UI Press | Michael Uzendoski | The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador

The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador

An indigenous Amazonian group's enlightening perspectives on value, reproduction, and exchange

Based upon historical and archival research, as well as the author's years of fieldwork in indigenous communities, Michael Uzendoski's theoretically informed work analyzes value from the perspective of the Napo Runa people of the Amazonian Ecuador.

Written in a clear and readable style, The Napo Runa of Amazonian Ecuador presents theoretical issues of value, poetics, and kinship as linked to the author's intersubjective experiences in Napo Runa culture. Drawing on insights from the theory of gift and value, Uzendoski argues that Napo Runa culture personifies value by transforming things into people through a process of subordinating them to human relationships. While many traditional exchange models treat the production of things as inconsequential, the Napo Runa understand production to involve a relationship with natural beings (plants, animals, spirits of the forest), which are considered to be subjects that share spiritual substance, or samai. Throughout the book, value is revealed as the outcome of a complicated poetics of transformation by which things and persons are woven into kinship forms that define daily social and ritual life.

"Uzendoski's book is an engaging and accessible introduction to contemporary Amazonian life-ways and would be quite suitable as an undergraduate text."--Eduardo Kohn, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

Michael A. Uzendoski is an associate professor of modern languages and linguistics at Florida State University and the author of The Ecology of the Spoken Word: Amazonian Storytelling and Shamanism among the Napo Runa.