Description
Book Synopsis This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.
Trade Review “The effect of the whole [volume] is to emphasize the importance of saving sites locally sacred to Indigenous or majority peoples, and to take full account of how they are regarded and how they must be reverently and civilly managed to keep from offending…Highly recommended.” • Choice
“This volume has multidisciplinary implications, and includes geographers, cultural anthropologists, and archaeologists, as well as the leader of an indigenous group as authors. This book will be an excellent complement to other existing texts in the field of ecological anthropology.” • William Balée, Tulane University
Table of Contents Dedication
List of Figures, Tables, and Boxes
Acknowledgements
Prologue: Whose Sacred Sites? Indigenous Political Use of Sacred Sites, Mythology, and Religion
Randall Borman
PART I: GEOGRAPHIES OF INDIGENOUS REVIVAL AND CONSERVATION
Introduction
Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner
Chapter 1. Sacred Natural Sites in a Conservation Management and Policy Perspective
Bas Verschuuren, Robert Wild, and Gerard Verschoor
Chapter 2. Structural Changes in Latin American Spirituality: An Essay on the Geography of Religions
Axel Borsdorf
PART II: FRAMING SACRED SITES IN INDIGENOUS MINDSCAPES
Introduction to Part II: Framing Sacred Sites in Indigenous Mindscapes
Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner
Chapter 3. El Buen Vivir and “The Good Life”: A South-North Binary Perspective on the Indigenous, the Sacred, and their Conservation
Esmeralda Guevara and Larry M. Frolich
Chapter 4. Sacred Mountains: Sources of Indigenous Revival and Sustenance
Edwin Bernbaum
Chapter 5. Frozen Mummies and the Archaeology of High Mountains in the Construction of Andean Identity
Constanza Ceruti
Chapter 6. Changing Images and Dimensions of Andean Indigenous Identities in Space and Time
Christoph Stadel
Chapter 7. National Park Service Approaches to Connecting Indigenous Cultural and Spiritual Values to Protected Places
David E. Ruppert and Charles W. Smythe
PART III: CASE STUDIES
Introduction to Part III: Case Studies
Fausto Sarmiento and Sarah Hitchner
Chapter 8. Collaborative Archaeology as a Tool for Preserving Sacred Sites in the Cherokee Heartland
Benjamin A. Steere
Chapter 9. Biocultural Sacred Sites in Mexico
Mindahi Crescencio Bastida Muñoz and Geraldine Patrick Encina
Chapter 10. New Dimensions in the Territorial Conservation Management in Ecuador: A Brief Political View of Sacred Sites in Ecuador
Xavier Viteri O.
Chapter 11. Traditional Ethnobotanical Knowledge and Sustainable Development in the Peruvian Amazon
Fernando Roca Alcazar
PART IV: CONCLUSION
Conclusion
Sarah Hitchner, Fausto Sarmiento, and John Schelhas
Bibliography
Index
