Customizing Indigeneity: Paths to a Visionary Politics in Peru

How do vision quests, river locations, and warriors relate to indigenous activism? For the Aguaruna, an ethnic group at the forefront of Peru's Amazonian Movement, incorporating practices and values they define as customary allows them to shape their own experience as modern indigenous subjects. As Shane Greene reveals, this customization centers on the complex articulation of meaningful social practices, cultural logics, and the political economy of specialized production and consumption. Following decades of engagement with and resistance to state-mandated missionary education, land-titling, and international advocacy networks, the Aguaruna have faced numerous constraints in pursuit of their own political projects. Based on first-hand fieldwork, Customizing Indigeneity provides a new theoretical language for the politics of indigeneity. Documenting the dynamic between historical constraints and cultural creativity, this work provides a fresh perspective on indigenous people's agency within evolving structures of inequality, while simultaneously challenging common assumptions about scholarly engagement with marginalized populations.

Author: Shane Greene
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 05/28/2009
Pages: 269
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 8.80h x 5.90w x 0.70d
ISBN: 9780804761192

Review Citation(s):
Choice 06/01/2010
Reference and Research Bk News 02/01/2010 pg. 83

About the Author
Shane Greene is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University.