A photographic documentary of the world of the Huaorani tribe of Ecuador.

Huaorani of the Western Snippet documents changes that the Huaorani culture of eastern Ecuador underwent over a period of fifty years. Part I focuses on the geographical, historical, sociological and economical background of the Ecuadorian Amazon as well as the problems that indigenous groups of this region face. Part II describes different aspects of Huaorani culture, and its consecutive subsections present research completed by anthropologists in different decades of twentieth century, and the data is reviewed and supplemented with data gathered during my research (2007-2013). Part III explores the life of a Huao man, Miñe, who serves as a local shaman. His different social roles are discussed in consecutive subsections in order to understand what shaped him as a person of the Huaorani group.

This is a firsthand account of a small band of Amazonian warriors and their battle to preserve their way of life from the scourge of civilization. Joe Kane, author of Running the Amazon, returns to the river to search for the Huaorani, a nation of 1300 nomadic warriors so remote that their language is unrelated to any other on Earth. For millenia all comers have been turned away from their land, a territory in the middle of the Ecuadorian Amazon the size of Massachusetts, USA.

A beating heart. A talking tree. The rain forest. Love. Mysticism. Harvest. And above all, chocolate. Dear Coco and Leo,I miss you! We all miss you! The whole forest misses you! I hear their thanks and wishes in my dreams. I hope you do, too. Prepare for a journey into a world filled with what so many crave -- the sweet savoring of a chocolate drop. A drop that can melt even the most troubled realities. But in this nuanced, heartrending story, before good can emerge, there is destruction, the bombarding of a people, their culture, heritage, sacred beliefs, and the very soul that drives their traditions. This urgent, beautiful novel takes readers into the ugly realities that surround the destruction of the Amazon rain forest and its people. Acclaimed author Laura Resau shows us that love is more powerful than hatred, and that by working together, hope can be magically restored, root and branch.

This book explores representations of Amazonian Indigenous peoples in contemporary cultural texts. It analyzes a variety of mediums from novels and films to games and exhibitions, uncovering a distorted image of Indigenous peoples of the Amazon in Euro-American common imagination. The author suggests that these texts rely on a stereotypical vision that was shaped in the first decades of colonization. The chapters consider the formation of the image of Amazonian Indigenous people throughout history and some of the contemporary issues they face, touching on daily life and themes such as shamanism and cannibalism. Together they highlight the misrepresented image of Indigenous groups in the Amazon, who are portrayed as different, even strange, in relation to Western culture. The argument put forward is that both “exotic” and “self-exoticization” rely on the notion of otherness, leading to romanticization, patronization, and caricature. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and comparative literature.

From Gustavo Politis, one of the most renowned South American archaeologists, comes the first in-depth study in English of the last “undiscovered” people of the Amazon. His work is groundbreaking and urgent, both because of encroaching guerrilla violence that makes Nukak existence perilously fragile, and because his work with the Nukak represented one of the last opportunities to conduct research with hunter-gatherers using contemporary methodological and the theoretical tools. Through a rich and comprehensive ethno-archaeological portrait of material culture “in the making,” this work makes methodological and conceptual advances in the interpretation of hunter-gather societies. Politis’s conclusions, based on six years of original research and on comparative analysis, are integrative and contribute to the identification of the multiple factors involved in the formation of hunter-gatherer archaeological assemblages.