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Kathy Austin and her Brazilian Navy partner have finally stumbled upon the lost German submarine but quickly discover that they aren't the first to set foot in it since it was abandoned. When Reinhart and the doctor, the two Nazis looking for the gold hidden in the U-boot, arrive in turn, bringing with them Jo, the albino with otherworldly powers, secrets will be revealed, old debts will be settled, and the British spy will finally be able to close her investigation - for now.

Brazil, 1949. A photographer crawls into a mission deep in the Amazonian rainforest and dies. On one of his films is an extraordinary shot: a man with skin white as snow and an elongated cranium. Deformed human... or extra-terrestrial being? Kathy Austin, having reluctantly become the specialist in such situations, is immediately sent by the crown to investigate. But the British aren't the only ones with an interest in the bizarre creature...

The Andes and Amazonia are two of the harshest regions on earth. The opportunities for productive agriculture, even with modern methods, seem limited, given conditions of climate, terrain, and soils. Nevertheless, indigenous people, both prehistoric and more recent, have developed systems of cultivation that have been intensive, highly productive, and sustainable, reclaiming marginal lands and supporting large numbers of people and complex societies. This book examines Indian agriculture in South America. The focus is on field types and field technologies, including agricultural landforms such as terraces, canals, and drained fields, which have persisted for hundreds of years. The evidence utilized comes from abandoned fields, historical documents, and current practices. What emerges is a picture of mostly successful indigenous farming practices in rain forests, savannahs, swamps, rugged mountains, and deserts. And while this knowledge may not always be directly applicable to development today, it does provide us with some unique techniques and some basic principles for farming difficult environments.

This book considers how forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another and what the explanation is for this. The author aims (a) to explain and identify the relationship between areal diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and (b) to discover the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. This is done using the example of Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the large area of the Vaupés river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing, interaction, and influence are resisted for ideological reasons. Professor Aikhenvald considers which grammatical categories are most and which are least likely to be borrowed in a situation of prolonged language contact where lexical borrowing is reduced to a minimum. She provides a genetic analysis of the languages of the region and considers their historical relationships with languages of the same family outside it. She also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic and cultural effects of being part of a group that is aware its language and identity are threatened. The book is presented in relatively nontechnical language and will interest linguists and anthropologists.

This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.

This book considers how and why forms and meanings of different languages at different times may resemble one another. The author explains the relationship between a real diffusion and the genetic development of languages, and reveals the means of distinguishing what may cause one language to share the characteristics of another. Professor Aikhenvald uses the example of Arawak and Tucanoan languages spoken in the large area of the Vaupés river basin in northwest Amazonia, which spans Colombia and Brazil. In this region language is seen as a badge of identity: language mixing, interaction, and influence are resisted for ideological reasons. The book considers which grammatical categories are most and least likely to be borrowed in a situation of prolonged language contact where lexical borrowing is reduced to a minimum. The author provides a genetic analysis of the languages of the region and considers their historical relationships with languages of the same family outside it. She also examines changes brought about by recent contact with European languages and culture, and the linguistic and cultural effects of being part of a group that is aware of the threat to its language and identity. The book is presented in relatively nontechnical language and will interest linguists and anthropologists.

This is the first account of Jarawara, a Southern Amazonia language of great complexity and unusual interest, and now spoken by less than two hundred people. It has only two open lexical classes, noun and verb, and a closed adjective class with fourteen members which can only modify a noun. Verbs have a complex structure with three prefix and some twenty-five suffix slots. There is an eleven-term tense-modal system with an evidentiality contrast (eyewitness/non-eyewitness) in the three past tenses. Of the two genders, feminine and masculine, feminine is unmarked. There are at least eight types of subordinate clause constructions, including complement clauses, relative clauses, coreferential dependent clauses, and 'when', 'if', 'due to the lack of' and 'because of' clauses.There are only eleven consonants and four vowels but an extensive set of ordered phonological rules of lenition, vowel assimilation and unstressed syllable omission. There are four imperative inflections (with different meanings) and three explicit interrogative suffixes within the mood system. The book is entirely based on field work by the authors.

