Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

The article looks at the power relations between landholders and wind companies for the fixation and distribution of rents from wind energy in the Oaxacan Isthmus. It foregrounds the centrality of rent in the process of land grabbing as well as the political nature of rent. Drawing on landholders, who have received little attention in the conflicts over wind energy in the Isthmus, the paper addresses a different layer in the socio-environmental conflict, where subaltern actors have political and economic motivations to accept wind energy despite their acknowledgment of uneven power relations with investors. The paper contributes to the literature on the political ecology of renewables.

The Ruta 30 scenic road project in Argentine Tierra del Fuego has encountered significant resistance. In this article, we analyze a public hearing convened to assess the road's impacts as an event illuminating the daily dynamics of the region. In this borderland, narratives about sovereignty create a space of liminalities between pasts and futures, centers and peripheries, and living and the dead. In this context, and with Patagonia's expanding conservation and ecotourism frontiers, studying public reflexivity becomes crucial for understanding rapid changes. To this end, we employ Turner's “social drama” concept to analyze the hearing as a performance enacting authorized discourses of experts, policymakers, environmentalists, industry, and workers. We conclude by discussing “liminal governance” in a border territory that transcends neoliberal and sovereign designs, and “impossible opposition,” revealing how the hearing reframed the road conflict as a sovereignty crisis, ultimately mitigating potential disruptions to established settler-colonial structures.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, the Colombian region of Urabá, that borders Panama, has gained notoriety for the transit of people moving from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean to North America. Using an ethnographic approach, this article examines how the accounts of local bureaucrats and other actors in the region frame these movements within the influence of “redes,” that is, networks, a vague reference to the hold illegal armed actors and smugglers have over the region. We argue that redes works as a placeholder that simplifies the complexities around these types of migration and gives the phenomenon distorted contours which ignore the agency of people on-the-move. We contrast local accounts of the criminal influence over these movements to those of the travelers themselves who describe a variety of interactions along their journeys, but do not mention networks of this kind.

Based on the discussion of the declaration of the Lanín volcano as a Mapuche sacred natural site, this article rethinks the relationship between conservation and care from an ethnographic perspective, paying special attention to the relationship between the entities volcano and pijan mawiza. The exploration occurs within the framework of the intercultural proposal behind the co-management of the National Parks in Argentina. I argue that the “multiculturalist” perspective based on interculturality and “dialogues of knowledge” has turned conservation and care into interchangeable synonyms, but that this translation renders invisible the possibility of addressing—from an ontological perspective—other worlds struggling to exist. The article reflects on the potentials of care to pluralize conservation based on juxtapositions of, and mixtures with, other forms of making world(s).

This article explores how villagers in Surama form alliances with outsiders through strategic hospitality within the touristic borderzone. Surama is a primarily Makushi village in Guyana. Tourism began during the 1990s and is now central to the village economy. Villagers' efforts to form relationships with certain visitors (particularly tourist leaders) as partners or yakos through hospitality reflect an ontological framework associated with shamanism. This involves relational modes of interaction that are common across Amazonia but have been underexamined in the context of tourism. However, Makushi alliances with outsiders in Surama are unique in their emphasis on mutuality and symmetry, which stems from past Makushi experiences of enslavement during the colonial encounter and antipathy towards asymmetric relations. Based on fieldwork involving interviews and participant observation in Surama, this article links debates in Amazonian ethnology and the anthropology of tourism to examine how villagers in Surama manage relations with tourists to obtain external resources.

The “world's end” or “el fin del mundo” is a very common representational figure used to describe the Fuegian Archipelago of South America. There are world's end hostels, coffee table books, and scientific expeditions, for example, and the phrase is widely used to describe the region's landscape and geography, Indigenous peoples, biota, and to signal precarity along several registers. In this article, I examine the world's end through the lens of the frontier, specifically focusing on how colonial imaginaries of Fuegian peoples as “lost” or lost to history are foundational to the region's territorial projects, including conservation efforts. Research for this paper stems from ethnographic fieldwork in the Fuegian Archipelago, between 2011 and 2018, as well as archival research on colonial settlement in the region.

Far from a settled fact, environmental citizenship is always in the making. In this article, we analyze how the settlers of a protected area in Patagonia, Argentina, seek to legitimize their claims for natural resources and territory through strategic representations of themselves. The self-presentation molds not only their own political subjects, but also the public authority of the governing offices. We argue that the legitimization of public institutions is partial and fragmented, allowing settlers to legitimize their claims and become active producers of environmental citizenship. The conservation encounters reproduce social practices, cultural symbols, and governmental artifacts. In this way, they contribute to the affirmation of state authority and the hegemony of the nation-state through their reproduction of the Patagonian imaginaries, while also curbing the sphere of influence of any particular institution.

The Chilean Blue Patagonia is an essential space for marine life and a global center of the aquaculture industry. Over the last few years, several socio-environmental crises and conflicts have marked its development, highlighting the impacts of salmon farming on marine habitats and the livelihoods of local communities. To face this critical scenario, the indigenous peoples have created the Indigenous Marine Areas (ECMPO), a protection figure which safeguards their livelihoods and preserves the ecosystems that sustain them. Based on ethnographic information, the work analyzes care practices and strategies of indigenous peoples, the vital paths of abundance, health and illness of the livelihoods, the other-than-human agencies' roles in the production of care narratives and behaviors, and the territorial dynamics of the ECMPOs.