Michael F. Brown

"Neither a debunker nor an advocate, Brown weaves together the opinions and life stories of practicing channels and their clients to bring their world and its assumptions into higher relief. He describes the experiences that lead often highly educated, middle-class Americans to conclude the useful information is filtered through the spirit world. He pursues the nature of the quest - the fears, hopes, and expectations of the seekers - and finds its roots in traditional American notions of individualism and self-perfection. The Channeling Zone is a lively journey into the complex social world of the thousands of Americans who have abandoned mainstream religions in search of direct and improvisational contact with spiritual beings."--Jacket.

"Documents the efforts of indigenous peoples to redefine heritage as a protected resource. Michael Brown takes readers into settings where native peoples defend what they consider to be their cultural property ... By focusing on the complexity of actual cases, Brown casts light on indigenous grievances in diverse fields ... He finds both genuine injustice and, among advocates for native peoples, a troubling tendency to mimic the privatizing logic of major corporations"--Jacket.

In this remarkable story of one man's encounter with an indigenous people of Peru, Michael Brown guides his readers upriver into a contested zone of the Amazonian frontier, where more than 50,000 Awajun renowned for their pugnacity and fierce independence remain determined, against long odds, to live life on their own terms. When Brown took up residence with the Awajun in 1976, he knew little about them other than their ancestors reputation as fearsome headhunters. The fledgling anthropologist was immediately impressed by his hosts vivacity and resourcefulness. But eventually his investigations led him into darker corners of a world where murderous vendettas, fear of sorcery, and a shocking incidence of suicide were still common. Peru's Shining Path insurgency in the 1980s forced Brown to refocus his work elsewhere. Revisiting his field notes decades later, now with an older man's understanding of life's fragility, Brown saw a different story: a tribal society trying, and sometimes failing, to maintain order in the face of an expanding capitalist frontier. Curious about how the Awajun were faring, Brown returned to the site in 2012, where he found a people whose combative self-confidence had led them to the forefront of South America's struggle for indigenous rights. Written with insight, sensitivity, and humor, Upriver paints a vivid picture of a rapidly growing population that is refashioning its warrior tradition for the twenty-first century. Embracing literacy and digital technology, the Awajun are using hard-won political savvy to defend their rainforest home and right of self-determination.