Based on 15 years of research in Brazil, this book is an interdisciplinary documentation and analysis of the process of frontier change in one region of the Brazilian Amazon, the southern region of the state of Para. The authors' analysis was based on the idea that what they documented in the field - deforestation, settlement patterns, and the intensity of rural violence, for example - were the outcomes of the competition for resources among social groups capable of mobilizing varying degrees of power. The analysis of these contests illustrates how national and international factors often shaped events at the local level, thereby propelling the story of frontier expansion in different and unexpected directions. Part One focuses on Amazonia as a whole. The authors review the history of the region, and analyze the federal and state policies that set into motion the contemporary process of frontier expansion. In parts Two and Three, they present the results of their empirical work on the evolution of frontier communities in southern Para. Each local history develops the general themes put forth in the first section.The final chapter brings the text back to larger issues of understanding such frontier change, especially in light of the country's anthropological, sociological, and demographic shifts and collisions.

From the pre-Columbian era to the present, native Amazonians have shaped the land around them, emphasizing utilization, conservation, and sustainability. These priorities stand in stark contrast to colonial and contemporary exploitation of Amazonia by outside interests. With essays from environmental scientists, botanists, and anthropologists, this volume explores the various effects of human development on Amazonia. The contributors argue that by protecting and drawing on local knowledge and values, further environmental ruin can be avoided.

Back from their adventure in the Arctic, the Renegades are once again called to a climate emergency - flaming monsters threaten to destroy the Amazon rainforest!Katelyn, Mo, and Leon need to use their superpowers to ensure that the world doesn't go up in flames - quite literally! This graphic novel for kids follows the three heroes as they stand face to face with the climate's latest threat.The Renegades: Flames of Amazonia follows on from the popular The Renegades: Arctic Meltdown comic book. Filled with adventure and captivating artwork, this action-adventure series addresses pressing environmental issues and connects ideas such as eating meat, deforestation, and farming. This climate change book in particular tells the story of the potential worldwide disaster the destruction of the Amazon forest would cause. What's more, it helps teenagers between the age of 12-17 understand modern threats to the ecology and encourages them to be the superheroes of the real world. Who can resist the temptation to go on a world-saving adventure? Together with the three protagonists, fight deadly fire-breathing creatures called Flamejantes and team up with local indigenous activists to stop them. And who knows, maybe solve the mystery of something - or someone - sinister that's behind the creatures' sudden appearance.The second comic book in The Renegades series, and following The Renegades Arctic Meltdown, this graphic novel educates teenagers on the dire effect climate change is having on our planet.

Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world’s most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous CofÁn people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the CofÁn chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them.Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of CofÁn society and Borman’s place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a CofÁn community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between CofÁn communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the CofÁn nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.

Deforestation is occurring at an alarming rate in many parts of the world, causing destruction of natural habitat and fragmentation of what remains. Nowhere is this problem more pressing than in the Amazon rainforest, which is rapidly vanishing in the face of enormous pressure from humans to exploit it. This book presents the results of the longest-running and most comprehensive study of forest fragmentation ever undertaken, the Biological Dynamics of Forest Fragments Project (BDFFP) in central Amazonia, the only experimental study of tropical forest fragmentation in which baseline data are available before isolation from continuous forest took place.A joint project of Brazil’s National Institute for Research in Amazonia and the U.S. Smithsonian Institution, the BDFFP has investigated the many effects that habitat fragmentation has on plants, invertebrates, and vertebrates. The book provides an overview of the BDFFP, reports on its case studies, looks at forest ecology and tree genetics, and considers what issues are involved in establishing conservation and management guidelines.

