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How are spiritual power and self-transformation cultivated in street ministries? This book provides an in-depth analysis of Pentecostal ministries in Puerto Rico that were founded and run by self-identified “ex-addicts,” ministries that are also widespread in poor Black and Latino neighborhoods in the U.S. mainland. The book melds cultural anthropology and psychiatry. Through the stories of ministry converts, the book examines key elements of Pentecostalism: mysticism, ascetic practice, and the idea of other-worldliness. It then reconstructs the ministries' strategies of spiritual victory over addiction: transformation techniques to build spiritual strength and authority through pain and discipline; cultivation of alternative masculinities based on male converts' reclamation of domestic space; and radical rupture from a post-industrial “culture of disposability.” By contrasting the ministries' logic of addiction with that of biomedicine, the book rethinks roads to recovery, discovering unexpected convergences with biomedicine while revealing the allure of street corner ministries.

One of the richest and most complex civilizations in ancient America evolved around Lake Titicaca in southern Peru and northern Bolivia. This book is a comprehensive synthesis of four thousand years of prehistory for the entire Titicaca region. It is a story of the transition from hunting and gathering to early agriculture, to the formation of the Tiwanaku and Pucara civilizations, and to the double conquest of the region, first by the powerful neighboring Inca in the fifteenth century and a century later by the Spanish Crown. Based on more than fifteen years of field research in Peru and Bolivia, the book brings together a wide range of ethnographic, historical, and archaeological data, including material not previously published. It brings together intimate knowledge of the ethnography and archaeology in this region to bear on major theoretical concerns in evolutionary anthropology. The book provides a broad comparative framework for evaluating how these complex societies developed. After giving an overview of the region's archaeology and cultural history, it discusses the history of archaeological research in the Titicaca Basin, as well as its geography, ecology, and ethnography. The book then synthesizes the data from six archaeological periods in the Titicaca Basin within an evolutionary anthropological framework. Titicaca Basin prehistory has long been viewed through the lens of Inca intellectuals and the Spanish state. This book demonstrates that the ancestors of the Aymara people of the Titicaca Basin rivaled the Incas in wealth, sophistication, and cultural genius.

Using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Brazilian hospitals, this book shows how plastic surgeons and patients navigate the public health system to transform beauty into a basic health right. The book historically traces the national concern with beauty to Brazilian eugenics, which established beauty as an index of the nation's racial improvement. From here, the book explains how plastic surgeons became the main proponents of a raciology of beauty, using it to gain the backing of the Brazilian state. Beauty can be understood as an immaterial form of value that the book calls “affective capital,” which maps onto and intensifies the social hierarchies of Brazilian society. Patients experience beauty as central to national belonging and to gendered aspirations of upward mobility, and they become entangled in biopolitical rationalities that complicate their ability to consent to the risks of surgery. This book explores not only the biopolitical regime that made beauty a desirable national project, but also the subtle ways in which beauty is laden with affective value within everyday social practices—thus becoming the terrain upon which race, class, and gender hierarchies are reproduced and contested in Brazil.

Two of the world's most pressing needs—biodiversity conservation and agricultural development in the Third World—are addressed in this multidisciplinary investigation in geography. The book challenges current opinion by showing that the world-renowned diversity of crops grown in the Andes may not be as hopelessly endangered as is widely believed. It uses the lengthy history of small-scale farming by Indians in Peru, including contemporary practices and attitudes, to shed light on prospects for the future. During prolonged fieldwork among Peru's Quechua peasants and villagers in the mountains near Cuzco, evidence that much of the region's biodiversity is being skillfully conserved on a de facto basis was found to be convincing, as has been true during centuries of tumultuous agrarian transitions. Diversity occurs unevenly, however, because of the inability of poorer Quechua farmers to plant the same variety as their well-off neighbors and because land use pressures differ in different locations. Social, political, and economic upheavals have accentuated the unevenness, and this book's geographical findings are all the more important as a result. Diversity is indeed at serious risk, but not necessarily for the same reasons that have been cited by others. The originality of this study is in its correlation of ecological conservation, ethnic expression, and economic development.

This synthesis of history, anthropology, and linguistics gives a view of the first two hundred years of the Spanish colonization of the Yucatec Maya. Drawing on a range of sources, it documents the crucial role played by language in cultural conquest: how colonial Mayan emerged in the age of the cross, how it was taken up by native writers to become the language of indigenous literature, and how it ultimately became the language of rebellion against the system that produced it. The book includes analyses of the linguistic practices of both missionaries and Mayas—as found in bilingual dictionaries, grammars, catechisms, land documents, native chronicles, petitions, and the forbidden Maya Books of Chilam Balam. It presents an approach to the study of religious and cultural conversion that aims to illuminate the history of Latin America and beyond.

