"While theoretically sophisticated, the book’s concrete language and brief introductory asides make it suitable for advanced undergraduates unfamiliar with its core concepts."  - Carwil Bjork-James (Anthropological Quarterly) "<i>Earth Beings</i> is essential reading for those following current research on relational ontologies and the importance of other-than-human contributions to society (<i>ayllu</i>) by encouraging us to think about how beings, places, knowledges, and power interact, particularly in the Peruvian Andes, but in a way that is relevant to much of South America and beyond.... [T]he exceptional ethnographic narratives and the clarity of writing make this a monograph that could be incorporated into a senior undergraduate or, more likely, a graduate level anthropology, geography, environmental studies, political sciences, or Indigenous studies class." - Katherine MacDonald (Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies) "De la Cadena's <i>Earth Beings</i> reads, from start to finish, as a labor of love. . . . Each page is dense with insights about the intricacies and challenges of collaborative politics." - Emily Yates-Doerr (Medicine Anthropology Theory) "De la Cadena’s book is an important read and a profound application of contemporary theory to Quechua struggles in South America. It is a moving yet challenging read where the discussions, specifically on cultural politics and representation, can be applied in numerous Indigenous contexts to better transform the relational mode of interactions and divisions between nature, humans and other- than- human entities within a political realm." - Agnieszka Pawlowska-Mainville (AlterNative) "<i>Earth Beings</i> is a powerful ethnography, the result of more than a decade of fieldwork in the Peruvian Andes.... [T]he reader can visualize the changes in the political opportunities for indigenous peoples in Peru’s political trajectory from liberalism to socialism to, most recently, the neoliberal multiculturalism of the new millennium." - Anita Carrasco (American Ethnologist) "[T]his book is important and vividly written and deserves to be widely read for how it revalorizes and brings fresh insight to the Andean living earth as a subject of social relations." - Peter Gose (Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology) "A remarkable feat of ethnographic writing with a keen linguistic sensitivity and a stunning accomplishment of cultural translation." - Enrique Mayer (Journal of Anthropological Research) "A remarkable achievement, not only merely in the compelling case it makes for ecologies of nature-humanity practices, but above all, at the level of method and authorship, where it models a concept of anthropology as of colaboring and writing 'from' rather than 'about' a specific place and land." - Valentina Napolitano (Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory)

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies-a realm that need not abide by binary logics-reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference as conditions for ethnography to work. 
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Conversing with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, Marisol de la Cadena explores the entanglements and partial connections between indigenous and non-indigenous worlds, and the ways in which indigenous knowing both include and exceed modern and non-modern practices.
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Foreword  xi

Preface. Ending This Book without Nazario Turpo  xv

Story 1. Agreeing to Remember, Translating, and Carefully Co-laboring  1

Interlude 1. Mariano Turpo: A Leader In-Ayllu 35

Story 2. Mariano Engages "the Land Struggle": An Unthinkable Indian Leader  59

Story 3. Mariano's Cosmopolitics: Between Lawyers and Ausangate  91

Story 4. Mariano's Archive: The Eventfulness of the Ahistorical  117

Interlude 2. Nazario Turpo: "The Altomisayuq Who Went to Heaven"  153

Story 5. Chamanismo Andino in the Third Millennium: Multiculturalism Meets Earth-Beings  179

Story 6. A Comedy of Equivocations: Nazario Turpo's Collaboration with the National Musuem of the American Indian  209

Story 7. Munayniyuq: The Owner of the Will (and How to Control That Will)  243

Epilogue. Ethnographic Cosmopolitics  273

Acknowledgments  287

Notes  291

References  303

Index  317
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Product details

ISBN
9780822359630
Published
2015-10-16
Publisher
Duke University Press
Weight
499 gr
Height
229 mm
Width
152 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Number of pages
277

Biographical note

Marisol de la Cadena is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and the author of Indigenous Mestizos: The Politics of Race and Culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991, also published by Duke University Press.