The future of Brazilian Amazonia, the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, hangs in the balance. Two decades of destructive development have provoked violent struggles for control over the region's resources, with disastrous social and environmental consequences. This multi-disciplinary collection reviews past experience but focusses on the latest phase of Amazonian settlement. Chapters by leading authorities examine such issues as colonisation in the most recent frontier areas, multinational mining projects, hydro-electric schemes, and the military occupation of Brazil's borders. After demonstrating how new government and business activities have exacerbated social tensions and ecological destruction, the volume considers alternative, more sustainable strategies.

The future of Brazilian Amazonia, the world's largest remaining tropical rainforest, hangs in the balance. Two decades of destructive development have provoked violent struggles for control over the region's resources, with disastrous social and environmental consequences. This multi-disciplinary collection reviews past experience but focusses on the latest phase of Amazonian settlement. Chapters by leading authorities examine such issues as colonization in the most recent frontier areas, multinational mining projects, hydro-electric schemes, and the military occupation of Brazil's borders. After demonstrating how new government and business activities have exacerbated social tensions and ecological destruction, the volume considers alternative, more substantial strategies.

This book is the story of one Amazonian community located along the middle Araguaia River in the northeastern comer of the state of Mato Grosso. It is based on fourteen months of fieldwork in 1976, 1978, and 1979.

This book is the story of one Amazonian community located along the middle Araguaia River in the northeastern comer of the state of Mato Grosso. It is based on fourteen months of fieldwork in 1976, 1978, and 1979.

This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo–Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica.It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region’s indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo・Colombian Area.

This book analyses the potential socio-economic and environmental impacts of the Initiative for Regional Infrastructure Integration in South America (IIRSA), a continent-wide programme. IIRSA aims at facilitating intra-regional trade and at improving trade and transport links with world markets. This is the first book on IIRSA and its potential implications for South America and more specifically for Amazonia. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the infrastructure programme and deals particularly with methods to assess the probable effects of road construction in environmentally fragile territories. To deepen our understanding of the potential impacts of roads in these areas, the book combines insights from economic and environmental sciences and gives a critical review of traditional assessments and strategic environmental assessments (SEAs). A comprehensive approach of assessing impacts is presented in three case studies of SEAs: the Corredor Norte in Bolivia, the road between Manaus and Porto Velho in Brazil, and the proposed road to link Suriname with Brazil.

This book argues against the assumption that sustainability and environmental conservation are naturally the common goal and norm for everyone in Amazonia. This is the first book focusing on agency, reflexivity and social development to address sustainable development in the region. It discusses the importance of looking into societal dynamics in order to deal with deforestation and sustainable development policies through the ethnography of an Amazonian settlement named New Paradise.This book demystifies utopian and overtly conservationist views that depict the Amazon rainforest as a troubled paradise. Engaging with social theory of practice with particular focus on emergentist perspectives and Foucault’s analysis of ‘heterotopia’, the author shows that Amazonia is a set of settlement heterotopias in which various local and external initiatives interact to make up real, lived-in places. The settlers’ placemaking continually rearranges power and material relations while the process usually emphasises utopian developmentalist and conservationist policy intervention. This book explores in detail how, as power relations are arranged and governance reshaped, sustainable development and construction of a green society also need to become a goal for the settlers themselves. The book’s insights on the relationship between the sustainable development frameworks used in environmental policy, and ongoing societal development on the ground inform debate both within Amazonia, and in comparable communities worldwide. It also offers institutional pathways to realise new, more engaging, policy intervention for development professionals and policy makers.

One of the great riddles of cultural history is the remarkable parallel that exists between the people of Amazonia and those of Melanesia. Although the two regions are separated by half a world in distance and at least 40,000 years of history, their cultures nonetheless reveal striking similarities in the areas of sex and gender. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, male-female differences infuse social organization and self-conception. They are the core of religion, symbolism, and cosmology, and they permeate ideas about body imagery, procreation, growth, men's cults, and rituals of initiation. The contributors to this innovative volume illuminate the various ways in which sex and gender are elaborated, obsessed over, and internalized, shaping subjective experiences common to entire cultural regions, and beyond. Through comparison of the life ways of Melanesia and Amazonia the authors expand the study of gender, as well as the comparative method in anthropology, in new and rewarding directions.

