Elizabeth Ewart – författare

Hailed once as ‘giants of the Amazon’, Panará people emerged onto a world stage in the early 1970s. What followed is a remarkable story of socio-demographic collapse, loss of territory, and subsequent recovery. Reduced to just 79 survivors in 1976, Panará people have gone on to recover and reclaim a part of their original lands in an extraordinary process of cultural and social revival. Space and Society in Central Brazil is a unique ethnographic account, in which analytical approaches to social organisation are brought into dialogue with Panará social categories and values as told in their own terms. Exploring concepts such as space, material goods, and ideas about enemies, this book examines how social categories transform in time and reveals the ways in which Panará people themselves produce their identities in constant dialogue with the forms of alterity that surround them. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students, scholars and anyone interested in the complex lives and histories of indigenous Amazonian societies.

What happens to body arts when these aesthetic practices assume fresh significance in the context of modernity? In many parts of the indigenous world, the realm of body arts has become an arena for innovation, debate, revival and repression under the conditions of modernity. Among some groups, formerly suppressed 'traditions' of body arts have recently been revived. Elsewhere, body arts have been the means for creating or renovating identities in response to a developing international tourist market and in the light of novel technologies of representation, such as photography and film. The contributions to this volume draw together ideas emerging from the anthropology of the body, the western interest in body ornamentation of the 'Other', and the recent revival of specific body arts such as tattooing and piercing. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from Amazonia, Indonesia, Africa, Melanesia and Polynesia, this volume shows how bodily presentation plays a fundamental role in contemporary identity politics in tension with encompassing national and global stereotypes, which may in turn both constrain and empower local traditions.

Hailed once as ‘giants of the Amazon’, Panará people emerged onto a world stage in the early 1970s. What followed is a remarkable story of socio-demographic collapse, loss of territory, and subsequent recovery. Reduced to just 79 survivors in 1976, Panará people have gone on to recover and reclaim a part of their original lands in an extraordinary process of cultural and social revival. Space and Society in Central Brazil is a unique ethnographic account, in which analytical approaches to social organisation are brought into dialogue with Panará social categories and values as told in their own terms. Exploring concepts such as space, material goods, and ideas about enemies, this book examines how social categories transform in time and reveals the ways in which Panará people themselves produce their identities in constant dialogue with the forms of alterity that surround them. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students, scholars and anyone interested in the complex lives and histories of indigenous Amazonian societies.