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This thesis is an ethnographic account of the Resistencia Waorani, a campaign and social movement born to oppose the auctioning of an oil block located within the territory inhabited by the Waorani people, in the Ecuadorian Amazon. By examining the political practices developed by Waorani activists and their allies as part of the evolving eco-Indigenous 'middle ground', it explores the novel ways in which they have been successfully mobilising to preserve their territorial integrity and cultivate autonomy. An area characterised by conflicting and overlapping territorialities, the Amazon region of Ecuador has been central to struggles over the expansion of the country's extractive frontier. The Waorani's history of entanglements with oil interests and coloniality is a long winding one that eludes stark categorisations of victimhood and culpability and that blurs the line between domination and resistance. Through my collaboration with Waorani organisations and an engaged approach based on 'observant participation' and interviews, I interrogate how the Resistencia of the Waorani of Pastaza represents a substantial transformation in the ways they interact with oil and powerful outsiders, and suggest the emergence of new forms of doing politics. In particular, by chronicling the strategic repertoire employed by activists and communities involved in the movement, I identify new subjectivities, vocabularies and territorialities that have been engendered in the process, thus exploring the implications of resisting oil. The questions the chapters address are: How is anti-extractivist resistance conceived and constructed in the new middle grounds of Amazonia? What innovative strategies of resistance to extractivist development did the Resistencia Waorani develop and adopt? To what extent are Waorani identities and perspectives of the future shaped by anti-extractivist resistance? Building on Foucauldian governmentality and connecting the theoretical traditions of critical geographies of social movements and indigeneity, and Latin American political ecology, the thesis provides both empirical and conceptual contributions. The processes of political transformation and mobilisation analysed throughout the thesis challenge the dominant conceptualisation of resistance as a counterforce (resistance against). In this way, the study helps broadening the boundaries of what is understood as 'resistance' and foregrounds its productive capacity (resistance for).

Brazilian ecosystems are facing major threats to their conservation and functioning from human induced disturbances in combination with climate change. The two largest Brazilian ecosystems, the Amazon Forest and Cerrado, lost together approximately 15,690 km2 year-1 of their intact vegetation cover between 2010 and 2020 (equivalent to 12% year-1 of England area), with an intensification of vegetation loss from 2019. Brazil is responsible for the largest carbon dioxide emissions from land use and land cover changes (LULCC). Still, uncertainties arise in global carbon budget assessments on the magnitude and trends of these disturbance fluxes and its impacts on the carbon balance. In this thesis, I investigate the components of human disturbance and how they impact the contemporary carbon cycle of Brazilian ecosystems, such as LULCC, as well the relationship between fire occurrence and landscape fragmentation. The thesis ends with a synthesis of the contemporary net land carbon balance of the Amazon using a set of state-of-the-art estimates from different methodological approaches. In chapter 2 I attempt to reconcile estimates of LULCC emissions for Brazil. I first evaluated new global LULCC maps used in global bookkeeping and Dynamic Global Vegetation Models (DGVMs) from the Global Carbon Budget (GCB) assessments for Brazil. These new maps were based on Food Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics combined with multi-year land cover data from the European Space Agency. I found good spatial agreement between the global LULCC maps with MapBiomas, the Brazilian remote sensing based LULCC maps. However, the global LULCC dataset still failed to capture the magnitude and recent increase in deforestation in Brazil. This is due to the method used to infer deforestation from agricultural area change reported to FAO in addition the use of a simple linear trend to extrapolate beyond the final census year. The findings of this study have been welcomed by the global land modelling community and led to the subsequent adoption of MapBiomas in the Global Carbon Budget assessment for 2022 (GCB2022). Conversion of intact vegetation cover to other land uses induce landscape fragmentation and fire spread. In chapter 3, I test the relationship between fire occurrence within intact vegetation fragments and the degree of landscape fragmentation in the two major and contrasting Brazilian ecosystems (Amazon and Cerrado). I found that there is an ecosystem-specific relationship between burned area fraction within intact vegetation fragments and landscape fragmentation induced by human activity. I find that fire occurrence within intact vegetation fragments associated to landscape fragmentation has an opposite relationship when comparing Amazon and Cerrado. These human-induced disturbances cause large losses of carbon to the atmosphere, thus impacting the carbon balance of tropical areas. Building on all the findings of chapters 2 and 3, in chapter 4, I use the latest data from a set of regional and global models to attribute and synthesise the contemporary net land carbon balance of Amazon. The different approaches agree that the south-eastern Amazonia is a net carbon source to the atmosphere. Bottom-up approaches suggest that Brazilian Amazonia was a net land carbon source in 2020 due to an increase in deforestation and fire emissions. Given the large uncertainties from the models and remaining knowledge gaps, there is insufficient data to reject the hypothesis that the Amazon was not neutral between 2010 and 2018. In conclusion, this thesis reconciles diverging estimates of land use and land cover emissions of Brazil in global carbon budget assessments. Moreover, this thesis brings together state-of-the art estimates of the Amazon carbon budget using bottom-up and top-down models and the knowledge gaps to reconcile them. Finally, I highlight the importance of the use of remote sensing data to constrain global estimates of land use and land cover change datasets and emissions. This thesis also demonstrates divergent fragmentation-fire relationships in the two major and contrasting Brazilian biomes. The results present in this thesis have important implications for the mitigation potential of Brazilian ecosystems within the goals of Paris Agreement.

