Céu do Mapiá is a community of people living in the rainforest in the southwestern quadrant of Brazil. It was founded in 1983 by ex-rubber tapper Sebastião Mota de Melo and a collection of followers of the religion known as “Santo Daime.” These men and women were seeking to create a “New World,” separating themselves from a society that was undergoing a great deal of upheaval as the period marked the initial phases of major deforestation in the Amazon. The community, therefore, offered a chance of escape from the devastation around them and the freedom to practice their religious beliefs. ‘The Holy Gift,’ as it translates in Portuguese, Santo Daime is a religion that melds together popular Roman Catholicism and indigenous ayahuasca use, as well as Afro-Brazilian spirit possession, Amazonian encantaria, and most recently, New Age beliefs and concepts. Ayahuasca is a concoction of two plants, B. caapi and P. viridis, that produces psychotropic effects and has been widely consumed among indigenous tribes in the Amazon. However, in the context of Santo Daime, it has been deemed a kind of sacrament, the central force of a religious movement that has expanded from its corner in the Amazon into urban centers across Brazil and into Europe, North America, and Japan. Though maintaining a fairly small following of 10,000, Santo Daime has become a global religious movement. This thesis attempts to unravel two seemingly contradictory processes embodied in the community of Céu do Mapiá: separation and expansion. First, I outline the trajectory of the community from its initial ideals to its later entanglements with state and other international actors. Second, I trace the network of people, ideas, and goods that have become a part of Santo Daime’s international expansion. Third, I discuss the contemporary everyday rhythms in the communities and how they have been shaped by the various relationships that have developed through this expansion, positing that place is a nexus of relations. / text

This thesis explores adverb distribution in Iquito, a Zaparoan language spoken byapproximately 25 people in the northern Amazon Basin of Peru. The syntactic distributions of Iquito adverbs correspond to four semantic classes: time, manner,epistemic, and an intensifier. Time adverbs have the broadest distribution, occurring before the topic of a topicalized sentence, between topic and subject, after the verb, and after the object of a transitive sentence. Manner adverbs have a similar distribution, but are not found before topic. Epistemic adverbs have an even narrower distribution, never occurring sentence-initially (whether the sentence is topicalized or not) and rarely occurring between topic and subject. The intensifier adverb has the most restricted distribution, as it only occurs before adjectives or other adverbs. These distributions can be used to classify "atypical" adverbs, namely infinitival verbs that are used adverbially. Furthermore, these distributions shed light on the phrase structure of Iquito. Adverbs are analyzed in the literature as adjuncts, and the allowable positions are explained either as the result of adjunction to different constituents (Ernst 2002; Iatridou 1990) or movement between adjoined positions (Cinque 1999). The pre-verbal positions of Iquito adverbs, particularly in irrealis and negated constructions, raise questions for these analyses. The data demonstrate that adverbs can occupy non-adjoined positions, namely the object position in an irrealis (SOV) construction and possibly negation, forcing a reevaluation of the current treatment of adverbs. The research also expands the existing documentation on Iquito. / text

In the middle of the eighteenth century the Portuguese crown, under the influence of the Marquis of Pombal, sought to reform the political administration of its vast set of imperial holdings. As part of these reforms, in 1751 Pombal sent his brother, Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, to the Portuguese Amazon to serve as governor of the state of Grão Pará and Maranhão. This study explores Furtado’s tenure as governor of the Amazon from his perspective, in an attempt to understand how and why he arrived at a set of policies known as the “Directorate,” which overhauled the region’s mission system and attempted to more effectively assimilate native Amazonians into Portuguese colonial society. Chapter One combines a look at Furtado’s initial years as governor with short digressions into the relevant historical background of the region. The analysis in this chapter focuses on Furtado’s influence on his brother, the Marquis of Pombal, as well as the early attempts at reform he pursues out of a growing sense of frustration with the Jesuit missionaries in the region. Chapter Two focuses on a long trip Furtado took upriver to a settlement called Mariuá, in order to negotiate the boundary demarcation with Spain. Over the course of two years away from his home in Belém at the mouth of the Amazon, Furtado’s opinion of the Indians evolves, influencing the implementation of the Directorate policy upon his return. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of the legacies of Furtado and the Directorate.

Access to markets is increasingly regarded in development circles as a critical factor in determining livelihood choices in peasant economies. In the northeastern Peruvian Amazon, a multitude of river transporters and market intermediaries based in the central city of Iquitos provide essential services and market opportunities for remote peasant producers across the region. Using a multi-scalar, multi-method approach involving extensive fieldwork in the Peruvian Amazon, this research (re)assesses the meanings and implications of "remoteness" and "connectedness" for rural peasants. At the regional scale, I examine the functional heterogeneity of river trading networks and marketing agents. Given the high-risk/high-transaction-cost environment, river trading is found to be expensive for producers and traders alike. High costs are exacerbated by the low gross returns of rural production (mainly food and natural building materials). Thin or missing markets for credit, labour, land and insurance increase the hardships associated with limited access to product markets. Regional findings are complemented with a comparative livelihoods analysis in two remote communities of the Alto Tigre River that benefit from differential access to oil-labour. My study reveals that differential access to labour has significant impacts on the livelihood strategies of working households. However, given limited access to external markets, cash-income from oil-labour is found to offer limited opportunities for growth. In sum, the research proposes insights for advancing the debate on livelihoods and poverty in the Peruvian Amazon.

With the further promotion and application of e-commerce, logistics is becoming necessary. Logistics and the importance of e-commerce are more and more getting people’s attention, but what is the relationship between e-commerce and logistics still needs to be explored.   The purposes of thesis are to research the relationship between e-commerce and logistics in B2C (business to consumer) companies. The aims of the thesis are threefold. Firstly, describe the coordination mechanism between e-commerce and logistics in general and particularly in Amazon.com. Secondly, find out the strengths and shortcoming of logistic when the company is developing e-commerce in general. Thirdly, In general, we focus on finding out the way to coordinate logistic in developing e-commerce, and how the logistic helps companies to develop e-commerce.   The qualitative research method is used in our thesis in order to fulfill our purposes. It is a case study of Amazon China as the study subject. We analyzed the data, collected from the interview and documentation. There are certain limitations for our thesis: the interviewees were working, and they only had one hour for us to make the interview. Because of the time limitation, we could not get satisfactory and detailed information from them. So we collected some secondary data in order to support our thesis. In order to get much specific data i.e. more logistics information about logistics in Amazon, we phoned the customer service and in order to get some detail data.   After the research, we found if e-commerce and logistics go hand in hand and converge; they create a unique mechanism which can help the business and market.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 125-133).

Thesis (Ph.D)--Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Rong Fu; Committee Member: Marc Stieglitz; Committee Member: Peter Webster; Committee Member: Robert E. Dickinson; Committee Member: Robert X. Black. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin. / Typescript (xerox copy). eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2001--Würzburg.

No description available.