Collection Highlights
Quispillaqta, Peru (ISB_00209)
Much of the collection is divided into groups: the largest category includes various rituals described in my ethnography, To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village (see below). Other resources found in the collection highlights include: music recorded in Chuschi in the early 1990's, with an accompanying article which analyzes the lyrics as well as protest art generated during the years of violence. Another category examines gender relations in Andean culture; this resulted from preparing the metadata for the slides in this collection. The section titled "Inka Observations of the Zenith Passage of the Sun" reflects my interest in Andean indigenous knowledge, taken from research trips in Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia in the 1980's. And lastly, the Ecology section examines how agriculture is practiced in the diverse ecological zones of the Andes.
To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village was first published by the University of Texas Press in 1978 and reissued by Waveland Press in 1985 with a new introduction. The Spanish edition of the ethnography was published by Bartolome de Las Casas in 2005 with an additional chapter on the violence that began in 1980, as well as a new introduction by me, and a preface by Enrique Mayer.