Finding Cholita

Billie Jean Isbell is a professor emeritus of anthropology at Cornell University. She is the author of To Defend Ourselves: Ecology and Ritual in an Andean Village and the multimedia websites Vicos: A Virtual Tour and The Billie Jean Isbell Andean Collection.

Received the honorable mention award for the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2009."A suspenseful story that deals candidly with the devastating effects of violence on Peruvian society while also revealing the significance of colonial history, indigenous cosmology, rituals, kinship, race relations, and symbolic systems in people's lives. Finding Cholita will be a useful tool for discussing these issues in classes."--Rachel Corr, associate professor of anthropology, Florida Atlantic University "An intriguing exploration of the relationship between ethnography and memoir writing that also expands in an experimental manner the many ways in which anthropologists write about the people with whom they work. It will be of great interest to readers interested in the Andes."--Enrique Mayer, author of The Articulated Peasant: Household Economies in the Andes