Not every world culture that has battled colonization has suffered or died. In the Ecuadorian Andean parish of Salasaca, the indigenous culture has stayed true to itself and its surroundings for centuries while adapting to each new situation. Today, indigenous Salascans continue to devote a large part of their lives to their distinctive practicesÑboth community rituals and individual behaviorsÑwhile living side by side with white-mestizo culture. In this book Rachel Corr provides a knowledgeable account of the Salasacan religion and rituals and their respective histories. Based on eighteen years of fieldwork in Salasaca, as well as extensive research in Church archivesÑincluding never-before-published documentsÑCorrÕs book illuminates how Salasacan culture adapted to Catholic traditions and recentered, reinterpreted, and even reshaped them to serve similarly motivated Salasacan practices, demonstrating the link between formal and folk Catholicism and pre-Columbian beliefs and practices. Corr also explores the intense connection between the local Salasacan rituals and the mountain landscapes around them, from peak to valley. Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is, in its portrayal of Salasacan religious culture, both thorough and all-encompassing. Sections of the book cover everything from the performance of death rituals to stories about Amazonia as Salasacans interacted with outsidersÑconquistadors and camera-toting tourists alike. Corr also investigates the role of shamanism in modern Salasacan culture, including shamanic powers and mountain spirits, and the use of reshaped, Andeanized Catholicism to sustain collective memory. Through its unique insiderÕs perspective of Salasacan spirituality, Ritual and Remembrance in the Ecuadorian Andes is a valuable anthropological work that honestly represents this peopleÕs great ability to adapt.

This book uses archaeology and ethnohistory to explore the evidence for the survival of ancestral beliefs and practices related to health and healing in Indigenous Andean communities. The authors argue that through determining the nature of the survival of beliefs around health and healing, important insights are gained into how people develop adaptive strategies for survival in a way that allows a continuity of identity and integrity. The book works through various stages of research to arrive at its conclusions. Firstly, through archaeology and ethnohistory, it establishes a ‘baseline’ of key ancestral (pre-European) Indigenous Andean beliefs related to health, illness and healing. It then proceeds to review the evidence for the survival of these ancestral beliefs and practices related to Indigenous pre-European Andean epistemologies and ontologies. Analysing the results of the first two sections, the final part reflects on the narratives around ancestral beliefs and practices and how they influence lived experience in the contemporary world. In essence, this book deals with the question 'How do people manage change?', a universal question relevant to humanity at any time, and stresses the need to recognise the significance of cultural diversity, intangible heritage and plurality. This interdisciplinary study is for researchers in ethnohistory, anthropology, medical anthropology, archaeology, history, heritage and Indigenous studies.

"A student-friendly text that tells the story of the development of the Andean republics and their people by emphasizing the themes of continuity and change over time. Henderson presents a succinct, narrative approach to Andean history that limits details about political coups and instead focuses on broader comparative social and culture aspects"--Provided by publisher.

The Ancient Central Andes presents a general overview of the prehistoric peoples and cultures of the Central Andes, the region now encompassing most of Peru and significant parts of Ecuador, Bolivia, northern Chile, and northwestern Argentina. The book contextualizes past and modern scholarship and provides a balanced view of current research. Two opening chapters present the intellectual, political, and practical background and history of research in the Central Andes and the spatial, temporal, and formal dimensions of the study of its past. Chapters then proceed in chronological order from remote antiquity to the Spanish Conquest. A number of important themes run through the book, including: the tension between those scholars who wish to study Peruvian antiquity on a comparative basis and those who take historicist approaches; the concept of "Lo Andino," commonly used by many specialists that assumes long-term, unchanging patterns of culture some of which are claimed to persist to the present; and culture change related to severe environmental events. Consensus opinions on interpretations are highlighted as are disputes among scholars regarding interpretations of the past. The Ancient Central Andes provides an up-to-date, objective survey of the archaeology of the Central Andes that is much needed. Students and interested readers will benefit greatly from this introduction to a key period in South America’s past.

The traditional costumes worn by people in the Andes—women's woolen skirts, men's ponchos, woven belts, and white felt hats—instantly identify them as natives of the region and serve as revealing markers of ethnicity, social class, gender, age, and so on. Because costume expresses so much, scholars study it to learn how the indigenous people of the Andes have identified themselves over time, as well as how others have identified and influenced them. Costume and History in Highland Ecuador assembles for the first time for any Andean country the evidence for indigenous costume from the entire chronological range of prehistory and history. The contributors glean a remarkable amount of information from pre-Hispanic ceramics and textile tools, archaeological textiles from the Inca empire in Peru, written accounts from the colonial period, nineteenth-century European-style pictorial representations, and twentieth-century textiles in museum collections. Their findings reveal that several garments introduced by the Incas, including men's tunics and women's wrapped dresses, shawls, and belts, had a remarkable longevity. They also demonstrate that the hybrid poncho from Chile and the rebozo from Mexico diffused in South America during the colonial period, and that the development of the rebozo in particular was more interesting and complex than has previously been suggested. The adoption of Spanish garments such as the pollera (skirt) and man's shirt were also less straightforward and of more recent vintage than might be expected.

In a country the size of Colorado one can explore snow-capped mountain peaks, tropical rainforests and coastal beaches. These three continental regions also offer a variety of flora and fauna that are a dream come true to the botanist, zoologist and ornithologist. The famous Galápagos Islands provide an additional living laboratory for the natural scientist. The ethnographer and sociologist will be fascinated by the diversity of Ecuador’s people and one could spend a lifetime studying the plethora of distinct ethnic, racial and linguistic groups. Students of economics will find an interesting case study of a mono-cultural economy that uses the U.S. dollar and avoids some of the pitfalls that other Latin American countries suffer from. Ecuador’s rich traditions in art, music, literature and architecture are a draw to scholars interested in culture. Ecuador has been described by one author as a “country of contrasts.” This is indeed an apt description of Ecuador’s geography and peoples. It also partially explains the nation’s traditional lack of political cohesion, which has plagued its quest for stability and development. Historical Dictionary of Ecuador contains a chronology, an introduction, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 800 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Ecuador.

Cement, Earthworms, and Cheese Factories examines the ways in which religion and community development are closely intertwined in a rural part of contemporary Latin America. Using historical, documentary, and ethnographic data collected over more than a decade as an aid worker and as a researcher in central Ecuador, Jill DeTemple examines the forces that have led to this entanglement of religion and development and the ways in which rural Ecuadorians, as well as development and religious personnel, negotiate these complicated relationships. Technical innovations have been connected to religious change since the time of the Inca conquest, and Ecuadorians have created defensive strategies for managing such connections. Although most analyses of development either tend to ignore the genuinely religious roots of development or conflate development with religion itself, these strategies are part of a larger negotiation of progress and its meaning in twenty-first-century Ecuador. DeTemple focuses on three development agencies—a liberationist Catholic women's group, a municipal unit dedicated to agriculture, and evangelical Protestant missionaries engaged in education and medical work—to demonstrate that in some instances Ecuadorians encourage a hybridity of religion and development, while in other cases they break up such hybridities into their component parts, often to the consternation of those with whom religious and development discourse originate. This management of hybrids reveals Ecuadorians as agents who produce and reform modernities in ways often unrecognized by development scholars, aid workers, or missionaries, and also reveals that an appreciation of religious belief is essential to a full understanding of diverse aspects of daily life.