Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador

Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador
Author: Laura Rival
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2016-05-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0816533717

The indigenous people of the Amazon Basin known as the Huaorani are one of the world’s most intriguing peoples. The community of just under four thousand in Ecuador has been known to the public primarily for their historical identity as a violent society. But Laura Rival reveals the Huaorani in all their humanity and creativity through a longitudinal ethnography, bringing a deeper perspective beyond the stereotype. Rival’s intimate knowledge of Huaorani culture spans twenty-five years. Here in a collection of broad-ranging essays, she offers a fascinating and provocative study. The first section, “Among Forest Beings,” shows that the Huaorani have long adapted to life in the tropical rain forest with minimal reliance on horticulture, yet have developed a complex relationship with plants. In “In the Longhouse,” the second section, Rival focuses on the intimate relations that create human persons and enact kinship relations. She also discusses women’s lives and perspectives. The third section, “In the Midst of Enemies,” considers how Huaorani society fits in larger political and economic contexts, illustrating how native values shape their encounters with oil companies, the state, and other external forces. Rival carefully analyzes insider/outsider dialectics wherein Huaorani people re-create meaningful and valued worlds in the face of alien projects, such as petroleum development, carbon trading, or intercultural education. Capitalizing on the author’s decades-long study and interactions in the community, Huaorani Transformations in Twenty-First-Century Ecuador brings new insights to the Huaorani’s unique way of relating to humans, to other-than-humans, and to the forest landscape they have inhabited for centuries.

Between the Forest and the Road

Between the Forest and the Road
Author: Andrea Bravo Díaz
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2023-09-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 180539357X

During the past two decades Ecuadorians have engaged in a national debate around Buen Vivir (living well). This ethnography discusses one of the ways in which people experience well-being or aspire to live well in Ecuadorian Amazonia. Waponi Kewemonipa (living well) is a Waorani notion that embraces ideas of good conviviality, health and certain ecological relations. For the Waorani living along the oil roads, living well has taken many pathways. Notably, they have developed new spatial organizations as they move between several houses, and navigate between the economy of the market and the economy of the forest.

Ecological Nostalgias

Ecological Nostalgias
Author: Olivia Angé
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2020-11-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1789208947

Introducing the study of econostalgias through a variety of rich ethnographic cases, this volume argues that a strictly human centered approach does not account for contemporary longings triggered by ecosystem upheavals. In this time of climate change, this book explores how nostalgia for fading ecologies unfolds into the interstitial spaces between the biological, the political and the social, regret and hope, the past, the present and the future.

Extractivism and Universality

Extractivism and Universality
Author: Japhy Wilson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 114
Release: 2023-02-28
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1000837157

What are the possibilities for a radical politics of universal humanity, at a time when the politics of identity increasingly defines the agenda of the left? What are the political and conceptual implications of such an emancipatory form of universality emerging through the struggles of Indigenous peoples on the extractive frontiers of global capitalism? How do such battles play out on the ground, and how should they be researched and conveyed? Extractivism and Universality takes an unorthodox approach to these timely questions. It tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Black, and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The book documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory and captures the flourishing of an insurgent form of political universality in which racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions were suddenly and powerfully overcome. Intervening in debates on the resistances and alternatives developed by the inhabitants of resource extraction zones, it takes the reader deep inside a rebellion on an Amazonian oil frontier and offers a unique insight into insurgent universality in the lived reality of its material existence. It argues that the dominant decolonial dichotomy between Eurocentric universalism and an Indigenous pluriverse should be replaced by an approach that is attentive to manifestations of universality performed by diverse subaltern subjects. And it does so through a fast-paced fusion of radical political theory with the raw first-person style of gonzo journalism. It will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in political and social theory, social movements, labor relations, and the political ecology of extractivism.

Global Ecology in Historical Perspective

Global Ecology in Historical Perspective
Author: Kazunobu Ikeya
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2023-03-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811965579

This book primarily examines human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asian forests (Southeast Asia and Japan) and inland waters (China). For comparison, cases from the Americas (whales in the Arctic, sea turtles in the Caribbean, and plants in the Amazon) and Central Asia are also included. The relationship between plants, animals, and humans in Asia is quite unique from a global perspective. For example, "satoyama" in Japan means ecotone area, or the boundary between a village and a forest. There, as the number of inhabitants declines, bears, wild boars, and other animals increasingly ravage crops, sometimes attacking humans as well. By showing the regional nature of human-animal and human-plant interactions in Asia, this book provides for the first time a framework for understanding the world's animal and plant-human relationships. It is assumed that the relationships between humans and animals and plants during this period were diverse, including hunting, taming, semi-domestication, and full domestication. At the same time, for regions outside of Asia, the extent to which these diverse relationships were adapted and how diversity was formed is explained from the perspective of historical ecology. Customers can expect to derive perspectives on the coexistence of human-animal and plant-animal relationships from this book in the near future. The conservation of rare species, diverse habitats, and biodiversity is a central theme in considering the relationship between modern civilization and the global environment. In post-industrial Japan, one focus has been the protection of iconic animals such as storks, crested ibis, dugongs, and sea turtles, while damage to crops and humans by deer, wild boars, monkeys, bears, and other common animals has become an important social issue. How can the world's 7.7 billion-plus people live in harmony with other species? We would like to get some hints on how to solve the problems we are facing.

Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River

Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River
Author: Mary-Elizabeth Reeve
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2022
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1496229606

Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River is an exploration of the dynamics of regional societies and the ways in which kinship relationships define the scale of these societies. It details social relations across Kichwa-speaking indigenous communities and among neighboring members of other ethnolinguistic groups to explore the multiple ways in which the regional society is conceptualized among Amazonian Kichwa. Drawing on recent studies in kinship, landscape from an indigenous perspective, and social scaling, Mary-Elizabeth Reeve presents a view of Amazonian Kichwa as embedded in a multiethnic regional society of great historic depth. This book is a fine-grained ethnography of the Kichwa of the Curaray River region (Curaray Runa) in which Reeve focuses on ideas of social landscape, as well as residence, extended kin groups, historical memory, and collective ritual celebration, to show the many ways in which Curaray Runa express their placement within a regional society. The final chapter examines social scaling as it is currently unfolding in indigenous societies in Amazonian Ecuador through increasing multisited residence and political mobilization. Based on intensive fieldwork, Amazonian Kichwa of the Curaray River breaks new ground in Amazonian studies by focusing on extended kinship networks at a larger scale and by utilizing both ethnographic and archival research of Amazonian regional systems.

Sowing the Forest

Sowing the Forest
Author: William Balée
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 246
Release: 2023-05-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0817321578

Explores how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests William Balée is a world-renowned expert on the cultural and historical ecology of the Amazon basin. His new collection, Sowing the Forest, is a companion volume to the award-winning Cultural Forests of the Amazon, published in 2013. Sowing the Forest engages in depth with how, over centuries, Amazonian people and their cultures have interacted with rainforests, making the landscapes of palm forests and other kinds of forests, and how these and related forests have fed back into the vocabulary and behavior of current indigenous occupants of the remotest parts of the vast hinterlands. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Substrate of Intentionality,” comprises chapters on historical ecology, indigenous palm forests, plant names in Amazonia, the origins of the Amazonian plantain, and the unknown “Dark Earth people” of thousands of years ago and their landscaping. Together these chapters illustrate the phenomenon of feedback between culture and environment. In Part 2, “Scope of Transformation,” Balée lays out his theory of landscape transformation, which he divides into two rubrics—primary landscape transformation and secondary landscape transformation—and for which he provides examples and various specific effects. One chapter compares environmental and social interrelationships in an Orang Asli group in Malaysia and the Ka’apor people of eastern Amazonian Brazil, and another chapter covers loss of language and culture in the Bolivian Amazon. A final chapter addresses the controversial topic of monumentality in the rainforest. Balée concludes by emphasizing the common thread in Amazonian historical ecology: the long-term phenomenon of encouraging diversity for its own sake, not just for economic reasons.

Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism

Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism
Author: Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 299
Release: 2019-01-01
Genre: Environmental policy
ISBN: 331993435X

Exploring indigenous life projects in encounters with extractivism, the present open access volume discusses how current turbulences actualise questions of indigeneity, difference and ontological dynamics in the Andes and Amazonia. While studies of extractivism in South America often focus on wider national and international politics, this contribution instead provides ethnographic explorations of indigenous politics, perspectives and worlds, revealing loss and suffering as well as creative strategies to mediate the extralocal. Seeking to avoid conceptual imperialism or the imposition of exogenous categories, the chapters are grounded in the respective authors’ long-standing field research. The authors examine the reactions (from resistance to accommodation), consequences (from anticipation to rubble) and materials (from fossil fuel to water) diversely related to extractivism in rural and urban settings. How can Amerindian strategies to preserve localised communities in extractivist contexts contribute to ways of thinking otherwise?

The Amazonian “Other”

The Amazonian “Other”
Author: Aleksandra Wierucka
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 119
Release: 2024-08-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1040155685

This book explores representations of Amazonian Indigenous peoples in contemporary cultural texts. It analyzes a variety of mediums from novels and films to games and exhibitions, uncovering a distorted image of Indigenous peoples of the Amazon in Euro-American common imagination. The author suggests that these texts rely on a stereotypical vision that was shaped in the first decades of colonization. The chapters consider the formation of the image of Amazonian Indigenous people throughout history and some of the contemporary issues they face, touching on daily life and themes such as shamanism and cannibalism. Together they highlight the misrepresented image of Indigenous groups in the Amazon, who are portrayed as different, even strange, in relation to Western culture. The argument put forward is that both “exotic” and “self-exoticization” rely on the notion of otherness, leading to romanticization, patronization, and caricature. The book will be of particular interest to scholars of Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, cultural studies, anthropology, and comparative literature.