Books on the topic 'Andean populations'

Andean Truths: Transitional Justice, Ethnicity, and Cultural Production in Post-Shining Path Peru studies how literature, drama, film, and the visual arts contest the dominant narrative of national peace and reconciliation, as constructed by Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Established in 2001, the Commission aimed to ‘investigate and make public the truth’ of the country’s twenty-year civil war, drawing upon homologous predecessors that provided a highly scripted model of truth-gathering and national healing. In this model, a predetermined collective mourning, catharsis, and reconciliation would move the nation forward in a consensually-determined fashion. Andean Truths shows that the Peruvian case proves internationally-endorsed models insufficient for arriving at the ‘truth’ of a national trauma that primarily affected disenfranchised ethnic groups, namely, the Andean Quechua speaking populations that accounted for the overwhelming majority of victims of the violence. Even as scholars recognize the importance of bringing multiple voices to the table in discussing post-Shining Path Peru, the question remains of what a more Andean-oriented transitional justice process might entail. Drawing on theories of decoloniality, intercultural communication and epistemological diversity (following scholars such as Enrique Dussel, Aníbal Quijano and Boaventura de Sousa Santos), this book analyzes cultural products, from the theater of Yuyachkani to the narrative of Oscar Colchado Lucio, the art of Edilberto Jiménez, and other popular artistic responses, that highlight Andean understandings of the conflict and its aftermath. These cultural products challenge dominant understandings of the conflict and question Peru’s ability to overcome its collective trauma without seriously reconsidering prevailing cultural paradigms.

The Inca Empire extended across myriad Andean environments where indigenous peoples had previously developed diverse, locally sustainable practices of agricultural intensification and land modification. Inca expansion disrupted these indigenous landscapes by introducing new laborers, tribute obligations, and land divisions. Many Inca agricultural facilities, such as state farms and estates, were primarily designed to satisfy the demands of the imperial nobility and military, and introduced social contradictions between state officials and commoners that reshaped Andean landscapes. Some subject populations withstood or even resisted Inca domination by continuing traditional farming practices despite the development and implementation of state agrarian infrastructure.

This book describes a period of several decades during the sixteenth century when conquistadores, Catholic friars, and imperial officials attempted to conquer the Inca Empire and impose Spanish colonial rule. When Francisco Pizarro captured the Inca warlord Atahuallpa at Cajamarca in 1532, European Catholics and Andean peoples interpreted the event using long-held beliefs about how their worlds would end, and what the next era might look like. The Inca world did not end at Cajamarca, despite some popular misunderstandings of the Spanish conquest of Peru. In the years that followed, some Inca lords resisted Spanish rule, but many Andean nobles converted to Christianity and renegotiated their sovereign claims into privileges as Spanish subjects. Catholic empire took a lifetime to establish in the Inca world, and it required the repeated conquest of rebellious conquistadores, the reorganization of native populations, and the economic overhaul of diverse Andean landscapes. These disruptive processes of modern world-building carried forward old ideas about sovereignty, social change, and human progress. Although they are overshadowed by the Western philosophies and technologies that drive our world today, those apocalyptic relics remain with us to the present.

When Spaniards invaded their realm in 1532, the Incas ruled the largest empire of the pre-Columbian Americas. Just over a century earlier, military campaigns began to extend power across a broad swath of the Andean region, bringing local societies into new relationships with colonists and officials who represented the Inca state. With Cuzco as its capital, the Inca Empire encompassed a multitude of peoples of diverse geographic origins and cultural traditions dwelling in the outlying provinces and frontier regions. Bringing together an international group of well-established scholars and emerging researchers, this Handbook is dedicated to revealing the origins of this empire, as well as its evolution and aftermath. The scope of this Handbook is comprehensive. It places the century of Inca imperial expansion within a broader historical and archaeological context, and then turns from Inca origins to the imperial political economy and institutions that facilitated expansion. Several chapters describe religious power in the Andes, as well as the special statuses that staffed the state religion, maintained records, served royal households, and produced fine craft goods to support state activities. The Incas did not disappear in 1532, and the volume continues into the colonial and later periods, exploring not only the effects of the Spanish Conquest on the lives of the indigenous populations, but also the cultural continuities and discontinuities. Moving into the present, the volume ends with an overview of the ways in which the image of the Inca and the pre-Columbian past is memorialized and reinterpreted by contemporary Andeans.

