Here are 98 books that Intimate Indigeneities fans have personally recommended if you like Intimate Indigeneities. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Andean Lives: Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huamán

Catherine J. Allen Author Of The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community

From my list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood.

Why am I passionate about this?

My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Has as well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.

Catherine's book list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood

Catherine J. Allen Why Catherine loves this book

This was a groundbreaking book when it came out in Peru in the 1970s. It’s the life stories of a street porter in the city of Cuzco and his wife, a market vendor, as they were told to a pair of Peruvian anthropologists. Monolingual in Quechua and living on the street, Gregorio and Asunta were at the very bottom of the social ladder, yet they recount their hard lives with such eloquence, humor, and grace that their words leap from the page. This is essential reading for anyone interested in Andean people, and a book you’ll never forget.

By Ricardo Valderrama Fernández , Carmen Escalante Gutiérrez , Paul H. Gelles (translator) , Gabriela Martínez Escobar (translator)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Andean Lives as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huaman were runakuna, a Quechua word that means "people" and refers to the millions of indigenous inhabitants neglected, reviled, and silenced by the dominant society in Peru and other Andean countries. For Gregorio and Asunta, however, that silence was broken when Peruvian anthropologists Ricardo Valderrama Fernandez and Carmen Escalante Gutierrez recorded their life stories. The resulting Spanish-Quechua narrative, published in the mid-1970s and since translated into many languages, has become a classic introduction to the lives and struggles of the "people" of the Andes.

Andean Lives is the first English translation of this important…


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Book cover of Aggressor

Aggressor by FX Holden,

It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.

The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…

Book cover of To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village

Catherine J. Allen Author Of The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community

From my list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood.

Why am I passionate about this?

My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Has as well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.

Catherine's book list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood

Catherine J. Allen Why Catherine loves this book

This was a foundational book for me as I completed my first fieldwork and wrote my dissertation. Isbell draws the reader into life in a highland village in the Ayacucho region of Peru shortly before it was upended by guerilla warfare, describing strategies villagers used to relate to, and maintain independence from, outside social forces. With vivid examples she provides in-depth analyses of social organization and ritual life, as well as a chapter on urban migration and a postscript about impending violence. 

By Billie Jean Isbell ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked To Defend Ourselves as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The result of ten years of studying the Quechua peasants of Chuschi in south-central Peru, this work is a structuralist attempt to uncover the mechanisms whereby the people of this Andean society struggle to protect the social and economic independence of their community from the outside world. The ethnographic strength of the book is a careful and insightful discussion of kinship and marriage as well as descriptions and interpretations of hydraulic, harvest, and fertility rites. Introductory notes by the author discuss guerrilla activities in the community that said, "To defend ourselves is to defend our traditions."


Book cover of At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community

Catherine J. Allen Author Of The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community

From my list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood.

Why am I passionate about this?

My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Has as well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.

Catherine's book list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood

Catherine J. Allen Why Catherine loves this book

This is a wonderful, sophisticated yet accessible book that provides readers with a vivid community study that is also a wide-ranging introduction to the anthropology of religion. The title refers to a small adobe house in the community of Rapaz that serves as a temple for religious practices directed to sacred mountains. Each chapter explores aspects of the temple and related ritual practices from a different theoretical vantage point, in order to “put before students’ eyes one case, an Andean temple, and treat it as an example for pondering the possibly pan-human matter of sacred ritual” (p.9). It’s beautifully written, personal and thought-provoking.

By Frank Salomon ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked At the Mountains' Altar as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In high-Andean Peru, Rapaz village maintains a temple to mountain beings who command water and weather. By examining the ritual practices and belief systems of an Andean community, this book provides students with rich understandings of unfamiliar religious experiences and delivers theories of religion from the realm of abstraction. From core field encounters, each chapter guides readers outward in a different theoretical direction, successively exploring the main paths in the anthropology of religion.

As well as addressing classical approaches in the anthropology of religion to rural modernity, Salomon engages with newer currents such as cognitive-evolution models, power-oriented critiques, the ontological…


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Book cover of Trusting Her Duke

Trusting Her Duke by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.

Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…

Book cover of Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds

Catherine J. Allen Author Of The Hold Life Has: Coca and Cultural Identity in an Andean Community

From my list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood.

Why am I passionate about this?

