Overview

How do Amazonian native young people perceive, question, and negotiate the new kinds of social and cultural situations in which they find themselves? Virtanen looks at how current power relations constituted by ethnic recognition, new social contacts, and cooperation with different institutions have shaped the current native youth in Amazonia.

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9781137265340

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Virtanen provides a vivid and encouraging picture of the Machineri Indians of western Brazil, for whom a recent indigenist movement resulted in citizenship, a reserve, and access to new resources in education, health, and trade, all of which require involvement with regional and national governments as well as various nongovernmental agencies ... Summing Up: Highly recommended. All level/libraries. - CHOICE

<p>the urban lives of young adults. In doing so, she does not reject the virtues of traditional ethnographic methods, for she is a passionate enquirer and a skilled recorder of what she sees and hears. I would not have imagined that the lives and thoughts of these young indigenous urban people would be so varied and pioneering, but, then, I also lacked the imagination to investigate the issue. Luckily for us, Virtanen had the imagination to ask the question, and has answered it. - Peter Gow, University of St Andrews<p> To date, studies of native Amazonian teenagers and studies of native Amazonian people's experiences in urban settings have been extremely rare, and none had ever attempted to combine both. This is therefore a groundbreaking book, providing an excellent balance between ambitious theoretical goals and detailed ethnographic description of contemporary life among the Manchineri, a hereto little-known people of Western Brazil. - Philippe Erikson, professor of Anthropology, University of Paris Ouest-Nanterre<p> This ambitious project goes beyond classic divisions in the study of Amazonian peoples and places, divisions that have guided understanding and academic research until very recently. Rejecting the traditional division of labour between the study of indigenous communities in the heart of the jungle and the study of impoverished migrants in the city, Virtanen also seeks to overcome the standard perceptions that the former are 'traditional, ' somehow fixed in time, while the latter are 'modern' - caught in times flow, albeit as the victims rather than the makers of history. Rather, the young people are portrayed as active, dynamic, living, and feeling subjects engaging their own resources and creativity in a complex landscape riddled with difficulties but also opportunities. - Cecilia McCallum, professor of Social Anthropology at the Federal University of Bahia

Author Information

Pirjo Kristiina Virtanen is a researcher in Latin American Studies in the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki.

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