Chapter 5 analyses manifestations of history, that is, concrete historical legacies of power and knowledge in present-day Andaman society. The first section discusses the impact of hegemonic nationalist rhetoric—highlighting the role of bourgeois nationalist freedom fighters incarcerated in the Andamans—on the local sense and perception of history. The first section aims to show how politics of recognition influence the ways in which community actors constitute their present by narrating the subaltern past. The second section focuses on the manifestation of criminality as a crucial relation between the state and the population in the here and now. It shows that Andaman actors construct contemporary identities by referring to the criminal past of convicts deported to the islands; moreover, the institutionalization of criminality within the economic system of the Andaman divides the population into elite actors profiting from the black-market sector and subalterns whose participation in the same system brings them into continuous conflict with the law.

Climate is a fundamental and independent variable of human existence. Given that 50 percent of the Earth’s surface and much of its population exist between 30oN and 30oS, paleoenvironmental research in the Earth’s tropical regions is vital to our understanding of the world’s current and past climate change. Most of the solar energy that drives the climate system is absorbed in these regions. Paleoclimate records reveal that tropical processes, such as variations in the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO), have affected the climate over much of the planet. Climatic variations, particularly in precipitation and temperature, play a critical role in the adaptations of agrarian cultures located in zones of environmental sensitivity, such as those of the coastal deserts, highlands, and altiplano of the Andean region. Paleoclimate records from the Quelccaya ice cap (5670 masl) in highland Peru that extend back ~1800 years show good correlation between precipitation and the rise and fall of pre-Hispanic civilizations in western Peru and Bolivia. Sediment cores extracted from Lake Titicaca provide independent evidence of this correspondence with particular reference to the history of the pre-Hispanic Tiwanaku state centered in the Andean altiplano. Here we explore, in particular, the impacts of climate change on the development and ultimate dissolution of this altiplano state.

A growing body of bioarchaeological research into the biocultural effects of Spanish colonialism on native Andean communities shows that traditional and popular narratives emphasizing the roles of epidemic disease and Spanish military superiority in the conquest of the Inca Empire are oversimplified. Bioarchaeologists are now interrogating the intricacies and etiologies of native mortality and depopulation, differential fertility, migration, and population recovery, as well as successful native adaptation. Their work demonstrates considerable variability and complexity in native responses to life under Spanish colonial rule, but these results are limited to the coastal valleys, and additional study is required from the other areas of the Inca Empire, especially the Yucay and the highland regions.

Chapter 2 contextualizes the Andaman Islands as a fieldwork location. It has two major objectives: First, it serves to introduce the reader to the Andamans as a geographical, ecological, and political space and as a site of imagination. This representation of the islands concentrates on the interplay of discourses and policies which have shaped their global, national, and local perception as well as the everyday life of the Andaman population. Second, the chapter underlines the conflation of anthropological theory, fieldwork, and biographical transformations. It demonstrates how recent theoretical trends and paradigm shifts in global and academic discourse have become enmeshed with the author’s experiences in and perceptions of the field. Elaborating on these intricate personal and professional ‘spectacles’ of the fieldworker, the author thus contextualizes the subjective conditions inherent in the production of ethnography as a type of literature.

This chapter summarizes the themes presented in Part 2, which focused on centers of Inca power in the Cuzco region and other parts of the Andes. Focusing on the overlapping concepts of royal estates and imperial centers, the chapter considers the different governing functions of each category, as well as the special social statuses (mitmacona, yanacona, acllacona) providing the labor that sustained them. These people were part of Inca efforts to extend royal households (panacas) from the Cuzco region into the provinces. The provincial construction of new state farms and imperial centers echoed similar projects of agrarian intensification and estate building in the Inca heartland and outlying provinces, helping to create nodes of imperial social and economic power that supported the imperial administration of diverse populations from across the Andes.

This chapter considers the history of Andaman migration from the institutionalization of a penal colony in 1858 to the present. It unpicks the dynamic relationship between the state and the population by investigating genealogies of power and knowledge. Apart from elaborating on subaltern domination, the chapter also reconstructs subaltern agency in historical processes by re-reading scholarly literature, administrative publications, and media reports as well as by interpreting fieldwork data and oral history accounts. The first part of the chapter defines migration and shows how it applies to the Andamans. The second part concentrates on colonial policies of subaltern population transfer to the islands and on the effects of social engineering processes. The third part analyses the institutionalization of the postcolonial regime in the islands and elaborates on the various types of migration since Indian Independence. The final section considers contemporary political negotiations of migration in the islands.

