A Future for Amazonia

Informationen zum Autor Michael Cepek is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a fellow in the Division of Environment, Culture, and Conservation at the Field Museum of Natural History. He began working with the Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador in 1994 and continues to collaborate with them on academic and activist projects. Klappentext Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world's most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them.Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman's place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century. We must thank Michael Cepek for an ethnography that not only sheds light on indigenous cultural resistance, but also allows us to imagine such questions.--Laura Rival"Journal of Latin American Studies" (07/01/2013) Zusammenfassung A remarkable story of empowerment, tracing the efforts of Randy Borman, the gringo chief who stemmed the tide of dispossession and rainforest destruction beginning in the 1990s and helped the Cofán of Amazonian Ecuador flourish as the result of unique c Inhaltsverzeichnis PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Cofán PossibilitiesPart I: An Individual and a People 1. Agency: The Emergence of an Intercultural Leader2. Identity: Collectivity and Difference3. Value: The Dilemma of Being CofánPart II: An Experiment in Indigenous and Environmental Politics 4. The NGO: Institutionalizing Activism5. The Forest: Collaborating with Science and Conservation6. The School in the City: Producing the Cofán of the FutureConclusion: A Possible ForestNotesBibliographyIndex...

Auteur

By Michael Cepek

Texte du rabat

Blending ethnography with a fascinating personal story, A Future for Amazonia is an account of a political movement that arose in the early 1990s in response to decades of attacks on the lands and peoples of eastern Ecuador, one of the world's most culturally and biologically diverse places. After generations of ruin at the hands of colonizing farmers, transnational oil companies, and Colombian armed factions, the indigenous Cofán people and their rain forest territory faced imminent jeopardy. In a surprising turn of events, the Cofán chose Randy Borman, a man of Euro-American descent, to lead their efforts to overcome the crisis that confronted them. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research, A Future for Amazonia begins by tracing the contours of Cofán society and Borman's place within it. Borman, a blue-eyed, white-skinned child of North American missionary-linguists, was raised in a Cofán community and gradually came to share the identity of his adoptive nation. He became a global media phenomenon and forged creative partnerships between Cofán communities, conservationist organizations, Western scientists, and the Ecuadorian state. The result was a collective mobilization that transformed the Cofán nation in unprecedented ways, providing them with political power, scientific expertise, and a new role as ambitious caretakers of more than one million acres of forest. Challenging simplistic notions of identity, indigeneity, and inevitable ecological destruction, A Future for Amazonia charts an inspiring course for environmental politics in the twenty-first century.

Résumé
A remarkable story of empowerment, tracing the efforts of Randy Borman, the gringo chief who stemmed the tide of dispossession and rainforest destruction beginning in the 1990s and helped the Cofán of Amazonian Ecuador flourish as the result of unique c

Contenu

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Cofán PossibilitiesPart I: An Individual and a People

• 1. Agency: The Emergence of an Intercultural Leader
• 2. Identity: Collectivity and Difference
• 3. Value: The Dilemma of Being CofánPart II: An Experiment in Indigenous and Environmental Politics
• 4. The NGO: Institutionalizing Activism
• 5. The Forest: Collaborating with Science and Conservation
• 6. The School in the City: Producing the Cofán of the FutureConclusion: A Possible ForestNotesBibliographyIndex