership have special significance and carry specific meanings in Amazonia, which has been portrayed as the antithesis of Western, property-based, civilization. Through carefully constructed studies of land ownership, slavery, shamanism, spirit mastery, aesthetics, and intellectual property, this volume demonstrates that property relations are of central importance in Amazonia, and that the ownership of persons plays an especially significant role in native cosmology.