Ritos y ceremonias andinas en torno a la vida y la muerte en el noroeste Argentino

With remarkable ethnographic precision and fidelity to ancestral mandates, Amalia Vargas describes and analyzes the Andean mortuary rituals in northwestern Argentina that are part of her own culture. Vargas offers not only an approach to beliefs about death, but also, and fundamentally, to the meaning that a community gives to life. This sense is woven from the celebration of the cult that people give to their ancestors who preceded them, the continuity of tradition and life, which contains a particular vision of the world. Such a particularity gives this and other Andean communities a universal breath that is associated with a shared concern for human beings of all times and places.