This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.

Since its first publication in 1979, this book, together with its companion volume, The Palm and the Pleiades by Stephen Hugh-Jones, has become established as 'the most competent and sophisticated ethnography to date of any South American tropical forest people' (The Times Higher Education Supplement). Both are now available for the first time in paperback. The book is an integrated account of a Northwest Amazonian society, which elucidates the structural models that underlie and unify the domains of kinship, religion, politics and economics. These dynamic models are built from a rich corpus of ethnographic data drawn from extensive field research, and are developed in such a way that, as far as possible, they reproduce an Indian theory of society. Besides enhancing anthropological understanding of a fascinating culture area, the book's highly original approach makes it an important contribution to the general theory of social and cultural structures.

This is a comprehensive reference grammar of Tariana, an endangered Arawak language from a remote region in the northwest Amazonian jungle. Its speakers traditionally marry someone speaking a different language, and as a result most people are fluent in five or six languages. Because of this rampant multilingualism, Tariana combines a number of features inherited from the protolanguage with properties diffused from neighbouring but unrelated Tucanoan languages. Typologically unusual features of the language include: an array of classifiers independent of genders, complex serial verbs, case marking depending on the topicality of a noun, and double marking of case and of number. Tariana has obligatory evidentiality: every sentence contains a special element indicating whether the information was seen, heard, or inferred by the speaker, or whether the speaker acquired it from somebody else. This grammar will be a valuable source-book for linguists and others interested in natural languages.

The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans.He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarape Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

From the author of ALTAR OF EDEN and MAP OF BONES comes another fantastic mystery adventure, this time set deep in the Amazon jungle.Out of the inhospitable Amazon rainforest a man stumbles into a missionary village. Soon the CIA operative and former Special Forces soldier, his eyes wide with terror, is dead. The photograph of Agent Clark's corpse in the Brazilian morgue shows two intact upper limbs, yet Agent Clark had only one arm, the other lost to a sniper's bullet. Nathan Rand's father led a scientific mission into the rainforest and never returned - the same expedition that took Clark into the jungle. Now Nate is to follow the elder Rand's trail, along with a team of scientists and experienced US Rangers. For somewhere in the dark, impenetrable depths of Earth's most dangerous region lie mysteries that must be solved...whatever the cost. As Nate Rand and his party push on into the jungle, they are haunted by a truth: that they are not alone. But each step brings the team closer to an ancient, unspoken terror that even the native people dread. As madness, fear and horrific death descend upon the second cursed expedition, those still living must confront a power beyond human imagining - one that can for ever alter the world beyond the dark, lethal confines of the Amazon rainforest for better...and for worse.

Anthropologist Neil L. Whitehead presents a collection of recent fieldwork and the latest theoretical perspectives that illuminate how a range of Native communities in the Amazon River basin, and those they encounter, use the past to make sense of their world and themselves. In recent decades, scholars have become increasingly aware of the role the past plays in the construction of culture and identity. Not only can the past be represented and codified overtly in various ways and media as a history, it also operates more fundamentally and pervasively in cultures as a mode of consciousness or way of thinking about the world, a historicity. In addition to examining the particular foundations and significance of history and historicity in such communities as the Guajá, Wapishana, Dekuana, and Patamuna, the contributors to this volume consider more broadly how different natural and cultural features can help shape historical consciousness: landscape and territory; rituals such as feasting; genealogy and kinship; and even the practice of archaeology. Also of interest are activist uses of historicity to promote and legitimize the cultural integrity and political agendas of Native communities, especially in contact situations past and present where multiple and often competing forms of history and historicity play important political roles in articulating relations between colonizers and the colonized. As this volume makes clear, understanding the powerful cultural role of the past helps scholars better appreciate the inherent dynamic quality of all cultures and recognize a rich resource of agency that can be used both to comprehend and to transform the present