This ethnography set in contemporary Peru provides an analysis of the making and unmaking of class consciousness among the urban poor. The author's research strategy is multifaceted; through interviews, participant observation, and survey research she digs deeply into the popular culture of the social activists and shantytown residents she studies. The result is a penetrating look at how social movements evolve, how poor people construct independent political cultures, and how the ideological domination of oppressed classes can shatter. This work is a new chapter in the growing literature on the formation of social movements, chronicling the transformation of Peru's poor from a culture of deference and clientelism in the late 1960s to a population mobilized for radical political action today.

This book tells the stories of tequila and mezcal, two of Mexico’s most iconic products, to investigate the politics of protecting local products in a global market. As people have yearned to connect with the people and places that produce their food, the concept of terroir—the taste of place—has become increasingly salient. Tequila and mezcal are both protected by denominations of origin (DOs), legal designations based on the notion of terroir. The DOs link production to particular regions, while quality standards guarantee each product’s safety and authenticity. Advocates argue that the DOs and the standards ensure the reputation of Mexico’s national spirits, expand market opportunities, and protect Mexico’s cultural heritage. But the institutions that regulate tequila and mezcal ultimately protect the interests of a small group of powerful global elites more than anyone else. The growing global demand for tequila and mezcal has led to fame and fortune for a handful of people, while excluding and marginalizing many others. The cases analyzed in this book illustrate the limitations of relying on alternative markets to protect food cultures and rural livelihoods. Because arguments about how to define and regulate tequila and mezcal have been conducted within the parameters of the global marketplace, they have privileged consumers while largely ignoring the perspectives of producers, farmers, workers, and communities. There is a need to move beyond market-based models to create more democratic, participatory, and inclusive ways of protecting and valuing local foods and drinks, as well as the people who make them.

In the two decades since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, Mexico has seen an epidemic of diet-related illness. While globalization has been associated with an increase in chronic disease around the world, in Mexico, the speed and scope of the rise has been called a public health emergency. The shift in Mexican foodways is happening at a moment when the country’s ancestral cuisine is now more popular and appreciated around the world than ever. What does it mean for their health and well-being when many Mexicans eat fewer tortillas and more instant noodles, while global elites demand tacos made with handmade corn tortillas? This book examines the transformation of the Mexican food system since NAFTA and how it has made it harder for people to eat as they once did. The book contextualizes NAFTA within Mexico’s approach to economic development since the Revolution, noticing the role envisioned for rural and low-income people in the path to modernization. Examination of anti-poverty and public health policies in Mexico reveal how it has become easier for people to consume processed foods and beverages, even when to do so can be harmful to health. The book critiques Mexico’s strategy for addressing the public health crisis generated by rising rates of chronic disease for blaming the dietary habits of those whose lives have been upended by the economic and political shifts of NAFTA.

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region's “coming of age”? This is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, the author shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, the book is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

Can we address the issue of nationalism without polemics and restore it to the domain of social science? This book takes a major step in that direction by applying anthropological tools to the study of national culture. The book's sweeping interpretation of Mexican national ideology constructs an entirely new theoretical framework for the study of national and regional cultures everywhere. With an analysis of culture and ideology in internally differentiated regional spaces—in this case Morelos and the Huasteca in Mexico—the book links ethnographic and historical research to two specific aspects of Mexican national ideology and culture: the history of legitimacy and charisma in Mexican politics, and the relationship between the national community and racial ideology.

The idea of a family level society, discussed and disputed by anthropologists for nearly half a century, assumes moving, breathing form in this book. According to this ethnography, the Matsigenka people of southeastern Peru cannot be understood or appreciated except as a family level society; the family level of sociocultural integration is for them a lived reality. Under ordinary circumstances, the largest social units are individual households or small extended-family hamlets. In the absence of such “tribal” features as villages, territorial defense and warfare, local or regional leaders, and public ceremonials, these people put a premium on economic self-reliance, control of aggression within intimate family settings, and freedom to believe and act in their own perceived self-interest. The book shows how the Matsigenka, whose home is the Amazon rainforest, are able to meet virtually all their material needs with the skills and labor available to the individual household. They try to raise their children to be independent and self-reliant, yet in control of their emotional, impulsive natures, so that they can get along in intimate, cooperative living groups. Their belief that self-centered impulsiveness is dangerous and self-control is fulfilling anchors their moral framework, which is expressed in abundant stories and myths. Although, as the book points out, such people are often described in negative terms as lacking in features of social and cultural complexity, it finds their small-community lifestyle efficient, rewarding, and very well adapted to their environment.

