Plantas para alejar las malas vibras
Aquí se puede leer mi ponencia del Congreso Internacional sobre la Amazonía Peruana II, titulado “Plantas para alejar las malas vibras: Observaciones etnbotánicas de la Amazonía urbana.” …
Tag: Amazonia
Volumes: The Technical Politics of Mathematical Abstractions in Contemporary Peruvian Amazonia
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2021 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Repairing Environmental Politics: Multispecies Healing in Ecuador’s Oil Frontier
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2021 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
The Cosmic Serpent: A poem on carnival and karma, first published by Sapiens
Most Carnival celebrations in Brazil were canceled for a second year in a row in 2022 due to the resurgence of COVID-19. This poem, which I wrote during…
The Mind of Plants: Book launch by Synergetic Press on December 15
–Synergetic Press has just released The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence, edited by John C. Ryan, Patricia Vieira and Monica Gagliano, and with a foreword by D…
A wildcat doesn’t change its spots: Gold mining on Indigenous lands in Bolsonaro’s Brazil
A shootout on May 10 between Yanomami Indigenous people and heavily armed illegal miners in Roraima state, Brazil, left three miners and two Yanomami children dead. Since then,…
Memoria y Salud Andino-Amazónica
En el 18 de julio de 2020, participé en un evento interdisciplinario organizado por el grupo estudiantil Abya Yala (de Ohio State) y el Foro Permanente de Estudios,…
"The Camera is our Weapon": Kayapó video warriors featured in new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York
The Kayapó (Mebengôkrê) people of Brazil are living proof of the resistance and adaptability of Indigenous cultures. A new exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York …
Fifty Shades of Green: Reflecting back on the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent in the age of coronavirus [excerpt]
The tragic death from coronavirus of indigenous actor Antonio Bolivar, star of the Oscar-nominated film Embrace of the Serpent, has made me reflect back on all the facts…
Catching up with Glenn Shepard: Interview to launch benefit photography sale with Linda Matney Gallery
This interview launches a new partnership with Linda Matney Gallery. Proceeds from the sale of selected photographs will directly support vital health services including emergency Covid-19 prevention …
Covid-19: Lessons from the Yanomami [New York Times Op-Ed]
This essay, which I translated and edited from an original draft written in French by anthropologist Bruce Albert, was first published by the New York Times on April…
Plants that Keep the Bad Vibes Away
A special issue on “Phyto-Communicability” will be coming out in the journal Ethnos at the end of this year. I contributed a research article to the issue that…
“The Measles from the Time of My Grandfather”: Amazonian Ethnocide Memories in Times of Covid-19 by Carlos Fausto
“Kanari Kuikuro shows me a pot full of winged leafcutter ants he has just collected”. November, 2002. Xingu Indigenous Land, Brazil. Photo by Carlos Fausto Two weeks ago,…
Coronavirus Brings Back Memories: Indigenous priest reflects on the global pandemic [excerpt]
Justino Sarmento Rezende, a Salesian priest of the Tuyuka indigenous people from the upper Rio Negro in Brazil, reflects on the coronavirus pandemic from the perspective of his…
Voluntary Isolation in the Age of Coronavirus
As governments around the world decide on public health measures to contain the spread of coronavirus, indigenous peoples across the Amazon, from the Madre de Dios region in…
The Fish Trap: Winning poem featured by Sapiens.org for World Poetry Day
The fish trapThe fish trap is sun bleached dry halfburied in squeaking whitesand under an equatorialmoon that wants to walk across the blackmirror but instead is twiceswallowed by…
Amazon under Fire: A letter of protest by Brazilian scientists published by the New York Review of Books
As Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stood before the United Nations in September of 2019 downplaying media reports of increasing forest fires under his administration and denouncing world-renowned i…
Toé (Brugmansia suaveolens): The Path of Day and Night [excerpt]
The Path of DayHenchi, a young man from a remote Matsigenka native community in Peru’s Manu National Park, left home one morning to go hunting in the vast…
Amazonia and the Ontological Turn: A Dialogue
In July 2017, I visited Manaus to work on a new collaboration with researchers in the Sociology Department at the Federal University of Amazonas State (UFAM) and I…
Urban Amazonian Show & Tell at #AmAnth18
At this year’s AAA meeting, I’ll be presenting a paper on a panel titled “The Cultural Work of Aesthetics: Brazilian Notions of the Beautiful and the Crafting of…
The Magnificent Indians: Sebastião Salgado’s studio in the Amazon forest
The Javari Valley has always attracted cameras and documentarists. The beauty of the Indians living in this high forest is irresistible. As I learned from Txema Matis, such…
A Pretext for Plunder? Environmental Change and State-Led Redevelopment in the Peruvian Amazon
Gordon Ulmer, Sydney Silverstein, and I just published a short article (with lots of photos!) in the latest edition of Anthropology Today. It examines how projected environmental changes…
First Trip Back Home – A Photo Essay
Amazônica just published a short interview and photo essay that I helped develop with friends while living in Iquitos, Peru in 2016. Roldan (the first author) is an indigenous…
The Awakening of the Waters: Clean water, health and village sanitation in the Peruvian Amazon
So it was, long ago, people had no clean water to drink. Instead, they drank from muddy swamps and stagnant puddles of algae and slime. One day, Shigentiri,…