Publications
Encyclopedia Entry: Humanitarianism
Pedro Silva Rocha Lima and Malay Firoz
2025, The Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology
This encyclopaedic entry outlines some of the main anthropological contributions to the study of humanitarianism, broadly understood as a concern with human suffering and a moral desire to alleviate it. It highlights four key areas within the anthropology of humanitarianism: critical perspectives on the management of populations, tensions within humanitarian ethics, the politics of ‘crisis’, and the de-centring of Western humanitarianism. As climate change impacts prospects for human life in vulnerable areas of the world, humanitarianism’s definitions, boundaries, and limits will also shift in response, offering anthropologists an important terrain of inquiry into how societies frame, mitigate, and manage the suffering of others.
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’…