Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America ed. by Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía (review)

Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, eds., Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. 282 pp.

The volume Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism: Ethnographies from South America, edited by Cecilie Vindal Ødegaard and Juan Javier Rivera Andía, is one of the latest works within the growing body of literature on extractivism and indigeneity in the region. Clearly written and yet rich in always surprising ethnographic material, this volume is essential reading for scholars and students interested in both Amerindian anthropology and political ecology in general. By examining how "indigenous life projects" are redefined through both negotiations and contestations with state and market actors, the nine contributions to this volume—set in Peru, Brazil, Ecuador, Guyana, Venezuela, and Bolivia—make a strong case for the value of the ethnographic gaze in dealing with uncertainties and dilemmas emerging from natural resource extraction within indigenous territories. Thanks to its ethnographic commitment, this volume succeeds in highlighting the historically deep colonial features of contemporary practices of natural resource extraction in alignment with the interests of their interlocutors, without falling for essentialist and romantic representations of indigenous resistance to capitalism, as evidenced, for example, in Li's and Paredes's chapter on the strategic use of indigeneity in environmental activism in Peru and Bolivia. From a theoretical standpoint, this book is built around the ambitious project of bridging three streams of literature typically developed with little communication among them. With different proportions, each chapter deals with materialistic questions of dispossession inspired by political ecology, debates on indigeneity and subject formation, and theoretical insights on world-making inspired by authors—such as Descola and Viveiros de Castro—typically associated with the so-called ontological turn. While this volume is certainly exemplary in attempting to bring together these three bodies of inquiry, in itself such an attempt is not a novelty. Nonetheless, it is truly refreshing in the ways in which the connection between these three bodies of questions and approaches allows authors to examine problematics, dilemmas, and controversies emerging from experiences of extractivism as they are conceptualized locally and contingently by indigenous actors.

The volume's focus on the local articulation of extractivist problematics and controversies has several significant implications on the broader debate about natural resources in the region. Two implications, however, seem particularly relevant. Firstly, as this volume illustrates, indigenous experiences with extractivism cannot be reduced to a clash between novel exogenous modernist assumptions (sensu Latour) on natural resource extraction and ahistorical and consensual indigenous ideas about nonhuman agency. Rather, ideas about objectivation and ownership of natural resources deriving from specific industrial and Western approaches to human-environmental relations are necessarily made sense of and resignified under local ontological and political terms. In contrast with accusations of essentialism, an ontological attention to natural resource extraction revolves around uncertain knowledge concerning the nature of a particular being and its agency within contingent controversies on natural resource extraction and its questions. For instance, Andia's chapter set in the Peruvian highland focuses on the role of apparently non-indigenous artifacts, such as a Catholic church (Iglisya) imbricated in ownership controversies around mining areas, in informing mutual determinations between humans and their landscape; Kroijer's examination of the impact of the oil industry on the Secoya people of Ecuador shows how the dangerous effects of oil leakages are predicted and identified not through a characterization of oil as powerful non-human spirit, but rather through a consideration of the role of uncontrolled flows in eco-cosmological relations.

Secondly, while many ontological principles of capitalism remain incommensurable with several indigenous notions of life, in extractivist contexts indigenous life projects are not necessarily carried out through political opposition to natural resource extraction. This volume draws attention to the dilemmas that many indigenous people face in incorporating certain...