Comparative Arawakan Histories: Rethinking Language Family and Culture Area in Amazonia

The first synthesis of the writings of ethnologists, historians, and anthropologists on contemporary Arawakan cultures

Before they were largely decimated and dispersed by the effects of European colonization, Arawak-speaking peoples were the most widespread language family in Latin America and the Caribbean, and they were the first people Columbus encountered in the Americas. Comparative Arawakan Histories, in paperback for the first time, examines social structures, political hierarchies, rituals, religious movements, gender relations, and linguistic variations through historical perspectives to document sociocultural diversity across the diffused Arawakan diaspora.

Jonathan D. Hill is chair of the Department of Anthropology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. He is the author of Keepers of the Sacred Chants: The Poetics of Ritual Power in an Amazonian Society.Fernando Santos-Granero is a staff scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama and the author of The Power of Love: The Moral Use of Knowledge amongst the Amuesha of Central Peru.