My connection with the Andean highlands of southern Peru stretches back to 1975 when I spent about a year in a small community of Quechua-speaking potato farmers and llama herders. I have returned there many times over the years, most recently in 2019. Its people, their way of life, and vision of the world are dear to my heart and are the subject of The Hold Life Has as well as a play, creative nonfiction, and, more recently, poetry. I love the way anthropology forces me to think outside the box and experience the world with different eyes, something I aim to convey in my work.

Catherine's book list on Andean life, landscape, and personhood

Catherine J. Allen Why Catherine loves this book

This book is about an unexpected meeting of minds. De la Cadena intended to write an account of a peasant campaign for land led by indigenous peasant leader Mariano Turpo during the 1950-60s.  But early on it became clear that she and Mariano were talking past each other, for Mariano understood his successful activism in terms of his relationship with animate places in the landscape (“earth beings”). The book contains a moving account of how the urban intellectual and traditional Andean leader learned to appreciate and communicate with each other. De la Cadena argues that attention to cultural difference—far from perpetuating false consciousnessmight open the way to radically new politics. Some readers may wish to pass over some dense theoretical passages, but the book is organized so one can do this without losing the larger picture.

By Marisol de la Cadena ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Earth Beings as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Earth Beings is the fruit of Marisol de la Cadena's decade-long conversations with Mariano and Nazario Turpo, father and son, runakuna or Quechua people. Concerned with the mutual entanglements of indigenous and nonindigenous worlds, and the partial connections between them, de la Cadena presents how the Turpos' indigenous ways of knowing and being include and exceed modern and nonmodern practices. Her discussion of indigenous political strategies-a realm that need not abide by binary logics-reconfigures how to think about and question modern politics, while pushing her readers to think beyond "hybridity" and toward translation, communication that accepts incommensurability, and mutual difference…


Book cover of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge

Dawn Baumann Brunke Author Of Awakening the Ancient Power of Snake: Transformation, Healing, and Enlightenment

From my list on the history, mystery, and healing power of snakes.

Why am I passionate about this?

I am an animal communicator and author of many books about our deeper connections with the animal world. A powerful dream featuring an archetypal Snake ignited my curiosity about snakes and inspired me to learn more. I immersed myself into the history, biology, and incredible diversity of snakes as well as their role in art, myth, medicine, and dreams. I also lived with two rescue snakes: a shy ball python named Carl and lively corn snake named Chloe. What I found was not only fascinating but life-changing. This book celebrates the mystery of Snake and the undeniable wisdom and healing that it offers our world.  

Dawn's book list on the history, mystery, and healing power of snakes

Dawn Baumann Brunke Why Dawn loves this book

Tracing Snake back to ancient times in its role as creator god, anthropologist Jeremy Narby follows both a scientific and shamanic approach to understanding our connection with Snake in its role as healer and mentor.

Why do life-creating, knowledge-imparting snakes appear in the visions, myths, and dreams of countless humans, Narby asks. Could this mythical serpent that created life be another way of perceiving the DNA molecule, which holds the organizing principle inherent in all life?

Highly recommended for a fascinating journey into the nature of reality and ourselves!  

By Jeremy Narby ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Cosmic Serpent as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This adventure in science and imagination, which the Medical Tribune said might herald "a Copernican revolution for the life sciences," leads the reader through unexplored jungles and uncharted aspects of mind to the heart of knowledge.In a first-person narrative of scientific discovery that opens new perspectives on biology, anthropology, and the limits of rationalism, The Cosmic Serpent reveals how startlingly different the world around us appears when we open our minds to it.


Book cover of Reimagining the Gran Chaco: Identities, Politics, and the Environment in South America

René Harder Horst Author Of A History of Indigenous Latin America: Aymara to Zapatistas

From my list on understand Indigenous peoples in Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

Born on the Navajo reservation and then raised among the Qom, Mocoi, and Pilagá in Argentina, I have been with Native peoples throughout my life. After studying Indigenous and Native American histories at Indiana University, I taught at Kalamazoo and Bates College, where I took students to track and canoe on Penobscot reserves. I write about Guaraní histories and have enjoyed teaching Indigenous, Native, and Latin American histories at Appalachian State University; some of my graduate students are now excellent university professors here in the Southeast. It was for these Indigenous peoples and for my amazing students that I wrote and dedicated my textbook.