The acclaimed book Soldiers in a Narrow Land went inside the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Carrying Chile's story up to the present, this book now offers this account of how Chile rebuilt its democracy after 17 years of military rule—with the former dictator watching, and waiting, from the sidelines. The book discusses the major players, events, and institutions in Chile's recent political history, delving into such topics as the environmental situation, the economy, and the election of Michelle Bachelet. Throughout, it examines Pinochet's continuing influence on public life as it tells how he grudgingly ceded power; successfully fought investigations into his human rights record and finances; kept command of the army for eight years after leaving the presidency; was detained on human rights charges; and died without being convicted of any of the many serious crimes of which he was accused. Chile has now become one of South America's greatest economic and political successes, but as we find in this book, it remains a country burdened with a painful past.

This book provides the first in-depth exploration of how Latin American feminist and queer activists have interpreted the internet, from its inception in the region through the explosion of social media. They have done so to support their counterpublics: the diverse and dynamic arenas in which they develop their identities, build their communities, and hone their strategies for social change. This region boasts a long history of gender- and sexuality-based counterpublic construction, supported by a range of alternative media. Since the 1990s, aided by a global network of women and men dedicated to establishing an accessible internet, activists have translated the internet into their own vernacular. Through an analysis of original research based on over 125 interviews and online evidence spanning fifteen years, this book advances three interrelated arguments. First, it supports the sociomaterial thesis that, as with all technologies, the internet is influenced by the social contexts in which it is embedded. But this influence changes over time and place. Second, the internet in itself offers no guarantee of social or political transformation. Instead, this book’s third argument is that the internet’s potential depends on the consciousness and creativity with which activists translate it into their own contexts, through adopting, sharing, and wielding it. In Latin America, feminist and queer counterpublic organizations have taken advantage of all three layers of the internet – physical, logical, and content – to extend and enrich their communities. And, led by their “keystone species” of early adopting, technologically savvy members, they have transformed applications from distribution lists to blogs in order to reflect their values.

This book describes the work of homicide detectives in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. In the midst of violence, detectives investigate two types of crimes—homicide and the routine killings of citizens by police known as resisting arrests followed by death. These two types of violence relay two different logics of killing, one on the part of an organized crime group known as the Primeiro Comando da Capital or PCC, and the other of a state broadly supportive of highly lethal police. This book tracks the ways that these two logics of killing and their subjects of violence align in moral and practical terms. This alignment reveals a system of governance in which who can live and who can die is largely defined by a de facto and mutually observed consensus between the state and the PCC, most intensely felt in the informally urbanized parts of the city. And yet that consensus can itself be killed, breaking apart into moments of acute and violent crisis in the city in which police and supposed PCC affiliates are killed by each other with near abandon. São Paulo's cyclical pattern of violence, which has long periods of relative peace punctuated by violent crisis, is rooted in the empirical practice of sovereignty by consensus that is deeply connected to the two prominent pressures of the contemporary moment, namely, security and democracy.

The Mayos, an indigenous people of northwestern Mexico, live in small towns spread over southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa, lands of remarkable biological diversity. Traditional Mayo knowledge is quickly being lost as this culture becomes absorbed into modern Mexico. Moreover, as big agriculture spreads into the region, the natural biodiversity of these lands is also rapidly disappearing. This ethnobotany, based on hundreds of interviews with the Mayos and illustrated with photographs, helps preserve our knowledge of both an indigenous culture and an endangered environment. It contains a comprehensive description of northwest Mexico's tropical deciduous forests and thornscrub on the traditional Mayo lands reaching from the Sea of Cortés to the foothills of the Sierra Madre. The first half of the book is an account of the climate, geology, and vegetation of the region. The chapters also provide a history of the people, their language, culture, festival traditions, and plant use. The second half of the book is an annotated list of plants, presenting detailed findings on plant use in Mayo culture.

