Here are 100 books that At the Mountains' Altar fans have personally recommended if you like
At the Mountains' Altar.
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My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This was a groundbreaking book when it came out in Peru in the 1970s. It’s the life stories of a street porter in the city of Cuzco and his wife, a market vendor, as they were told to a pair of Peruvian anthropologists. Monolingual in Quechua and living on the street, Gregorio and Asunta were at the very bottom of the social ladder, yet they recount their hard lives with such eloquence, humor, and grace that their words leap from the page. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Andean people, and a book you’ll never forget.
Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huaman were runakuna, a Quechua word that means "people" and refers to the millions of indigenous inhabitants neglected, reviled, and silenced by the dominant society in Peru and other Andean countries. For Gregorio and Asunta, however, that silence was broken when Peruvian anthropologists Ricardo Valderrama Fernandez and Carmen Escalante Gutierrez recorded their life stories. The resulting Spanish-Quechua narrative, published in the mid-1970s and since translated into many languages, has become a classic introduction to the lives and struggles of the "people" of the Andes.
Andean Lives is the first English translation of this important…
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This was a foundational book for me as I completed my first fieldwork and wrote my dissertation. Isbell draws the reader into life in a highland village in the Ayacucho region of Peru shortly before it was upended by guerilla warfare, describing strategies villagers used to relate to, and maintain independence from, outside social forces. With vivid examples she provides in-depth analyses of social organization and ritual life, as well as a chapter on urban migration and a postscript about impending violence.
The result of ten years of studying the Quechua peasants of Chuschi in south-central Peru, this work is a structuralist attempt to uncover the mechanisms whereby the people of this Andean society struggle to protect the social and economic independence of their community from the outside world. The ethnographic strength of the book is a careful and insightful discussion of kinship and marriage as well as descriptions and interpretations of hydraulic, harvest, and fertility rites. Introductory notes by the author discuss guerrilla activities in the community that said, "To defend ourselves is to defend our traditions."
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
What does it mean to be “indigenous”? The answer is never simple, and I particularly like the way Andrew Canessa approaches the question by drawing us into people’s lives in an Aymara-speaking community in highland Bolivia and exploring how the people themselves understand different ways of being indigenous in different contexts. In the process he shows how “indigenous” identity is complex and situationally defined.
Drawing on extended ethnographic research conducted over the course of more than two decades, Andrew Canessa explores the multiple identities of a community of people in the Bolivian highlands through their own lived experiences and voices. He examines how gender, race, and ethnic identities manifest themselves in everyday interactions in the Aymara village. Canessa shows that indigeneity is highly contingent; thoroughly imbricated with gendered, racial, and linguistic identities; and informed by a historical consciousness. Addressing how whiteness and indianness are reproduced as hegemonic structures in the village, how masculinities develop as men go to the mines and army, and how…
My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Hasas well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.
This book is about an unexpected meeting of minds. De la Cadena intended to write an account of a peasant campaign for land led by indigenous peasant leader Mariano Turpo during the 1950-60s. But early on it became clear that she and Mariano were talking past each other, for Mariano understood his successful activism in terms of his relationship with animate places in the landscape (“earth beings”). The book contains a moving account of how the urban intellectual and traditional Andean leader learned to appreciate and communicate with each other. De la Cadena argues that attention to cultural difference—far from perpetuating false consciousness—might open the way to radically new politics. Some readers may wish to pass over some dense theoretical passages, but the book is organized so one can do this without losing the larger picture.
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…
Vincent Lee is a professional architect and former Alpine climbing guide and instructor, US Marine Corps officer, Andean explorer, and author. Searching in the high Andes of Peru and the rain forests of the Upper Amazon for the remains of the long-lost final redoubt of the once-powerful Inca Empire not only appealed to his life-long interest in all of these disparate fields, but it called upon his many years of experience in each: wilderness trekking, mountain warfare, mapping and drawing the remains of the more than 500 ancient structures discovered.
Following up on Hiram Bingham's 1911 visit to an overgrown ruin in the forest at a place called Espíritu Pampa (The Plain of Ghosts) and dismissed by Bingham as unimportant, Savoy set out in 1964-5 to prove him wrong. Bingham had identified Machu Picchu as the lost Inca capital, Vilcabamba, but Savoy was sure there was more to be found at the Plain of Ghosts than Bingham knew. He was right, and in several adventurous expeditions found a large Inca city there that he thought better met the Spanish accounts of Vilcabamba.
This inspiring and historic book: Antisuyo by Gene Savoy, is about the search for the lost cities of the Amazon. Antisuyo is the full account of the authors' daring expedition beyond one of the few remaining uncharted frontiers, and of his glorious discovery of the fabled cities of Viacabamba and Muyok Viejo--two of the most important archaeololgical sites found in recent years. He takes the reader through the forbidding mysteries of the wild territory in search for of clues to puzzles that have remained unsolved since the days of Pizarro: Aztahualpa: the legendary Manco Capac; the famed El Dorado, City…
Growing up in a sheltered environment on Long Island, NY, I had little sense of a larger world, except for seeing images of the Vietnam War. Going to college in the early 70s and becoming an anthropology major, the world began to open up, yet I hadn't experienced life outside the U.S. until my mid-20s as a graduate student living in Mexico to do dissertation research. That experience and travels to Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, and Costa Rica helped me to see how diverse Latin America is, and how real poverty and suffering are as well. Coming into my own as a historian, teacher, and writer, my fascination with women’s voices, experiences, and activism only grew.
