Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology最新文献

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.

This conclusion to the In-Focus issue examines the conservation frontier in Patagonia. The conservation frontier is a historical process of spatial transformation connected to the mobilization of imaginaries that unlock existing regimes of resource control and promote new territorialization projects. The discussion highlights the creation of national park systems, the securing of the contested border, and the conversion of Andean Patagonia into a space of sublime wilderness. We argue that the contemporary conservation frontier is an open field of contestation defined by its multiplicities. The articles comprising the special issue reflect crosscutting themes regarding frontier multiplicities: varied conservation-based territorialization projects; the genesis of onto-epistemic frictions between actors; and disparate frontier temporalities that anchor spatial transformations. These contemporary frontier projects draw attention to new avenues of change related to Indigenous self-rule and carework, co-management regimes, infrastructure building efforts, and eco-apocalyptic temporalities, as well as hyping the possibility of Patagonia as a bastion for alternative energy. Thus, this conclusion highlights how conservation frontiers are historically made and remade in relation to spatial production tied to capitalist dynamics and state formation.

While Indigenous/mestizo distinction in Latin Americanist anthropology has been mainly thought of as a cultural and/or socioeconomic demarcation, I argue that a conceptualization in terms of race offers some valuable insights. Starting from a soccer championship in the Otavalo region of Ecuador, I show how otavaleño Indigenous people's historical and current experiences of racialization have shaped the criteria that they consider relevant to identification practices, and I illustrate how they build on these to act to some advantage. Building on the assemblage of what I call phenotypization—an extended notion of phenotype—and genealogy, otavaleños create spaces of identification control, striving to maintain the Indigenous/mestizo divide and a sense of belonging upon which they rely for economic activities. Favoring the notion of race, this study lays the groundwork for a Latin Americanist anthropology that considers Indigenous people as part of the same subaltern category as Afro-descendants.

In Patagonia, emerging concerns over environmental degradation in frontier territories suggest the constitution of a new type of frontier—the conservation frontier—in which nature is an object of consumption rather than extraction. Conservation frontiers are made through disputed forms of spatialization, in which wilderness can be a refuge, a source of capital accumulation, and a new space for political experimentation. Three overlapping yet conflicting processes constitute the conservation frontier: nation-building, green productivism, and environmentalism. The material and discursive making of a conservation frontier illustrates how environmental conservation both disrupts and extends settler projects of territorialization.

The judicialization of environmental conflicts in Mexico has generated a growing demand for legal evidence of environmental damages and risks to ecosystems and communities. When conflicts arise over large development projects, one opposition strategy consists of denouncing errors in a project's Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) or procedural errors in its evaluation by federal authorities. Volunteer scientists collaborate with local communities and nonprofit organizations to diagnose technical errors in the EIS and develop “countermeasures” of risks that can be used to contest projects in court. This article analyzes a paradigmatic case of independent EIS review that occurred to oppose a tourism megadevelopment project adjoining the Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park in Baja California Sur. Confronted with the contraction of the political sphere in Mexico, this administrative tactic of political struggle appears as a viable alternative to directly challenging powerful elites. The Cabo Pulmo case highlights evolving relationships between science, environmental governance, and emergent forms of political mobilization in Latin America.