Amy Penfield

Amy Penfield is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bristol in the UK. Her research explores economic livelihoods in remote regions of Amazonia, whether in the form of animist environmental ecologies, informal wildcat mining, everyday experiences of oil economies, or struggles to access energy sources. Her initial research was undertaken in Venezuelan Amazonia with a Yanomami language group, focusing on how they make sense of a rapidly transforming world amid the backdrop of informal gold mining, gasoline supplies, and an approaching socialist state. Her new work focuses on livelihoods in Amazonia that we don’t normally see from the outside – people on the frontline of environmental degradation, people who navigate legal loopholes to access land, people who extract gold, and people who smuggle illegal resources under the radar. She strives to bring these stories into light with a nuanced and compassionate perspective.