Janet Chernela

• PhD, Columbia University.
• Professor Emeritus at University of Maryland, College Park

Speakers of Eastern Tukanoan languages in Brazil and Colombia construe linguistic differences as indices of group identity, intrinsic to a complex ontology in which language is a consubstantial, metaphysical product—a ‘substance’ in the development of the person. Through speech, speakers of the same language signal a corporality based in theories o...

This paper considers the power of external mediating agents in constructing frameworks and criteria through which local demands are defined and problematized. The paper examines the history of a grassroots environmental movement in the Brazilian Amazon from the early 1980s to the present in order to consider political transformations in an expandin...

My contribution differs from prior explorationspeakers of Wanano, an Eastern Tukanoan language, strategically speakers combine the rhetorical dialogic device of reported speech, one type of “voicing,” with choice of a grammatical evidential to indicate a speaker’s relationship to the information conveyed, in order to expand available repertoires of...

Gretchen E Schafft is contributing editor of “Human Rights Forum,” the AAA Committee for Human Rights column in Anthropology News . Keywords: Brazil, South America, economic development, indigenous peoples

This article considers ecotourism among the Kuna of the San Blas Archipelago in Panama, using the term I use the concept of islamiento to describe both ‘isolation’ and ‘island-isation’ as central metaphors to understand Kuna strategies in demarcating tourist and community spaces. The local autonomy exemplified by the Kuna in tourism is just one tra...

Poetic performance has often been relegated to secondary status by social scientists who may consider it epiphenomenal to everyday life. This argument is deftly countered in Anthony Seeger's acclaimed book, Why Suyá Sing, now in paperback with accompanying CD. In impeccable, economic, prose Seeger shows that performance is more than the artful use...

Taking the Northwest Amazon of Brazil as its example, this article argues for the analytic concept of a "speech culture," combining, but heuristically separating, speech practice and language ideology. In the Northwest Amazon, an ideology of language establishes an equivalence between linguistic performance and descent group belonging. In contrast...

Yanomami Warfare: A Political History. R. BRIAN FERGUSON. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1995. xiv + 449 pp., maps, notes, references, index.

The Anthropology of Love and Anger: The Aesthetics of Conviviality in Native Amazonia. Joanna Overing and Alan Passes. eds. London: Routledge, 2000. 305 pp.

Indigenous South Americans of the Past and Present: An Ecological Perspective. David J. Wilson. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999. 480 pp.

How Real People Ought to Live: The Cashinahua of Eastern Peru. Kenneth M. Kensinger. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1995. vi. 305 pp., figures, photographs, notes, bibliography, index.

The proliferation of a nongovernmental sector held the promise of linking local actors with national and international ones, thereby contributing to a highly participatory, Habermasian ideal in which the formerly marginalized would find greater participation and expression. Yet the role of international agents in community-based resource management...

Interview with Davi Kopenawa, June 7, 2001, Demini Village, Yanomami territories, Brazil. Davi discusses the ethics of anthropological fieldwork and addresses the American Anthropological Association.

Clark, Herbert H. Arenas of Language Use. Chicago: University of Chicago Press and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, 1992. xviii + 419 pp. including notes, references, and index. $47.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.Tannen, Deborah, ed. Gender and Conversational Interaction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. xiv + 327 pp. including...

In northwest Amazon societies, diverse groups marry across linguistic and geographic barriers: kinship and kin proximity occur according to cultural rules, and kinship, language, and residence may not be equated with genetic relatedness, as previously postulated. The assumption of genetic relatedness and random mating within a prescribed geographic...