Underdeveloping The Amazon

Underdeveloping the Amazon shows how different extractive economies have periodically enriched various dominant classes but progressively impoverished the entire region by disrupting both the Amazon Basin's ecology and human communities. Contending that traditional models of development based almost exclusively on the European and American experience of industrial production cannot apply to a regional economy founded on extraction, Stephen G. Bunker proposes a new model based on the use and depletion of energy values in natural resources as the key to understanding the disruptive forces at work in the Basin.

Underdeveloping the Amazon shows how different extractive economies have periodically enriched various dominant classes but progressively impoverished the entire region by disrupting both the Amazon Basin's ecology and human communities. Contending that traditional models of development based almost exclusively on the European and American experience of industrial production cannot apply to a regional economy founded on extraction, Stephen G. Bunker proposes a new model based on the use and depletion of energy values in natural resources as the key to understanding the disruptive forces at work in the Basin.

Amazonia is never quite what it seems. Despite regular attention in the media and numerous academic studies the Brazilian Amazon is rarely appreciated as a historical place home to a range of different societies. Often left invisible are the families who are making a living from the rivers and forests of the region. Broadly characterizing these people as peasants Amazon Peasant Societies in a Changing Environment seeks to bring together research by anthropologists, historians, political ecologists and biologists. A new paradigm emerges which helps understand the way in which Amazonian modernity has developed. This book addresses a comprehensive range of questions from the politics of conservation and sustainable development to the organization of women’s work and the diet and health of Amazonian people. Apart from offering an analysis of a neglected aspect of Amazonia this collection represents a unique interdisciplinary exercise on the nature of one of the most beguiling regions of the world.

In this engaging book, Stephen Nugent offers an in-depth historical anthropology of a widely recognised feature of the Amazon region, examining the dramatic rise and fall of the rubber industry. He considers rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, emphasizing the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. Through a critical examination focused on the rubber industry, Nugent addresses myths that continue to influence perceptions of Amazonia. The book challenges widely held assumptions about the hyper-naturalism of the ‘lost world’ of the Amazon where ‘the challenge of the tropics’ is still to be faced and the ‘frontiers of development’ are still to be settled. It is relevant for students and scholars of anthropology, Latin American studies, history, political ecology, geography and development studies.

The Amazon Indian is an icon that straddles the world between the professional anthropologist and the popular media. Presented alternately as the noble primitive, the savior of the environment, and as a savage, dissolute, cannibalistic half-human, it is an image well worth examining. Stephen Nugent does just that, critiquing the claims of authoritativeness inherent in visual images presented by anthropologists of Amazon life in the early 20th century and comparing them with the images found in popular books, movies, and posters. The book depicts the field of anthropology as its own form of culture industry and contrasts it to other similar industries, past and present. For visual anthropologists, ethnographers, Amazon specialists, and popular culture researchers, Nugent's book will be enlightening, entertaining reading.

The first history of the German multinational's resounding failure in its global development project of a cattle ranch in the Brazilian Amazon.

Research site and sample characteristics; Multivariate analysis; A fram-level bioeconomic model.

Frontiers of Development in the Amazon: Riches, Risks, and Resistances contributes to ongoing debates on the processes of change in the Amazon, a region inherently tied to the expansion of internal and external socio-economic and environmental frontiers. This book offers interdisciplinary analyses from a range of scholars in Europe, Latin America, and the United States that question the methods of development and the range of socio-ecological impacts of those methods by examining the theoretical, methodological, and empirical dimensions of frontier-making along with evaluating and refining existing frameworks. Contributors focus on the complex politics of border formation shaped by institutional, economic, and political forces, placing them in relation to ethical, imaginary, and symbolic elements. In doing so, contributors explore the dynamic production of identities, values, and subjectivities, covering matters of migratory patterns, complex power struggles, and intensive—at times violent—clashes. Among other topics, this book assesses the recent encroachment of export-driven agribusiness into the Amazon Region in the context of recolonization, resource exploitation and multiple programs of modernization and national integration. Scholars of Latin American studies, international development, environmental studies, and applied social sciences will find this book particularly useful.