Since its independence in the nineteenth century, the South American state of Colombia has been shaped by decades of bloody political violence. In The Para-State, author Aldo Civico draws on interviews with paramilitary death squads and drug lords to provide a cultural interpretation of the country’s history of violence and state control. Between 2003 and 2008, Civico was given unprecedented access to some of Colombia’s most notorious leaders of the death squads, whose words and life stories he chronicles. He also conducted interviews with the victims of paramilitary’s violence, with drug kingpins, and with vocal public supporters of the paramilitary groups. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, this riveting work demonstrates how the paramilitaries have, in essence, become the war machine deployed by the Colombian state to control and maintain its territory and political legitimacy.

Based on the spontaneous conversations of shantytown youth hanging out on the streets of their neighborhoods and interviews from the comfortable living rooms of the middle class, Race and the Brazilian Body asks how racial ideas about the superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of blackness continue to play out in the daily lives of Rio de Janeiro’s residents. The book draws on over 20 years of research to explain what is called Brazil’s “comfortable racial contradiction,” in which embedded structural racism that very visibly privileges whiteness exists alongside a deeply held pride in the country’s history of racial mixture and lack of overt racial conflict. This linguistic and ethnographic account describes how cariocas (people who live in Rio de Janeiro) carefully “read” the body for racial signs. The amount of whiteness or blackness a body displays is determined not only through observations of phenotypical features, including skin color, hair texture, and facial features, but also through careful attention paid to cultural and linguistic practices, including the use of nonstandard speech that is commonly described as slang (gíria). It is through adherence to implicit social norms that encourage individuals to display whiteness (by demonstrating a “good appearance”), to avoid blackness, and to “be cordial” (by not noticing racial differences), that Rio residents determine who belongs on the world famous beaches of Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon, who deserves to shop in privatized, carefully guarded, air conditioned shopping malls, and who merits the rights of citizenship.

Fashion knock-offs are everywhere. Even in the out-of-the-way markets of highland Guatemala, fake branded clothes offer a cheap, stylish alternative for people who can’t afford high-priced originals. Fashion companies have taken notice, ensuring that international trade agreements include stronger intellectual property protections to prevent and punish brand “piracy,” the unauthorized reproduction of trademarked brand names and logos. Regulating Style approaches the fashion industry from the perspective of indigenous Maya people who make and sell knock-offs, asking why they copy and wear popular brands, how they interact with legal frameworks and state agents who criminalize their livelihoods, and exploring the localized ethics, norms, and values that structure their trade. Beyond showing that intellectual property proponents misrepresent the presumed threat that “piracy” poses to the economy, this book argues that international law itself perpetuates powerful divisions of race, class, and gender across a postcolonial field, institutionalizing a discriminatory divide between populations designated as rightful creators and consumers and others disparaged as mere copycats. Drawing on cultural studies, archaeology, and material culture studies in anthropology, this book develops a robust theory of style that emphasizes the centrality of copying and imitation to processes of cultural production. In analyzing the relationship of style to race, class, gender, indigeneity, and discourses of entrepreneurship and development that privilege a particular model of creativity, originality, and modernity in Guatemala and beyond, Regulating Style offers a new perspective on what is really at stake for fashion companies in the globalization of intellectual property law.

This book is an anthropological account of how Peruvian emigrants raise and remit money and what that activity means for them and for their home communities. The book draws on first-hand ethnographic data from North and South America, Europe, and Japan to describe how Peruvians remit to relatives at home, collectively raise money to organize development projects in their regions of origin, and invest savings in business and other activities. The author challenges unqualified approval of remittances as beneficial resources of development for home communities and important income for home countries. The book finds a more complex situation in which remittances can also create dependency and deprivation.

Making news on Argentina's border with Brazil and Paraguay is tightly linked to security. While international political and media narratives since 9/11 have established this region as a haven of organized crime, for local residents, security is embedded in their daily social and economic realities. Drawing on the experiences of journalists who live and work in an allegedly dangerous South American region and on a personal account of collaborating on an investigative television program, Savage Frontier shows that the production of knowledge is disputed and tactical. This ethnography traces how making news in the so-called Triple Frontier depends on journalists' encounters with violent crime in Argentina's urban centers and their memories of repression under the last military regime. Concerned with the harmful socioeconomic consequences of exposing illegalized yet legitimate activities—from contraband like food and electronics to illegal adoptions—reporters protect parts of local knowledge as public secrets, thus allowing the informal cross-border economy to persist, mitigating social vulnerabilities created by a patchy presence of the state in this territorial periphery. Savage Frontier documents how local media tactically use news production to challenge ongoing criminalization and militarization of the tri-border region and to make their community more secure.