Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia by Michael L. Cepek

Abstract

Michael L. Cepek, with photographs by Bear Guerra Life in Oil: Cofán Survival in the Petroleum Fields of Amazonia Austin: University of Texas Press, 2018. 304 pp. Photographs, maps, references, index. $27.95 paper (ISBN: 978–1–4773–1508–8). The Ecuadorian Cofán are in a sense legendary in the popular imaginary of Indigenous Amazonia” (Davidov, 2014, p. 197). The cover of Life in Oil supports that legend: feathers in ears, noses, and crowns; mounded strands of beads and more feathers and scores of peccary tusks made into long necklaces. The legend of Indigenous Amazonia includes a culture inextricable from rainforest and rivers full of sustenance and danger, includes shamans drinking yaje (or ayahuasca) that they might learn to become jaguars or anacondas. It encompasses waves of proselytizing settlers seekingfortuneinthisworldand/orthenext. By the late-twentieth century, the Cofán legend incorporated hydrocarbon production and its vast consequences in Amazonia, and a Cofán-identifying-Caucasian son of missionaries occasionally called a “gringo chief.” The legend includes a decades-long, nineteen -billion-dollar,lawsuitagainstbehemoth Chevron, and multiple armed occupations of hydrocarbon industry sites by hundreds of Cofán people. A number of Bear Guerra’s black-and-white photographs accompany Cepek’s words in a telling of this legend with a focus on Cofán experience. Sometimes, stories of legendary Native survivalandimages ofauthenticallyadorned and stoic Natives under environmental attack—both suggested by this book’s cover—canbeproblematic(e.g.Kane,1995). Sometimes, such texts function—as they have for centuries across the Americas—to (un)intentionally reify Native peoples’ racialized socioecological marginalization, especially when a power disparity exists between the Native people being portrayed and those whose gazes shape portraits, often North AmericansorWesterners.Iwrite“sometimes” because we all know the old adage about judging a book’s cover. Cepek’s relationship with many of his Cofán collaborators spans more than two decades. He speaks fluent A’ingae, the Cofán language. The people on the book’s cover—Alejandro, Lucia, and Roberto—host Cepek during his fieldwork staysintheCofáncommunityofDurenoand considerhimfamily,afeelinghereciprocates accordingtothesharedkindnessesdescribed throughout Life in Oil. Those relationships are what make this book more than simply another example of a popular research genre that Cepek himself criticizes: something on the horrors of oil in Amazonian Ecuador written by a North American simply to improve their own lot in life with little concern foranyEcuadorian,Indigenousorotherwise (p. 190). Using the staple anthropological practices of applied linguistic proficiency and long-term ethnographic fieldwork, Cepek conducted interviews, conversations, and observationsthatprovidemostofthesubject matter of Life in Oil. After relating the experienceofariverineoilspillin2014 ,chapterone succinctly states the book’s approach: “life in 3 book reviews oil is a form of slow, confusing, and ultimately unknowable violence” (p. 10). Cofán people are described as confident, suffering, and fearful “victims of history who [recognize that they] deserve material compensation for oil’s assault on their lives” (p. 11). A nod to Nixon’s (2011) appraisal of long-lasting socialandenvironmentaljusticeissuesas “slow violence,” Cepek’s theoretical framing of the hydrocarbonindustryanditssocioecological effectsconsistentlyemployswhatAppeletal. (2015) refer to as the “metonymic register” of “oil.” In this common social science approach, theterm“oil”variablyrefersto:thesubstance itself, sometimes considered an actant in the Latourian sense; the infrastructures, practices ,andconsequencesofitscommodification; and/or complex themes of hydrocarbon governance and politics such as modernity, money, power, and violence. That metonym is “performative” (Appel et al., 2015, p. 17), a compelling and expedient mode of framing the complex socioecological problems that constitute “oil.” Chapter two begins with background on Cepek’s relationship to Alejandro and his family, followed by an overview of Cofán spatial history focused on Dureno before and after the advent of the hydrocarbon industry . This chapter also introduces the reader to Cofán shamanism, explored further in chapter three. There, retellings of the life and death of a powerful shaman serve to guide an exploration of ancestral Cofán cosmology, andhowitsmeaningsanduseshavechanged over the last few decades. Chapter four explores the term “cocama“: an A’ingae word that marks the boundaries of Cofán-ness and also implies the propensity for violence Cofán culture attributes to non-Cofán: settlers , the state, certain missionaries, the hydrocarbon industry. A brief literature review on types and effects...