Customer Reviews

The Ecology of Power: Culture, Place and Personhood in the Southern Amazon, AD 1000-2000 (Critical Perspectives in Identity, Memory & the Built Environment)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Disclaimer: This is a superficial review based on a superficial scan of the book, and I'm not an archeological or anthropological professional. I only had a copy to look over for a couple of days, but that was enough to make some observations, and really--as it turned out--all the time I wanted to spend on it.

I was interested in "Ecology of Power" after reading about Heckenberger and his work in David Grann's "Lost City of Z". Grann's book was a journalistic/(auto)biographical story aimed at the widest possible general audience. Heckenberger's book is an uncompromisingly scientific work aimed at specialists in South American archeology and anthropology.

Much of the text is opaque to the lay reader: because it's framed in terms of theories or doctrines particular to the field, and/or because it's written in technical/scholarly jargon, and/or because in some places it makes heavy use of untranslatable Indian words ("Next, the i'itai of the ai'u'ingas brings out the hu'num'pitla..."--that's a made-up example, but you get the idea.)

A science fiction/fantasy writer could do worse than skim this book for ideas about how to design an alien society. One tends to think of jungle-dwelling natives as living in a sort of untrammeled, near-anarchic freedom, but when their culture is closely observed, they seem to be even more rigidly controlled by law, custom, taboo and hierarchy than we ourselves are. Only tribal chieftans have the privilege of "speaking in certain ways"; cultural protocols govern things right down to the details of where a particular person may sit or stand in a house. (But then, really, couldn't the same thing be said about a visit to your wealthy cousin's?)

I get the impression that this is a paradigm-shifting work, no doubt both hugely significant and controversial in the fields it pertains to, but for reactions from specialists you'd probably have to go to professional journals (or off-the-record professional comments!).

I've given this three stars mostly, say 90%, to indicate the book's inaccessibility to the general reader; but also in small part (say 5%) because even in my quick look-over, I noticed a surprising number of typographical errors for such a scholarly work--there are fairly frequent incomplete sentences, as well as the kinds of typos that a spellcheck wouldn't catch but a proofreading would (or should) have, like "stain" substituted for "strain". Doesn't anybody in the computer generation proofread books anymore? And also, the last 5%, because I'm left with a nagging suspicion that some of the exotic societal features and dynamics Heckenberger describes might, if the description were rendered into nontechnical language, actually seem like relatively straightforward and mundane stuff.

So, Heckenberger spends years(?) in the jungle gathering this information, and I spend an hour at the kitchen table critiquing it. Well, that's the privilege Amazon provides.

I am not an anthropologist, but as a geologist, I find that I have a deep interest in that area. The information in this book will be of assistance when ever I am seeking more information concerning puzzles that are presented in other books on the Amazon River area. I will be referring to it time after time. I think it is a great book.