Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

Pastoralism worldwide faces a complex landscape of increased pressures and exclusion. Beyond ecological and economic challenges, pastoralists suffer eroding cultural identity, limited generational renewal, and political marginalization. Yet pastoral livelihoods are increasingly recognized as stewards of sustainable futures and amongst the best food producers in a post-fossil world scenario. In such a struggle for socio-ecological justice, voices of Latin America pastoralists remain unheard both within regional debates and pastoral scholarship globally. With this article we explore the Latin American context to push conceptual, economic, and political boundaries that pose constraints for sustainable rural development. Rising voices of Latin American pastoralists reveal local agency, resourcefulness, and resistance. Critical notions of identity and feeling to belong tied to rootedness and “sense of place” emerge as particularly relevant, in contrast with conventional framings focused on environmental and economic constraints.

This article is focused on four Black women entrepreneurs in Cuba's lucrative bed and breakfast home-based tourism economy, asking: (1) what intersectional factors facilitated their entrepreneurial enterprises, (2) how they conceptualize success, and (3) how their narratives illuminate patterns involving gendered race in the country's increasingly market-oriented context, and what opportunities might be on the horizon? Their narratives provide a praxis that demonstrates how despite their distinct paths to cuentapropismo (self-employment), socialist values largely shape their conceptions of success. Nonetheless, historic tropes from the prerevolutionary era involving White (or foreign) patriarchal gatekeepers reveal themselves, even with evidence of potential patrons who were previously inaccessible due to similar social marginalization. By centering these Black women's voices and experiences, this project uses womanism as theory in action.

This provocation calls readers to think more deeply about the role anthropology could play in radically disrupting plant blindness. Thanks to Environmental Humanities, the natural world is no longer apprehended as a mere backdrop to human activity. The taken-for-grantedness of plants has given way to a recognition of their biological complexity. However, a preference for “relational” over “classificatory” thinking, linked to a desire to pay greater attention to nonhuman agency, has resulted in portraying “humanity” as a homogenous category. A rush to let vegetal voices be heard could lead to the silencing of forms of collective existence organized around values perceived to be essential for life to flourish. This risk can be avoided by applying the lessons of twentieth-century historical anthropology to the analysis of contemporary communities, whose assertions of the good life wax and wane according to complex historical and ecological dynamics. To show how anthropological methodology could best contribute to Environmental Humanities, I interrogate my early work on manioc domestication through a new kind of ethnographic exploration. A journey I took with two Waorani friends to a ribeirinho community on the Upper Rio Negro forms the starting point for a more intimate and intersubjective interrogation of the creative potential of cross-cultural exchange. On the basis of ethnographic insights triggered by this encounter, I revisit explanations of the historical and spatial divide between manioc brewers and manioc flour makers. I also re-analyze the historical role played by manioc flour during the rubber boom. I underscore the importance of history as lived and remembered. I conclude that environmental humanistic sensibilities may not be sufficient to explain the resilience of agrifood systems. The biological plasticity of manioc matters, but manioc becomes a protagonist only when people carry their memories through.

Building on an ongoing dialogue with co-editors Claudio Alvarado Lincopi and Roberto Cayuqueo Martínez, this article explores the process that redefined roles and relationships with and through writing. It investigates multivocal representations and collaborative writings, interrogating the possibilities and challenges of divergent positionalities in methodologies and epistemologies of co-creation that are simultaneously Indigenous, academic, ethnographic, and deeply engaged. “Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and anticolonial indigeneity in Santiago de Chile” (MUP, 2022) results from a 4-year collaborative research project involving Mapuche activists, artists, and scholars. The book, structured as a map of Santiago, chronicles the Indigenous urban diaspora, emphasising creative and political acts of place-making. Connected to a website housing audio-visual materials, the volume experiments with multimodality, collective writing, and shared authorship. Editorial work and writing involved extensive review, feedback, and translation between individual and collective creation, and negotiations around choices of language, style, format, and forms of representation.