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.

"They Leave Their Kidneys in the Fields takes the reader on an ethnographic tour of the melon and corn harvesting fields in California's Central Valley to understand why farmworkers die at work each summer. Laden with captivating detail of farmworkers' daily work and home lives, Horton examines how U.S. immigration policy and the historic exclusion of farmworkers from the promises of liberalism has made migrant farmworkers what she calls 'exceptional workers.' She explores the deeply intertwined political, legal, and social factors that place Latino migrants at particular risk of illness and injury in the fields, as well as the patchwork of health care, disability, and Social Security policies that provide them little succor when they become sick or grow old. The book takes an in-depth look at the work risks faced by migrants at all stages of life: as teens, in their middle-age, and ultimately as elderly workers. By following the lives of a core group of farmworkers over nearly a decade, Horton provides a searing portrait of how their precarious immigration and work statuses culminate in preventable morbidity and premature death"--Provided by publisher.

Moveable Gardens explores how biodiversity and food can counter the alienation caused by displacement. By offering in-depth studies on a variety of regions, this volume carefully considers various forms of sanctuary making within communities, and seeks to address how carrying seeds, plants, and other traveling companions is an ongoing response to the grave conditions of displacement in today’s world. The destruction of homelands, fragmentation of habitats, and post-capitalist conditions of modernity are countered by thoughtful remembrance of tradition and the migration of seeds, which are embodied in gardening, cooking, and community building. Moveable Gardens highlights itineraries and sanctuaries in an era of massive dislocation, addressing concerns about finding comforting and familiar refuges in the Anthropocene. The worlds of marginalized individuals who live in impoverished rural communities, many Indigenous peoples, and refugees are constantly under threat of fracturing. Yet, in every case, there is resilience and regeneration as these individuals re-create their worlds through the foods, traditions, and plants they carry with them into their new realities. This volume offers a new understanding of the performances and routines of sociality in the face of daunting market forces and perilous climate transformations. These traditions sustained our ancestors, and they may suffice to secure a more meaningful, diverse future. By delving into the nature of nostalgia, burrowing into memory and knowledge, and embracing the specific wonders of each deeply rooted or newly displaced community, endlessly valuable ways of being and understanding can be preserved. Contributors: Guntra A. Aistara, Aida Curtis, Terese V. Gagnon, John Hartigan Jr., Tracey Heatherington, Taylor Hosmer, Hayden S. Kantor, Melanie Narciso, Virginia D. Nazarea, Emily F. Ramsey, Krishnendu Ray, David Sutton, James R. Veteto, Marc N. Williams

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.

Rival presents a comprehensive academic study of the Huaorani, correcting distorted portrayals of them by journalists, missionaries, environmentalists, and tour guides as 'Ecuador's last savages'.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.