Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments This book came together in part because of a colleague’s advice some years back. Shesuggestedmypaperswerescatteredandhardtofindandthatitwouldbeuseful for those who might be interested in reading them if they were reprinted in a single volume.Shesaidthis,inpart,becauseIhaveindeedpublishedarticlesandchapters, as some of us do from time to time, in a variety of venues, in­clud­ing rather hard-­to-­ find and out-­ of-­ the-­ way ones. All the essays herein, in­ clud­ ing two new ones, were arranged with the purpose of showing certain threads of my thinking in his­tori­cal ecology and Greater Amazonia as these have unfolded over the past thirty years, and the central aspects of these ideas that remain in academic discourse. Of course, I have all the individuals, institutions, groups, and societies to acknowledge for the origi­ nal papers that appeared over the years and are here re­ issued in modified form to fit the layout and concept undergirding this book. They have been thanked as in­di­vidual persons in the origi­nal publications, so I won’t repeat their specific identifiers here. I would merely state that I could not have done the work obviously without the acceptance and to a large extent expert tutelage in forest intricacies by the indigenous communities who are the focus of the book, especially the Ka’apor, Sirionó, Araweté, Assurini, Guajá, and Tembé. I am also indebted to longstanding support by the New York Botanical Garden, the Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi in Belém, Brazil, and the Stone Center for Latin Ameri­ can Studies at Tulane University. I am also grateful to the collegial ambience consistently provided by my colleagues and students in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. In putting the volume together, I have tried to take note of current findings and trends in related work, and several scholars have helped me stay, as much as possible, au courant. The people I must thank the most for this are the two anonymousreviewerswhomTheUniversityofAlabamaPresschoseforthevolume .They supplied valuable insights and helpful suggestions, by far most of which I incorporated herein, with the objective of improving the work. As far as it goes for the identifiable people who got closest to this project, I am indeed grateful for vari­ous specific kinds of assistance. First, I would like to thank photographer and art historian Meghan Kirkwood for permission to reproduce two of her photographs. I would like to acknowledge Kathy Cummins, who copyedited the manuscript in a thorough and timely fashion. Tulane University research assistants Nicole ­ Katin and Dustin Reuther deserve my gratitude for their insights regarding several images as well as in the occasionally vexing, though usually merely boring, task of rekeying of several chapters. Finally, I thank my editor, Joseph Powell of the University of Alabama Press, for his initial interest in and thereafter unflagging support getting this project into print. I am also grateful to him for a number of suggestions regarding the images included herein. Cultural Forests of the Amazon ...