Native South Americans

In South America indigenous languages are extremely diverse. There are over one hundred language families in this region alone. Contributors from around the world explore the history and structure of these languages, combining insights from archaeology and genetics with innovative linguistic analysis. The book aims to uncover regional patterns and potential deeper genealogical relations between the languages. Based on a large-scale database of features from sixty languages, the book analyses major language families such as Tupian and Arawakan, as well as the Quechua/Aymara complex in the Andes, the Isthmo-Colombian region and the Andean foothills. It explores the effects of historical change in different grammatical systems and fills gaps in the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) database, where South American languages are underrepresented. An important resource for students and researchers interested in linguistics, anthropology and language evolution.

The information in this book makes it possible to delineate the various cultures more accurately than in the past. Beyond factual or descriptive accounts, this book offers interpretations and explanations.

Utilizing ethnographic and archaeological data and an updated paradigm derived from the best features of cultural ecology and ecological anthropology, this extensively illustrated book addresses over fifteen South American adaptive systems representing a broad cross section of band, village, chiefdom, and state societies throughout the continent over the past 13,000 years.Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present presents data on both prehistoric and recent indigenous groups across the entire continent within an explicit theoretical framework. Introductory chapters provide a brief overview of the variability that has characterized these groups over the long period of indigenous adaptation to the continent and examine the historical background of the ecological and cultural evolutionary paradigm. The book then presents a detailed overview of the principal environmental contexts within which indigenous adaptive systems have survived and evolved over thousands of years. It discusses the relationship between environmental types and subsistence productivity, on the one hand, and between these two variables and sociopolitical complexity, on the other. Subsequent chapters proceed in sequential order that is at once evolutionary (from the least to the most complex groups) and geographical (from the least to the most productive environments)?around the continent in counterclockwise fashion from the hunter-gatherers of Tierra del Fuego in the far south; to the villagers of the Amazonian lowlands; to the chiefdoms of the Amazon v¿ea and the far northern Andes; and, finally, to the chiefdoms and states of the Peruvian Andes. Along the way, detailed presentations and critiques are made of a number of theories based on the South American data that have worldwide implications for our understanding of prehistoric and recent adaptive systems.

Drawing on fieldwork from diverse Amerindian societies whose lives and worlds are undergoing processes of transformation, adaptation, and deterioration, this volume offers new insights into the indigenous constitutions of humanity, personhood, and environment characteristic of the South American highlands and lowlands. The resulting ethnographies – depicting non-human entities emerging in ritual, oral tradition, cosmology, shamanism and music – explore the conditions and effects of unequally ranked life forms, increased extraction of resources, continuous migration to urban centers, and the (usually) forced incorporation of current expressions of modernity into indigenous societies.

In terms of its linguistic and cultural make-up, the continent of South America provides linguists and anthropologists with a complex puzzle of language diversity. The continent teems with small language families and isolates, and even languages spoken in adjacent areas can be typologically vastly different from each other. This volume intends to provide a taste of the linguistic diversity found in South America within the area of clause subordination. The potential variety in the strategies that languages can use to encode subordinate events is enormous, yet there are clearly dominant patterns to be discerned: switch reference marking, clause chaining, nominalization, and verb serialization. The book also contributes to the continuing debate on the nature of syntactic complexity, as evidenced in subordination.

Library holds volume 2, part 2 only.