Combining personal and family recollections with incisive accounts of academic, political, and institutional experiences, The Art of Memory offers a remarkable account of the life of one of the foremost Latin American ethnographers and a leading expert in Indigenous cultures, peoples, and cosmologies. Varese narrates the story of his journey from Italy to Peru, his formative years as an Anthropologist and the critical work he did with Amazonian communities in the 1970s, his transformation into an activist scholar, his move to Mexico and his long-standing commitment with the peoples of Oaxaca, and his life as an academic in the United States. The reader will appreciate the honesty and transparency with which Varese brings out all these experiences. This extraordinary book combines the personal, the political, and the transnational to produce a vivid account of a unique and fulfilling journey.

For four centuries, the indigenous Campa Ashaninkas of the Peruvian Amazon have fought for their identity and independence in the face of Spanish colonialism and Peruvian national expansionism. Stefano Varese originally wrote about the Campa Ashaninkas in the mid-1960s after three seasons of field research among them and three years of archival research, titling his book La Sal de Los Cerros after the conquered Mountain of Salt that had been the center of Camp Ashaninka trade and power for millennia. Updated with a new preface and introduction by the author, Salt of the Mountain makes Varese's classic work of anthropology available in English for the first time.This book has special significance as an early example of engaged anthropology. Varese conducted his research with an explicit commitment to letting the Campa Ashaninkas speak for themselves, using their myths and cosmological interpretations as source material and, with this in mind, attempting new readings of both colonial Spanish and modern Peruvian documents relating to the tribe. He chronicles the relentless success of European geographic annexation and the continuing failure of European cultural assimilation. Living among the Camp Ashaninka, Varese found that their worldview rejects the modern notion that assimilation is inevitable, and he developed a deep respect for the Campa Ashaninkas's fiercely independent spirit. For this reason, he calls his work an ""approximation"" of their world rather than a description or history of them. ""Salt of the Mountain is clear and direct proof of what Stefano Varese can do. As a scholarly study, it is the historical re-creation of the drama of the Ashaninka in their confrontation with civilization. As ethnological fieldwork, it is the result of his effort and joy in living the life of the Ashaninka in order to give us their vision of the world, of themselves, and of us, their Others and decimators.""-Darcy Ribeiro, from the Foreword