Though the Indians appeared eager to receive the Gospel, they also had a tendency to forget the missionaries’ lessons and “revert” to their natural state of war, cannibalism, and polygamy. This peculiar mixture of acceptance and rejection, compulsion and forgetfulness was incorrectly understood by the priests as a sign of the natives’ incapacity to believe in anything durably.In this pamphlet, world-renowned Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro situates the Jesuit missionaries’ accounts of the Tupi people in historical perspective, and in the process draws out some startling and insightful implications of their perceived inconstancy in relation to anthropological debates on culture and religion.

    But it does an even better job at helping women look and feel great about themselves.What makes a really successful woman is not what she wears but what she is made of inside. New shoes can make you feel good for a moment, but they won't help you deal with the endless challenges you face as a woman - relationships, marriage, children, work, feelings of inadequacy, the stress of staying in shape and looking good, hurt feelings, ............ you can fill the blank.In 'Better Than A New Pair Of Shoes' you will find wisdom and tools to deal with these and other situations that affect you. Talking to you, not down to you, Cristiane Cardoso speaks from her experiences - good and bad - and shares insights into what she has learned on her journey as a single woman, then wife, then mother, and now a counselor to thousands of women worldwide.

    

    Said to be the disembodied spirit of an unruly harlot, Pomba Gira is a controversial figure in Brazil. Devotees maintain that Pomba Gira possesses an intimate knowledge of human affairs and the mystical power to intervene in the human world. Others view this entity more ambivalently. Kelly E. Hayes provides an intimate and engaging account of the intricate relationship between Pomba Gira and one of her devotees, Nazaré da Silva. Combining Nazaré’s spiritual biography with analysis of the gender politics and violence that shapes life on the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Hayes highlights Pomba Gira’s role in the rivalries, relationships, and struggles of everyday life in urban Brazil.A DVD of the film Slaves of the Saints is included.

    Alberto finds that black intellectuals' ways of engaging with official racial discourses changed as broader historical trends made the possibilities for true inclusion appear to flow and then recede. These distinct political strategies, Alberto argues, were nonetheless part of black thinkers' ongoing attempts to make dominant ideologies of racial harmony meaningful in light of evolving local, national, and international politics and discourse. Terms of Inclusion tells a new history of the role of people of color in shaping and contesting the racialized contours of citizenship in twentieth-century Brazil.

    Thus, successive generations of followers have seen a long, steady stream of curious outsiders coming to their temples with notebooks and cameras, questions and inquisitive gazes, or ogling eyes and the hope of inclusion. This study asks what seduced these outsiders to seek access to the Afro-Brazilian religious universe and, conversely, how did believers respond to the overwhelming interest in their creed and to becoming an object of the outsiders’ imaginations.“Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today.”— Birgit Meyer, Free University of Amsterdam.

    His girlfriend Thereza is a determined young woman, desperate to escape the struggles and tragedies of a dangerous Brazilian favela, by entering a carnival competition offering hope of a better future in the South.But evil traffickers lie behind the sinister practices of carnival. And death has been the prize of former winners who have disappeared.The route out to a new life is not as easy as it appears, and as the competition spirals into a corrupt and perilous deception, it plunges the young loves into a fight for their lives.Word count: 107,000