René's book list on understand Indigenous peoples in Latin America

René Harder Horst Why René loves this book

This wonderful book collects ethnographies about Indigenous peoples in the Gran Chaco. This beautiful region, where I grew up and currently teach about, links Paraguay, Bolivia, Argentina, and Brazil and is home to over twenty-five Indigenous nations. 

The Gran Chaco is ecologically important because it is the second-largest biome in Latin America and the site of multiple extractive industries. Ranchers and soy planters are currently deforesting the region at the highest rate in the world and displacing the Indigenous peoples, forcing them into poverty, hunger, and prostitution.  

By Silvia Hirsch (editor) , Paola Canova (editor) , Mercedes Biocca (editor)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Reimagining the Gran Chaco as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region's many indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.

The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental and NGOs, and private businesses and how local…


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Book cover of The Duke's Christmas Redemption

The Duke's Christmas Redemption by Arietta Richmond,

A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.

Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…

Book cover of The Unconquered

Alex Cuadros Author Of When We Sold God's Eye

From my list on the Amazon rainforest and the amazing people who live there.

Why am I passionate about this?

You might say I have a love-hate relationship with the Amazon. As a journalist, I’ve been reporting from the rainforest since 2013, and I spent six years working on a book about an Amazonian tribe, often spending weeks a time at one of their villages. It’s not an easy place: hot, wet, insect-ridden. It can also be dangerous, what with all the loggers, prospectors, and sundry other outlaws. But I came to appreciate the singular beauty of the forest, truly a marvel of nature. And I loved befriending Indigenous people who understood the world in a radically different way, and led me to question my own, Western assumptions.

Alex's book list on the Amazon rainforest and the amazing people who live there

Alex Cuadros Why Alex loves this book

This book achieved the rare feat of keeping me in suspense with an inherently dramatic narrative while satisfying my intellectual curiosity about a place that, at the time, I knew little about. On one level, it’s a classic Amazon adventurethe story of a jungle expeditionbut on another, it’s a history of Brazil’s forced contacts with isolated Indigenous groups.

Along the way, you also get the rich texture of the rainforest itself. 

By Scott Wallace ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Unconquered as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The extraordinary true story of a journey into the deepest recesses of the Amazon to track one of the planet's last uncontacted indigenous tribes.
 
Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon's uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest's secrets while moving…


Book cover of The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru

Leo J. Garofalo Author Of Afro-Latino Voices: Translations of Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic Narratives

From my list on Afro-Latin American and Afro-Andean history.

Why am I passionate about this?

History tells us who we are and what we can become. History in the Andes tells us that people of the African Diaspora have been a part of building that part of the world into what it is today for over 500 years. I have been fascinated by learning this history and inspired by leaders, writers, artists, and fellow historians who consider themselves Afro-Andean and are building the future. For 25 years now, I have been scouring historical archives in Peru, Spain, and the US to find more sources to help us recognize and understand that history as we use it to build a better, more just present and future. 

Leo's book list on Afro-Latin American and Afro-Andean history

Leo J. Garofalo Why Leo loves this book

For thousands of years, right down to the present, textiles and weaving in the Andes has been some of the most exquisite and sophisticated in the world. It has been linked to the amazing cultural creativity of people in the Andes and the rise and fall of successive empires because controlling textile production is controlling power and wealth.

This book shows us something entirely new: how the weavers who made these amazing textiles experienced and often resisted that power and the exploitation of their labor. Even though this book is not explicitly about Afro-Andean people, they were an integral part of the Andean labor force, and they figure in histories of resistance and rebellion in the Andes.

By Di Hu ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Fabric of Resistance as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The Fabric of Resistance: Textile Workshops and the Rise of Rebellious Landscapes in Colonial Peru documents the impact of Spanish colonial institutions of labor on identity and social cohesion in Peru. Through archaeological and historical lines of evidence, Di Hu examines the long-term social conditions that enabled the large-scale rebellions in the late Spanish colonial period in Peru. Hu argues that ordinary people from different backgrounds pushed back against the top-down identity categories imposed by the Spanish colonial government and in the process created a cosmopolitan social landscape that later facilitated broader rebellion.

