Awaiting product image
Awaiting product image

Predatory Economies

Predatory Economies

$29.95

In stock
0 out of 5

$29.95

SKU: 9781477327081 Category:
Title Range Discount
Trade Discount 5 + 25%
Add to wishlist

Description

Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary.

Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities; in addition, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.

A study of the modes of predation used by and against the Sanema people of Venezuela.

Amy Penfield is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bristol.

    Key Characters

    Introduction: Locating Predators and Prey

    Chapter 1. Predation, Then and Now

    Chapter 2. Extracting Good Things

    Chapter 3. Horizons of the Unknown

    Chapter 4. Subterranean Forces

    Chapter 5. Invoking the State

    Chapter 6. Forest Papers

    Epilogue: Predatory Economies in Amazonia and Beyond

    Acknowledgments

    Notes

    References

    Index

    Predatory Economies is an utterly engaging story of Sanema lives entangled in predation and desire amid the rush of gold, oil, and gasoline in Bolivarian Venezuela. Penfield brilliantly combines the best traditions of Amazonian ethnography with an astute analysis of the wider tentacles of predatory capitalism, offering a Sanema lesson on the ills wrought by the fever of endless growth. 
    A great read that goes beyond well-rehearsed ideas about Amazonian cosmology to explain why concepts such as predation are integral to the means by which Amazonian people engage with their neighbors, the state, and extractive economies. Rather than simply dwelling on differences between Penfield’s Sanema informants and other Venezuelans, her detailed and textured ethnography shows how the state and its promises are imbricated in people’s lives, hopes, frustrations, and failures. This is exactly the kind of book that helps contextualize and give substance to key concepts that have emerged in regional scholarship in recent years. Its clear and engaging presentation, along with its depiction of Amazonian people living at the margins of wider Latin American political and economic processes, guarantees this book’s importance beyond the field of Amazonian ethnography. I very much look forward to using it in my courses.

Additional information

Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in