Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti

Abstract

Reviewed by: Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods by laura zanotti Christopher Jarrett laura zanotti, Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon: The Kayapó's Fight for Just Livelihoods. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2016. 229 pp. Laura Zanotti's Radical Territories offers a historically grounded, politically astute, and ethnographically vivid account of how the Kayapó of the Brazilian Amazon build diverse livelihoods in plural landscapes. With a keen sense of ethics and a commitment to justice, Zanotti provides a complex picture of an indigenous Amazonian people who actively maintain and defend the ceremonial and material practices of their ancestors while thoughtfully and open-mindedly engaging with new opportunities for collaboration with a range of external allies. Zanotti's narrative describes how the Kayapó sustain "beautiful" living in geographies defined at once by their political potency as legally recognized indigenous "territories," their complexity and particularity as meaningful places, and their liberating potential as spaces of experimentation with different kinds of economies. Zanotti situates the book in a "territorial turn" in Latin America (36; Offen 2003, Bryan 2012). The focus of the text is on how the Kayapó have not only gained legal recognition for their territory through political struggle, but also continously make their territory. They do so through long-term occupation and adaptation to changing circumstances, ceremonial and spiritual engagement, productive practices that sustain their lifeways, and experimental alliances with outside groups. Kayapó territorialities are thus composed of historically sedimented, socially meaningful landscapes populated by multiple human and non-human actors. Such a wide-ranging account invariably leads Zanotti to engage with diverse theoretical movements, but the core of her approach is rooted in theories of space and place, feminist political ecology, and post-colonial [End Page 1283] scholarship. She skillfully depicts an example of "place as process" (12), and demonstrates the ways in which Western notions of abstract and capital-defined space both fail to capture and do violence to indigenous forms of territorial construction. She also tells "stories" of indigenous people that simultaneously support their struggles in regional and global arenas and carefully convey the heterogeneity of their positionalities, perspectives, and experiences (40). Radical Territories opens with an introduction that discusses Kayapó efforts to secure their current territory and to enact territorialities that reflect both a Kayapóspecific cosmological orientation and global efforts to construct "new geographies of well-being and living well" in contexts of neodevelopmentalism and neoextractivism (10). Zanotti explains that Kayapó livelihoods are dependent on "healthy lands and waters, but also demand creative entrepeneurship and political acumen to generate income and foster pathways to success" (4). Accordingly, she describes how Kayapó territory construction complicates simple critiques of the commodification of nature, for instance. At the same time, she outlines how Kayapó notions of well-being, and struggles in pursuit of such notions, contribute to movements for hope and justice. In the introduction, she also explains her methodological approach, which was grounded in community-based work in the Kayapó village of A'Ukre, but was also attentive to how this village is linked to outside places through "intersections of commodity chains, visual economies, rights-based efforts, and daily routines" (45). In the subsequent five chapters, Zanotti addresses various dimensions of Kayapó territory-making, such as history and political struggle (Chapter 1), ceremonial life (Chapter 2), foodways and swidden agriculture (Chapter 3), the non-timber forest product trade (Chapter 4), and community–conservation alliances (Chapter 5). Chapter 1 outlines Kayapó history and struggles to obtain and protect their formal territory, as well as ways in which Kayapó place-making is more expansive than juridical definitions. Here, it would have been interesting to learn more about Kayapó understandings of their identity beyond its articulation in the context of political struggles. Chapter 2 provides vivid, detailed descriptions of naming ceremonies and other Kayapó social processes that sustain collective life. Zanotti emphasizes that the Kayapó understand their lifeways as involving a multitude of species with whom they co-inhabit the landscapes in their territory. This chapter contributes to current efforts in Amazonian anthropology to examine the [End Page 1284] relationship between cosmology and politics without conceptually isolating the two (Cepek 2012). Toward...