Article: ‘Before They Sent Us to Civilise Them, Now They Send Us to Defend Them from Civilisation’: Missionary Theopolitics at the Margins of the State

Natalia Valdivieso Kastner

2025, Social Sciences and Missions, 38(1-2), 184-211.

This article examines the involvement of Catholic missionaries in mediating the socio-environmental conflicts arising from oil extraction in the Northern Ecuadorian Amazon. Drawing on a 13-month ethnographic study and archival research, it investigates how missionaries navigate marginality areas where state practices are both constructed and deconstructed through informal and illegal practices…

Book: Predatory Economies: The Sanema and the Socialist State in Contemporary Amazonia

Amy Penfield

2023, University of Texas Press: Austin, Texas.

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 …

Article: Will farmers seek environmental regularization in the Amazon and how? Insights from the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR) questionnaires

Rayane Pacheco et al.

2021, Journal of Environmental Management, Vol 284, 112010

The future availability and quality of natural resources essential to life such as ecosystem services and biodiversity depend on the conservation and restoration of native vegetation. The Brazilian Native Vegetation Protection Law (NVPL) requires farmers to conserve a minimum percentage of native vegetation within their properties as Legal Reserves…

Article: The wild inside out: fluid infrastructure in an Amazonian mining region

Amy Penfield

2019, Social Anthropology. Vol. 27, no. 2, p. 221-235.

Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The ‘wild’ landscapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach and work in these far-flung mine sites consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and unpredictable waterways, locales that restrict and confound formal infrastructural development. In such terrains, prospectors must devise innovative ‘fluid infrastructures’…