Contrary to ingrained academic and public assumptions, wherein indigenous lowland South American societies are viewed as the product of historical emplacement and spatial stasis, there is widespread evidence to suggest that migration and displacement have been the norm, and not the exception. This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant processes of ecological and social change, have shaped and continue to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia. Drawing on a wide range of historical time frames (from pre-conquest times to the present) and ethnographic contexts, different chapters examine the complex and important links between migration and the classification, management, and domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as the incorporation and transformation of environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies and identities.
Table of Contents:
List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Editor’s Preface
Chapter 1. Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia: Contemporary Ethnoecological Perspectives – an Introduction
Miguel N. Alexiades
PART I: CIRCULATIONS: MOBILITY, SUBSISTENCE AND THE ENVIRONMENT
Chapter 2. Towards an Understanding of the Huaorani Ways of Knowing and Naming Plants
Laura Rival
Chapter 3. The Restless Life of the Nahua: Shaping People and Places in the Peruvian Amazon
Conrad Feather
Chapter 4. Urban, Rural and In-between: Multi-Sited Households Mobility and Resource Management in the Amazon Flood Plain
Miguel Pinedo-Vasquez and Christine Padoch
Chapter 5. Unpicking ‘Community’ in Community Conservation: Implications of Changing Settlement Patterns and Individual Mobility for the Tamshiyacu Tahuayo Communal Reserve, Peru
Helen Newing
PART II: TRANSFORMATIONS: KNOWLEDGE, IDENTITY, PLACE-MAKING AND THE DOMESTICATION OF NATURE
Chapter 6. Domestication of Peach Palm (Bactris gasipaes): the Roles of Human Mobility and Migration
Charles R. Clement, Laura Rival and David M. Cole
Chapter 7. Intermediation, Ethnogenesis and Landscape Transformation at the Intersection of the Andes and the Amazon: the Historical Ecology of the Lecos of Apolo, Bolivia
Meredith Dudley
Chapter 8. The Political Ecology of Ethnic Frontiers and Relations among the Piaroa of the Middle Orinoco
Stanford Zent
Chapter 9. ‘Ordenar El Pensamiento’: Place-Making and the Moral Management of Resources in a Multi-Ethnic Territory, Amazonas, Colombia
Giovanna Micarelli
Chapter 10. Plants ‘of the Ancestors’, Plants ‘of the Outsiders’: Ese Eja History, Migration and Medicinal Plants
Miguel N. Alexiades and Daniela M. Peluso
Chapter 11. Weaving Power: Displacement and the Dynamics of Basketry Knowledge amongst the Kaiabi in the Brazilian Amazon
Simone Ferreira de Athayde, Aturi Kaiabi, Katia Yukari Ono and Miguel N. Alexiades
Chapter 12. Traditions in Transition: African Diaspora Ethnobotany in Lowland South America
Robert Voeks
Index