Hu's case study is Pomacocha, the site…


Book cover of Moon, Sun, and Witches: Gender Ideologies and Class in Inca and Colonial Peru

Susan Kellogg Author Of Weaving the Past: A History of Latin America's Indigenous Women from the Prehispanic Period to the Present

From my list on the history of Native women in Latin America.

Why am I passionate about this?

Growing up in a sheltered environment on Long Island, NY, I had little sense of a larger world, except for seeing images of the Vietnam War. Going to college in the early 70s and becoming an anthropology major, the world began to open up, yet I hadn't experienced life outside the U.S. until my mid-20s as a graduate student living in Mexico to do dissertation research. That experience and travels to Guatemala, Peru, Cuba, and Costa Rica helped me to see how diverse Latin America is, and how real poverty and suffering are as well. Coming into my own as a historian, teacher, and writer, my fascination with women’s voices, experiences, and activism only grew.

Susan's book list on the history of Native women in Latin America

Susan Kellogg Why Susan loves this book

This book is a classic of Latin American women’s history, telling the story of how Andean women’s relative gender equity (what the author calls “gender parallelism,” a concept that applies to gender structures in many Latin American societies, especially the Aztecs—known as Nahuas—about whom I’ve also written) became transformed first by the Inca, then by the Spanish.

Written with feeling about forms of both complementarity and exploitation, Silverblatt shows women of the past, non-elite and noble, to have been productive, creative, and responsive to the social and economic conditions around them.

By Irene Marsha Silverblatt ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Moon, Sun, and Witches as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

When the Spanish arrived in Peru in 1532, men of the Inca Umpire worshipped the Sun as Father and their dead kings as ancestor heroes, while women venerated the Moon and her daughters, the Inca queens, as founders of female dynasties. In the pre-Inca period such notions of parallel descent were expressions of complementarity between men and women. Examining the interplay between gender ideologies and political hierarchy. Irene Silverblatt shows how Inca rulers used their Sun and Moon traditions as methods of controlling women and the Andean peoples the Incas conquered. She then explores the process by which the Spaniards…


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Book cover of Old Man Country

Old Man Country by Thomas R. Cole,

This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.

In these and other intimate conversations, the book…

Book cover of Antisuyo: The Search for the Lost Cities of the Amazon

Vincent R. Lee Author Of Forgotten Vilcabamba: Final Stronghold of the Incas

From my list on discovery of the true Lost City of the Incas.

Why am I passionate about this?

Vincent Lee is a professional architect and former Alpine climbing guide and instructor, US Marine Corps officer, Andean explorer, and author. Searching in the high Andes of Peru and the rain forests of the Upper Amazon for the remains of the long-lost final redoubt of the once-powerful Inca Empire not only appealed to his life-long interest in all of these disparate fields, but it called upon his many years of experience in each: wilderness trekking, mountain warfare, mapping and drawing the remains of the more than 500 ancient structures discovered.

Vincent's book list on discovery of the true Lost City of the Incas

Vincent R. Lee Why Vincent loves this book

Following up on Hiram Bingham's 1911 visit to an overgrown ruin in the forest at a place called Espíritu Pampa (The Plain of Ghosts) and dismissed by Bingham as unimportant, Savoy set out in 1964-5 to prove him wrong. Bingham had identified Machu Picchu as the lost Inca capital, Vilcabamba, but Savoy was sure there was more to be found at the Plain of Ghosts than Bingham knew. He was right, and in several adventurous expeditions found a large Inca city there that he thought better met the Spanish accounts of Vilcabamba.

By Gene Savoy ,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Antisuyo as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This inspiring and historic book: Antisuyo by Gene Savoy, is about the search for the lost cities of the Amazon. Antisuyo is the full account of the authors' daring expedition beyond one of the few remaining uncharted frontiers, and of his glorious discovery of the fabled cities of Viacabamba and Muyok Viejo--two of the most important archaeololgical sites found in recent years. He takes the reader through the forbidding mysteries of the wild territory in search for of clues to puzzles that have remained unsolved since the days of Pizarro: Aztahualpa: the legendary Manco Capac; the famed El Dorado, City…


Book cover of Andean Lives: Gregorio Condori Mamani and Asunta Quispe Huamán
Book cover of To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village
Book cover of At the Mountains' Altar: Anthropology of Religion in an Andean Community

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Interested in ethnicity, Bolivia, and Peru?

Ethnicity 28 books
Bolivia 20 books
Peru 52 books