THE STORY: A group of club-women try to entertain a high-hat woman novelist. Everything goes wrong, and the poor women are in despair trying to make conversation. One member, to show up the bluffs of the novelist and her own fellow-members, starts everyone talking about Xingu. No one knows what this is, but no one will admit it. During the squabble the novelist slips away with the woman who mentioned it-or him-and the others are forced to ask the maid, who knows of course that Xingu is a river!
Xingu is a humourous short story by Edith Wharton, about a group of six women who meet together at a lunch club hosted by Mrs Ballinger. At this meeting, they have invited an author of one of the books they have supposed to have read, but find they can't really discuss it, as they meet more to socialise than to discuss books. Wharton captures perfectly the need of the characters to outdo each other, with the point seemingly to be as pretentious as possible.
‘Xingu’ lampoons the leisurely lives of six ladies who lunch. Having formed a literary club, the six pseudo-intellectuals are thrown into panic at the prospect of being visited by a famous author. With sparkling dialogue and some wry observations about the lives of the upper classes, ‘Xingu’ is a biting satire on women’s place in the society of the time. A superb read, with an unexpected and riotous denouement. Edith Wharton (1862 – 1937) was an American designer and novelist. Born in an era when the highest ambition a woman could aspire to was a good marriage, Wharton went on to become one of America’s most celebrated authors. During her career, she wrote over 40 books, using her wealthy upbringing to bring authenticity and detail to stories about the upper classes. She moved to France in 1923, where she continued to write until her death.
"Like many other South American Indian communities, the Suya Indians of Mato Grosso, Brazil, devote a great deal of time and energy to making music, especially singing. In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suya Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suya - and by extension for other groups - through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in an initiation ceremony." "This new paperback edition features a CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suya in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers." -- Prové de l'editor.
"This book charts the changes in the lives and fortunes of these incredible people. It focuses on their humanity and on their individuality. It shows that they are people, just as we are people, and not simply exotic objects. It tells us that they have a fundamental right to our respect, and that we have an obligation to protect their land, their environment and their chosen way of life." - Sting The Spirit of the Amazon is the work of photojournalist Sue Cunningham and writer Patrick Cunningham. It is a celebration of cultural difference and a call for better stewardship of the world. Sue's stunning photographs demonstrate the spiritual and material value of the Xingu tribes to all mankind; they keep the forest alive and they protect the climate of South America and the rest of the world. Their spiritual connection to their environment and the wider Earth shows us an alternative way to connect to the natural richness of the planet, built on foundations completely different from those of global materialism. During their expedition by boat, the authors followed the course of the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, travelling 2,500 km through the heart of Brazil. They visited 48 tribal villages in this remote part of the Amazon, accessible only by small plane or by negotiating the rapids of the Xingu. This is the story of the tribal communities they met; their daily lives, their connection to the land and to the rivers, the threats which pervade each day of their lives. It is also a validation of their importance to the rest of the world; why these small, remote and often secretive indigenous communities are so important to our own lives and to our shared planet. It is a celebration of their vibrant cultures, their rituals and their rites of passage, of cultures very different from each other, but with a shared spiritual basis which respects the trees, the rivers and the rain. And it is a call for the world to protect them, their lands and their forests and rivers from the destruction which our avaricious greed for natural resources drives ever closer and deeper into their realm. AUTHORS: Photojournalist Sue Cunningham was born in London, but moved to Brazil at the age of twelve. Writer Patrick Cunningham was born in Northamptonshire. In the early 1980s, while on a commission to cover gold mining in the Amazon for the Financial Times, Sue came into contact with the Xicrin tribe. She experienced first hand the discrimination they suffered and the immense threats they were under from pressures for the development of the Amazon. Sue later took Sting, and Anita and Gordon Roddick (The Body Shop) into the Amazon to visit the tribes of the Xingu and help raise a more global awareness. In 1998, Sue and Patrick won The Royal Geographical Society award for their Heart of Brazil Expedition.
Like human groups everywhere, Wauja people construct their identity in relation to others. This book tells the story of the Wauja group from the Xingu Indigenous Park in central Brazil and its relation to powerful new interlocutors. Tracing Wauja interactions with others, Ball depicts expanding scales of social action from the village to the wider field of the park and finally abroad. Throughout, the author analyzes language use in ritual settings to show how Wauja people construct relationships with powerful spirit-monsters, ancestors, and ethnic trading partners. Ball’s use of ritual as an analytic category helps show how Wauja interactions with spirits and Indian neighbors, for example, are connected to interactions with the Brazilian government, international NGOs, and museums in projects of development. Showing ritual as a contributing factor to relationships of development and the politics of indigeneity, Exchanging Words asks how discourse, ritual, and exchange come together to mediate social relations close to home and on a global scale.
Little boy of the South American jungle in the valley of the Amazon wants to be a hunter but after some adventures with the strange animals of the wild he no longer wants to shoot them for they are his friends.
The music of the peoples of South and Central America, Mexico, and the Caribbean has never received a comprehensive treatment in English until this multi-volume work. Taking a sociocultural and human-centered approach, Music in Latin America and the Caribbean gathers the best scholarship from writers all over the world to cover in depth the musical legacies of indigenous peoples, creoles, African descendants, Iberian colonizers, and other immigrant groups that met and mixed in the New World. Within a history marked by cultural encounters and dislocations, music emerges as the powerful tool that negotiates identities, enacts resistance, performs belief, and challenges received aesthetics. This work, more than two decades in the making, was conceived as part of "The Universe of Music: A History" project, initiated by and developed in cooperation with the International Music Council, with the goals of empowering Latin Americans and Caribbeans to shape their own musical history and emphasizing the role that music plays in human life. The four volumes that constitute this work are structured as parts of a single conception and gather 150 contributions by more than 100 distinguished scholars representing 36 countries. Volume 1, Performing Beliefs: Indigenous Peoples of South America, Central America, and Mexico, focuses on the inextricable relationships between worldviews and musical experience in the current practices of indigenous groups. Worldviews are built into, among other things, how music is organized and performed, how musical instruments are constructed and when they are played, choreographic formations, the structure of songs, the assignment of gender to instruments, and ritual patterns. Two CDs with 44 recorded examples illustrate the contributions to this rich volume.
