Ecotourism, Peasants, Selva and Residuals of War in the Colombian Amazon: A Look Through Affective Ecology

Abstract

Ecotourism became one of the most important sectors on Guaviare's government agenda since the 2000s. Through its trainings, it would seek to turn coca growers into environmental-entrepreneurial subjects, and the Amazon into an untransformed resource that generates value. With the concept of affective ecologies, I explore the relations that took place between the ecotourism, peasants, the forest, and the residuals of war in Guaviare between 2005 and 2018. In doing so, I argue that, although peasants reproduced the types of subjectivity and nature of institutional ecotourism that operate in the society-nature divide, they also exceeded them. In this way, I reflect on the capacities that the concept of affective ecologies can have to trace and think alternative ways of life without capturing them within the modern conceptual framework of environmental policies and of what some refer as the properly political.