Review by Choice Review
Harrison examines Quechua-language songs as a means of entering and attempting to understand Andean Indian cultures; his examples are drawn from both Colonial era and modern sources. As he emphasizes throughout, the songs express cultural values and systems of classification different from those of the US, and the translator must be careful not to force the Quechua view of the world into Western cultural categories. The Quechua-language family expresses a complex, hierarchical system of thought, and Harrison meticulously explicates the songs' multiple levels of meaning. A dominant theme is the Quechua emphasis on aligning opposing forces into balanced, symmetrical wholes. The individual chapters contain many valuable insights into native Andean cultures, but no concluding chapter unites those insights into a comprehensive argument readily applicable to other cultural traditions. As a result, the book resembles a series of self-contained essays and will be of most interest to graduate-level specialists in Andean studies. G. W. Conrad Indiana University--Bloomington
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
