Amerindian socio-cosmologies between the Andes, Amazonia and Mesoamerica : toward an anthropological understanding of the Isthmo-Colombian Area / Ernst Halbmayer.

The Isthmo-Colombian Area in context -- Introduction: Toward an anthropological understanding of the area between the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Amazon / Ernst Halbmayer -- Conceptualizing the Isthmo-Colombian Area from a regional comparative perspective -- An Amerindian humanism: Order and transformation in Chibchan universes / Juan Camillo Niño Vargas -- Languages of the Isthmo-Colombian Area and its Southeastern Borderland: Chibchan, Chocoan, Yukpa, and Wayuunaiki / Matthias Pache, Colette Grinevald and Sergio Meira -- Kinship, clanship, and hierarchy in the Isthmo-Colombian Area / Ernst Halbmayer -- Between Mesoamerica, the Central Andes, and Amazonia: Area conceptions, chronologies, and history / Ernst Halbmayer and Christiane Clados -- The golden ones: The human body as reflective metallic surface in the Isthmo-Colombian Area / Christiane Clados. Case studies: Change and continuity in shamanic and priestly practices and the conception of things, humans, plants and animals -- Parents who own lives: Relations and persons among a Chibchan group in Colombia / Jose Arenas Gómez -- Tuwancha, "the One Who Knows": Specialists and specialized knowledge in transhuman communication among the Sokorpa Yukpa of the Serranía del Perijá, Colombia / Anne Goletz -- The Wounaan haaihí jëeu nam ritual with the K'ugwiu: reinforcing benevolence and preventing calamity / Chindío Peña Ismare, Julia Velásquez Runk, Rito Ismare Peña and Chenier Carpio Opua -- Things, life, and humans in Gunayala (Panama): Talking about Molas and Nuchus inside and outside Guna Society / Mònica Martínez Mauri -- Plant ontologies among the Bribri of Talamanca, Costa Rica / Schabnam Kaviany -- The place of livestock in human-nonhuman relationship among the Wayuu / Alessandro Mancuso -- Murderous spirits: Shamanic Interpretation of Armed violence, suicide, and exhumation in the economy of death of the Emberá (Chocó, Antioquia, Colombia) / Anne-Marie Losonczy.

"This book offers a new anthropological understanding of the socio-cosmological and ontological characteristics of the Isthmo-Colombian Area, beyond established theories for Amazonia, the Andes and Mesoamerica. It focuses on a core region that has been largely neglected by comparative anthropology in recent decades. Centering on relations between Chibchan groups and their neighbors, the contributions consider prevailing socio-cosmological principles and their relationship to Amazonian animism and Mesoamerican and Andean analogism. Classical notions of area homogeneity are reconsidered and the book formulates an overarching proposal for how to make sense of the heterogeneity of the region's indigenous groups. Drawing on original fieldwork and comparative analysis, the volume provides a valuable anthropological addition to archaeological and linguistic knowledge of the Isthmo-Colombian Area"-- Provided by publisher.

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