Upper Amazonian Spirituality: Healing the Interior and Exterior Landscape

Dr. Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, Professor Emerita, Dpt. of Anthropology at Smith College, United States

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Dpt. of Anthropology at Smith College. She has also taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and Wesleyan University. She founded Sachamama Center in the Peruvian High Amazon in 2009 which she directs. She has spent years in India and Peru working with indigenous peoples and with farmers. She was a research associate at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University, for several years in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. She has authored as well as edited fifteen books and published some 70 articles and book chapters. In 1993 she decided for political and ethical reasons that she could no longer engage in classical anthropological fieldwork and ever since then has been invited to collaborate with activist/intellectual groups in Peru and Bolivia and with one of them, PRATEC, has published The Spirit of Regeneration: Andean Culture Confronting Western Notions of Development. (Zed Books & St.Martin Press,1998) Her 2011 book based on her work in Peru is entitled Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World(Oxford U.Pr, New York) A recent book is co-edited with Stefano Varese and Róger Rumrrill (in Spanish) Selva Vida: De la destrucción de la Amazonía al paradigma de la regeneración, Casa de las Américas, Cuba; UNAM, México and IWGIA, Denmark, 2013. Her 2017 book with Robert Tindall and David Shearer (North Atlantic Books) Sacred Soil has just been translated in Spanish and published in 2019 by Apus Graph in Lima, Peru under the title of Yana Allpa: El Biocarbon; una solución ancestral amazónica a la crisis climática. The latest book co-edited with Stefano Varese entitled Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi: A Reappraisal will be published by Peter Lang academic press in 2019.

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