From horseback to motorbikes: inside the motorcycle boom in Indigenous South America

The landscape of the South American Lowlands has been drastically changed over the past 150 years by the arrival of mechanical machinery, and particularly the territories inhabited by indigenous peoples who have been forced to adapt to new ways of living, with their traditional life transformed or disrupted. Steamships, railways and trucks used for transportation arrived over the last century, followed by guns, used for both hunting and warfare. Then the arrival of bulldozers and chainsaws, used by the logging industry, has changed the rainforest forever. Meanwhile, electric generators hum constantly in the background. Motorbikes are one of the latest machines to hit the lowlands. Over the last two decades, there has been a huge motorbike boom in Indigenous South America, with more and more indigenous people buying bikes from the money they make trading rubber, timber, palm hearts and Brazil nuts, and I have seen firsthand how motorbikes have drastically changed these people´s lives

La otra cara de la luna. Escritos sobre el Japón

Compila nueve conferencias, comunicaciones breves y entrevistas en las cuales Claude Lévi-Strauss despliega su particular visión del Japón. Los textos cubren temas tan disímiles como el arte, la técnica culinaria, la mitología, los relatos de diversos viajeros o la dialéctica eterna entre tradición y cambio. No faltan los habituales recursos del maestro del estructuralismo: las citas de Montaigne, Rousseau o Chateaubriand, las analogías con mitos griegos y norteamericanos, la expresión barroca, la comparación sorprendente, la frase memorable

Unwinding Limb Development.

The molecular mechanisms underpinning vertebrate body plan evolution are beginning to be unravelled. In this issue of Cell, Kvon et al. spectacularly demonstrate how transplanting snake-specific genetic changes found uniquely in serpent enhancers leads to limb loss in mice

Generalizing complexity: a fruitful partnership of functional genomics and systems biology.

A report on the meeting 'Functional Genomics and Systems Biology 2011', Wellcome Trust Conference Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, Cambridge, UK, 29 November to 1 December, 2011

Comparative Studies and the South American Gran Chaco

This article reviews the historical and present prospects of ethnohistorical and ethnographic work in the South American Gran Chaco. Geographically the Chaco is a semi-arid central South American plain, some one million square kilometers in size, encompassing portions of northern Argentina, eastern Bolivia, and western Paraguay. Average rainfall oscillates around 800 mm/yr, with the peripheries being wetter and the central Chaco drier. Some 250,000 indigenous people belonging to more than twenty ethnic groups live in the Chaco. Traditional ethno-linguistic categorization classifies them into six main linguistic groups: Mataco-maká (Wichí-Mataco, Chorote, Nivaclé-Chulupí, Maká), Guaycurú (Toba, Toba-Pilagá, Pilagá, Mocoví, Mbayá-Caduveo), Lule-Vilela (Chunupí), Lengua-Maskoi (Lengua, Sanapaná, Angaité, Enenlhet), Zamuco (Chamacoco-Ishir, Ayoreo) and Tupí-Guaraní (Ava-Chiriguano, Chané, Tapiete, Isoseño-Guaraní, and Guaraní Occidental). The last group is the largest, including nearly 100,000 people, of whom the majority live in Bolivia. Unlike their Amazonian and Andean counterparts, Chaco indigenous peoples have yet to establish transnational, pan-indigenous representative bodies of their own. The present position of Chaco scholars is in many ways isomorphic to that of Chaco indigenous peoples, as Chaco anthropology has not established itself as an internationally recognized field of endeavor. Nevertheless, recent scholarship in the region is currently producing an original synthesis of many of the long-standing concerns of Andeanist and Amazonianist scholarship, respectively. A case can also be made for a new direction for research, based upon intriguing anthropological and historical parallels between the North American Great Plains and the South American Gran Chaco. The very indefinition of Chaco scholarship may also be its principal strength, and the past and present directions of Chaco research both draw upon and make a persuasive case for returning to comparative and area studies approaches in anthropology

García Jordán Pilar (éd.), Para una crónica de Guarayos

Completando una trilogía que incluye otras obras dedicadas a los guarayos de Bolivia (García Jordán 2006, 2009), la historiadora Pilar García Jordán recupera en este libro los diarios franciscanos de las cinco reducciones guarayas: Urubichá, Ascensión, Yotaú, Yaguarú y San Pablo. Localizados en el Archivo de Tarata, en el Archivo Histórico de la Provincia Misionera de San Antonio (Cochabamba) y en el Archivo Parroquial de Ascensión de Guarayos, los diarios narran los pormenores de la existenc..

Los viajes del doctor Vellard

For most Americanist scholars, Jehan Albert Vellard (1901-1996) is relatively unknown. He may appear as a passing bibliographical reference, or at best as the doctor of medicine who joined Claude Lévi-Strauss on his trip to Mato Grosso. Vellard the Americanist is definitely not a contemporary author: to us, his works may seem antiquated, devoid of glamour and heuristic potential, while the author himself appears as an awkward and unpleasant ancestor whom nobody defends. Yet, such a diagnosis is simplistic and premature. This customary dismissal of Vellard prevents us from grasping his multifaceted personality, his role as a key witness at a critical moment for Chaco, the Andes and the Amazon, and his scientific research which combined ethnography, physical anthropology, linguistics, archaeology and biology. This paper therefore revisits some of the anthropological expeditions in which Jehan Vellard took part during the 1930s, commissioned by the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro, and particularly his voyage to Paraguay (1931-1932) during the Chaco War and the famous Mato Grosso expedition (1938) with Lévi-Strauss. The aim is to reconstruct the specific context in which part of the Museum’s anthropological collections were formed, while at the same time shedding light on the ambiguities of the per­sonal and scientific legacy of Jehan Vellard.Para la mayoría de los americanistas Jehan A. Vellard (1901-1996) es un desconocido. Para muchos es apenas una referencia bibliográfica más, y para otros tan solo el médico que acompañó al Mato Grosso a Claude Lévi-Strauss. Definitivamente Vellard no es un contemporáneo: su obra resulta anticuada, poco glamorosa y carece de potencia heurística, mientras que su autor se presenta como un ancestro incómodo, antipático, que nadie reivindica. Sin embargo, contentarse con este diagnóstico sería demasiado fácil. El descarte disciplinar de la figura de Vellard deja escapar una personalidad polifacética, testigo de tiempos críticos para el Chaco, los Andes o la Amazonía, y al mismo tiempo una obra que combina la etnografía, la antropología física, la lingüística, la arqueología y la biología. Se trata, entonces, de revisar desapasionadamente algunas de las expediciones científicas que Vellard realiza para el Museo del Trocadero en la década de 1930, en particular los viajes al Paraguay (1931-1932) en vísperas de la guerra del Chaco y al Mato Grosso (1938) en la famosa expedición con Lévi-Strauss, y de repasar las circunstancias específicas en las cuales se conformó una parte de las colecciones del museo. Al mismo tiempo, el análisis permite echar luz sobre las ambigüedades del legado personal y científico de Vellar

Cordeu Edgardo Jorge, El origen de la pintura. Mitología, memoria étnica y autobiografía del artista indígena Ógwa

Llamados a través de los siglos horio, caypotorades, imonos, tunachos, timinaha, timuaes, karaos o xamococos, los chamacoco (o ishír) constituyen la rama oriental de la familia lingüística zamuco. Inmortalizados a fines de siglo xix en las excepcionales imágenes documentadas por la cámara de Guido Boggiani, para muchos el término « chamacoco » evoca única, metonímicamente, la célebre casta servil de los mbaya-caduveo; sin embargo, cualquier conocedor del Chaco sabe también que su singularidad..