Some 45 years ago, when I first went to live as an anthropology doctoral student, with the Baniwa indigenous people of the northwest Amazon in Brazil, it was a very remote place, though still under the control of Catholic Salesian and Protestant evangelical missionaries…
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The first time I traveled to the Brazilian Amazon some years ago, I visited my friend Simone in Macapá. The capital of Amapá, one of the nine states that make up Brazil’s Legal Amazon region, Macapá is a sleepy town on the northern bank of the Amazon River, close to…
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English + Español
“The eight relatives died in fourteen days. One after the other, we went burying them all. I didn’t even get a rest. When I was drifting off to sleep, someone would always call: ‘Your uncle died.’ ‘Your grandfather died.’ If another Kokama dies, we will not have any tears left…
One early morning in September 2017, I bought a bean tamale for two quetzals, equivalent to a U.S. quarter. The middle-aged vendor wore a multi-colored cloth skirt, snug above the waist and falling to mid-calf, and a knit mesh crop-top over a purple tank. Her skirt…
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English + Español
Sometimes we find our research topics in other people’s footnotes. I first read Canaima (1935), a lesser-studied novel by author, teacher and former president Rómulo Gallegos (1884-1969), as a student of Latin American literature in the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins…