First of all, I want to welcome you to my course. As you probably learned from the intro, I work at the at the Department for Cultural Studies, Faculty of Philology at the University of Gdańsk. The idea for this course came to me as an answer to repeated students’ question if I would organize the course about the cultures of the Amazon region. There is no place for the course like this in our curriculum, so the on-line course seemed as a good idea to do it.
I have been conducting research in the Amazon Basin since 2007. During anthropological fieldwork researchers go back to the same settlements many times in order to deepen their knowledge and experiences. I travel to the Amazon region every year and work with the people in two groups – Huaorani and Quichua. Most of my knowledge about the cultures comes from the people I live and work with. They share their home with me and let me be to some extend the part of their lives. Also, I read literature about the Amazonian cultures, about the tropical forest and rivers – I think it is important to see the connections between the indigenous people and the environment they live in.
I hope you will enjoy the course. I tried to organize it in the way that would make it easy to follow and to review the knowledge.
The course consists of five modules. They have been organized in a way that should let you easily go through them, as they start with (1) the knowledge of the forest and the rivers and how indigenous people are using them, through (2) overview of shared cultural characteristics of the indigenous groups of the region, (3) the elaboration on specific cultures, (4) ethics of research in the Amazon region and finally to (5) the threats that Indians face today.
Every module is accompanied by the bibliography as well as a “dig deeper section” that point to literature and Internet sources about the given topic. Some modules include the presentation with the voice over (module 1, 2 and 5), others have the source texts (module 4) or the text based on different sources (3). Three out of five modules have the movie clips attached and the references to them are included in the text or voice-over.
You can contact me anytime during the course of after completing it. My e-mail address is aleksandra.wierucka@wp.pl and I will be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding the course.