The Introduction highlights the major topics and questions addressed by this ethnography. The first section introduces disenfranchised Andaman migrants from various social, regional, linguistic, religious, and caste backgrounds as central actors of the book. Further, it elaborates on the major analytical advantages of utilizing subaltern theory to analyse migration processes as well as the production of social inequality in the modern nation state. Here, the author suggests to closely examine the relationship between the local state and the migrant population by making use of the key concept of subalternity. Moreover, he puts emphasis on adopting an interdisciplinary research methodology that considers both historical and contemporary (ethnographic) perspectives in order to gain holistic results. The second section lays out the structure of the book.

Migraine is an episodic brain disorder that affects about 15 per cent of the population (Lipton et al. 2001; Steiner et al. 2003), can be highly disabling (Menken et al. 2000), and has been estimated to be the most costly neurological disorder in the European Community at more than €27 billion per year (Andlin-Sobocki et al. 2005). It is the most common reason for neurological referral in the United Kingdom, estimated by the Association of British Neurologists to drive 20 per cent of referrals in outpatients; epilepsy is next at 12 per cent. Unfortunately, there is a tacit assumption that doctors in general just understand headache, and that neurologists in particular have special knowledge and training in the field. Sadly this is most often not the case and they learn on the job often perpetuating mistakes of their supervisors. To manage headache can be a source of extreme frustration or undiluted pleasure; the difference simply reflects how much one knows about the subject. Readers encouraged either by this text or by their clinical experience can look more deeply into headache with detailed texts (Goadsby and Silberstein 1997; Silberstein et al. 2002; Lance and Goadsby 2005; Olesen et al. 2005).

Rural development and peacebuilding in Colombia have been highly prioritized by higher education institutions since the signing of the Peace Agreement between the National Government and the FARC-EP. This has resulted in the need to further analyze rural strategies that contribute towards a better life for the population of territories where armed conflict is coming to an end, whilst understanding the pressing uncertainty that this process implies; on the one hand, for the urgency of generating rapid and concrete responses to social justice and equity, and on the other, because fulfilling the agreement guarantees scenarios of non-repetition of the war in the country. These were some of the reflections that motivated the research project “Rural development alternatives for peacebuilding: educational strategies to strengthen the ability of producers and young people that contribute to the coffee production chain in the municipalities of Leiva, Policarpa and Los Andes of the department of Narino, with international impact in the province of Carchi-Ecuador”. This work is presented as an investigative result that contains the analysis of theoretical and territorial Dynamic contributions regarding the construction of peace, education and the economy for rural development. The book is made up of three parts: Part 1 gathers sociological, legal and demographic works on the challenges of peacebuilding with the national and departmental context of Narino, and looks at human rights from the perspective of population health and quality of life. Part 2 presents texts on the dynamics of rural education in Colombia; national challenges and lessons learned based on case studies of specific forms of education. Part 3 presents economic analyses regarding the models that are behind the conception of rural development and the productive and institutional dynamics of the local sphere for the generation of employment and income. All three parts are relevant at both the national level and also the more specific area of the department of Narino and within this, the Cordillera region. This area, historically affected by the armed conflict, despite experiencing continuing uncertainty regarding the resurgence of violence and the increase in illegal crops, has also reignited hope with regards to finding solutions to the problems seen in the countryside; through educational, community and productive experiments. Although there are contradictory dynamics, the authors agree that the rural territory is a scene of permanent and collective construction, mediated by constant social struggles and power disputes with the State. It is therefore necessary to rethink the strategies for implementing the Peace Agreement in this region, with participatory scenarios being provided to include the rationale specific to rurality, such as: justice and reconciliation, social pedagogy, pertinence of study and student retention rates, social and solidarity economy, productive associativity, demographic conditions and health; including the physical, mental and social wellbeing of rural workers. With this work, we hope to reflect collectively with academics and human rights activists, spurring an increase in studies of rural areas and those analyses of community and innovative strategies that reinforce the road towards the construction of a lasting peace with social justice in Colombia.