Space And Society In Central Brazil

Hailed once as ‘giants of the Amazon’, Panará people emerged onto a world stage in the early 1970s. What followed is a remarkable story of socio-demographic collapse, loss of territory, and subsequent recovery. Reduced to just 79 survivors in 1976, Panará people have gone on to recover and reclaim a part of their original lands in an extraordinary process of cultural and social revival. Space and Society in Central Brazil is a unique ethnographic account, in which analytical approaches to social organisation are brought into dialogue with Panará social categories and values as told in their own terms. Exploring concepts such as space, material goods, and ideas about enemies, this book examines how social categories transform in time and reveals the ways in which Panará people themselves produce their identities in constant dialogue with the forms of alterity that surround them. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students, scholars and anyone interested in the complex lives and histories of indigenous Amazonian societies.

Hailed once as ‘giants of the Amazon’, Panará people emerged onto a world stage in the early 1970s. What followed is a remarkable story of socio-demographic collapse, loss of territory, and subsequent recovery. Reduced to just 79 survivors in 1976, Panará people have gone on to recover and reclaim a part of their original lands in an extraordinary process of cultural and social revival. Space and Society in Central Brazil is a unique ethnographic account, in which analytical approaches to social organisation are brought into dialogue with Panará social categories and values as told in their own terms. Exploring concepts such as space, material goods, and ideas about enemies, this book examines how social categories transform in time and reveals the ways in which Panará people themselves produce their identities in constant dialogue with the forms of alterity that surround them. Clearly and accessibly written, this book will appeal to students, scholars and anyone interested in the complex lives and histories of indigenous Amazonian societies.

Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon sheds light on the creative and groundbreaking efforts Kayapó peoples deploy to protect their lands and livelihoods in Brazil. Laura Zanotti shows how Kayapó communities are using diverse pathways to make a sustainable future for their peoples and lands. The author advances anthropological approaches to understanding how indigenous groups cultivate self-determination strategies in conflict-ridden landscapes.

The Indigenous Canela inhabit a vibrant multispecies community of nearly 3,000 people and over 300 types of cultivated and wild plants living together in Maranhão State in the Brazilian Cerrado (savannah) a biome threatened with deforestation and climate change. In the face of these environmental threats, Canela women and men work to maintain riverbank and forest gardens and care for their growing crops who they consider to be, literally, children. This nurturing, loving relationship between people and plants—which offers a thought-provoking model for supporting multispecies survival and well-being throughout the world—is the focus of Plant Kin. Theresa L. Miller shows how kinship develops between Canela people and plants through intimate, multi-sensory, and embodied relationships. Using an approach she calls “sensory ethnobotany,” Miller explores the Canela bio-sociocultural life-world, including Canela landscape aesthetics, ethnobotanical classification, mythical storytelling, historical and modern-day gardening practices, transmission of ecological knowledge through an education of affection for plant kin, shamanic engagements with plant friends and lovers, and myriad other human-nonhuman experiences. This multispecies ethnography reveals the transformations of Canela human-environment and human-plant engagements over the past two centuries and envisions possible futures for this Indigenous multispecies community as they reckon with the rapid environmental and climatic changes facing the Brazilian Cerrado as the Anthropocene epoch unfolds.

Described as a ‘master plant’ by many indigenous groups in lowland South America, tobacco is an essential part of shamanic ritual, as well as a source of everyday health, wellbeing and community. In sharp contrast to the condemnation of the tobacco industry and its place in contemporary public health discourse, the book considers tobacco in a more nuanced light, as an agent both of enlightenment and destruction.Exploring the role of tobacco in the lives of indigenous peoples, The Master Plant offers an important and unique contribution to this field of study through its focus on lowland South America: the historical source region of this controversial plant, yet rarely discussed in recent scholarship. The ten chapters in this collection bring together ethnographic accounts, key developments in anthropological theory and emergent public health responses to indigenous tobacco use. Moving from a historical study of tobacco usage – covering the initial domestication of wild varieties and its value as a commodity in colonial times – to an examination of the transcendent properties of tobacco, and the magic, symbolism and healing properties associated with it, the authors present wide-ranging perspectives on the history and cultural significance of this important plant. The final part of the book examines the changing landscape of tobacco use in these communities today, set against the backdrop of the increasing power of the national and transnational tobacco industry.The first critical overview of tobacco and its uses across lowland South America, this book encourages new ways of thinking about the problems of commercially exploited tobacco both within and beyond this source region.

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela. Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary. Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.