This book is a classic of Latin American women’s history, telling the story of how Andean women’s relative gender equity (what the author calls “gender parallelism,” a concept that applies to gender structures in many Latin American societies, especially the Aztecs—known as Nahuas—about whom I’ve also written) became transformed first by the Inca, then by the Spanish.
Written with feeling about forms of both complementarity and exploitation, Silverblatt shows women of the past, non-elite and noble, to have been productive, creative, and responsive to the social and economic conditions around them.
When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes, while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such notions of parallel descent were expressions of complementarity between men and women. Examining the interplay between gender ideologies and political hierarchy. Irene Silverblatt shows how Inca rulers used their Sun and Moon traditions as methods of controlling women and the Andean peoples the Incas conquered. She then explores the process by which the Spaniards…
I am an animal communicator and author of many books about our deeper connections with the animal world. A powerful dream featuring an archetypal Snake ignited my curiosity about snakes and inspired me to learn more. I immersed myself into the history, biology, and incredible diversity of snakes as well as their role in art, myth, medicine, and dreams. I also lived with two rescue snakes: a shy ball python named Carl and lively corn snake named Chloe. What I found was not only fascinating but life-changing. This book celebrates the mystery of Snake and the undeniable wisdom and healing that it offers our world.
Tracing Snake back to ancient times in its role as creator god, anthropologist Jeremy Narby follows both a scientific and shamanic approach to understanding our connection with Snake in its role as healer and mentor.
Why do life-creating, knowledge-imparting snakes appear in the visions, myths, and dreams of countless humans, Narby asks. Could this mythical serpent that created life be another way of perceiving the DNA molecule, which holds the organizing principle inherent in all life?
Highly recommended for a fascinating journey into the nature of reality and ourselves!
This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.
There is no quality of life without meaning, and there is no better meaning than the search for it. The Vision Quest has been a beacon of hope for me my entire life. It permeates all my aspirations and writing. It inspired me to hitchhike worldwide for five years and continued into my professional life. I hope you enjoy the selections.
Tahir Shah’s writing is inspired, funny, multifaceted, and offbeat. This book is his account of hiring a crazy Vietnam vet named Richard Fowler to escort him into the remote Amazon to look for the birdmen of Peru.
I hired the same guy to take me and a good friend into the same jungle several years later, with similar results I recorded in Stout Men. Both are vision quests through slow water in strange company and a passion for the bizarre and grotesque.
Enthralled by the chronicle of a 16th-century Spanish monk, which said that the Incas 'flew like birds' over the jungle, and by the recurring theme of flying in Peruvian folklore, Tahir Shah set out to discover whether the Incas really did fly or glide above the jungles of Peru. Or was it flight of a different kind, inspired by powerful drugs? After gathering equipment in London the long quest begins, in the mountains of Peru, with a trek to Machu Picchu, the Incas' most sacred city. Then on to the mountain city of Cusco and a mysterious island on Lake…
History tells us who we are and what we can become. History in the Andes tells us that people of the African Diaspora have been a part of building that part of the world into what it is today for over 500 years. I have been fascinated by learning this history and inspired by leaders, writers, artists, and fellow historians who consider themselves Afro-Andean and are building the future. For 25 years now, I have been scouring historical archives in Peru, Spain, and the US to find more sources to help us recognize and understand that history as we use it to build a better, more just present and future.
For thousands of years, right down to the present, textiles and weaving in the Andes has been some of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world. It has been linked to the amazing cultural creativity of people in the Andes and the rise and fall of successive empires because controlling textile production is controlling power and wealth.
This book shows us something entirely new: how the weavers who made these amazing textiles experienced and often resisted that power and the exploitation of their labor. Even though this book is not explicitly about Afro-Andean people, they were an integral part of the Andean labor force, and they figure in histories of resistance and rebellion in the Andes.
The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.
I feel passionate about spreading the word about all the fantastic children’s literature set in South America. As an author and a multilingual mom whose son enjoys learning about his Latin American heritage, I’ve always brought home stacks of picture books—in Spanish and English—that celebrate Latin American cultures and settings. I’ve loved traveling to the Andes mountains and the Amazon rain forest as part of my children’s book collaborations with Indigenous women in those regions. Most of all, I love transporting young readers to these inspiring places through story.
Several years ago, I took a beautiful and eye-opening trip to an Indigenous-run ecolodge in the Amazon Rain Forest.
Tragically, the following year, the community was displaced after an oil company invaded and destroyed their forest. So, I connected strongly to this book, which tells the story of Zonia, an Indigenous Asháninka girl living in the Peruvian Amazon, who forms playful and sacred bonds with her plant and animal friends.
But when she comes across felled trees, she must respond to the forest’s call for help. The illustrations are sweet and warm, inviting readers to take part in Zonia’s experiences. And when we witness the stark devastation, we feel her despair and her call to action.
I loved this book that encourages us all to support Indigenous and environmental rights.
A heartfelt, visually stunning picture book from Caldecott Honor and Robert F. Sibert Medal winner Juana Martinez-Neal illuminates a young girl’s day of play and adventure in the lush rain forest of Peru.
Zonia’s home is the Amazon rain forest, where it is always green and full of life. Every morning, the rain forest calls to Zonia, and every morning, she answers. She visits the sloth family, greets the giant anteater, and runs with the speedy jaguar. But one morning, the rain forest calls to her in a troubled voice. How will Zonia answer? Acclaimed author-illustrator Juana Martinez-Neal explores the…