The film, Kanarta, and the accompanying text Cultivating the Real at the Edge of the Forest are the outcome of a multimedia research inquiry into the praxis, perspectives and desires of Shuar and Wampis forest people living in the Amazonian region of Southern Ecuador and Northern Peru. The film and text combine to produce a sensory exploration of the entanglements of diverse ecological, environmental and socio-political forces that characterise this region. While critical of approaches that posit a generalised Amerindian ontology, the work also recognises the importance of not discarding or dissolving a sense of Amerindian authenticity. Rather, the research shows how a sense of Amazonian reality emerges in heterogeneous processes of unfolding and negotiation. To this end the film and written text focus on the lifeworlds of indigenous Amazonian forest dwellers, demonstrating how indigenous knowledges emerge and are articulated in times of uncertainty, with particular attention given to how practices and relationships are continually rewoven, enmeshed and constituted as real. Grounded in considerations of the body and of perception at the intersection of phenomenology and specifically Amazonian theories of corporeality, I unravel the complex arts of relating with Others, both human and non-human, including plants, animals, spirits, and other features of the natural environment. The concrete practices and events considered in this research (such as communal works, plant-induced dreaming, experiences of illness, knowledge-making and relations of care) are related to a quest for the real Amazon-ness that arises at a time when such authenticity is seen by local inhabitants as elusive and un-assured. The audiovisual material forms the core of the thesis, rather than serving as a secondary element to illustrate the text. Approached in this way, the film Kanarta (147) presents at once an assemblage of potentialities that nurture the sensory, experiential and synesthetic apprehension of relevant ethnographic moments, and a standalone cinematic endeavour that engages with the lifeworlds of the two main protagonists, Sebastian and Pastora, a Shuar-Quichua couple living in Ecuadorian Amazonia. By appropriating techniques of filming and editing largely inspired by cinema verite, the film shows how the immersive and inter-subjective storytelling of cine-ethnography can open new perspectives on indigenous knowledge practices.

This thesis presents an indigenous analysis of social and spatial relations in southern Guyana through the histories, perspectives and practices of people in Masakenyarï, considered by its approximately 250 residents to be a Waiwai village. It explores contemporary indigenous relations to the environment and environmental NGOs, the state, and various outsiders in Guyana. The chapters examine the multiple ways in which people in Masakenyarï understand and act within broader political and economic processes, which are analytically framed through Waiwai ideas about the desired and potentially dangerous relation between exteriority and interiority. Central to this account of social and spatial relations is the Waiwai ewto, the village or 'place-where-people-live'. Masakenyarï became an Amerindian Protected Area in 2007, partnering with an international NGO and later with the Guyanese government. I show how for people in Masakenyarï making their ewto includes everyday household and communal processes but also establishing the protected area, seeking expertise outside the village, and building relations with the state. Themes such as leadership, gender, development, exchange, and identity are explored to elaborate interiority and exteriority as dynamic spatial but also conceptual relations. I pay particular attention to the ways that people in Masakenyarï frame their participation in environmental conservation and increased connection to the state as active and agentive. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the persisting importance of the exterior - which includes state, NGO and other itinerant actors - as a source of value for Waiwai people for the village-based livelihoods that they desire. Rooted in the anthropology of Latin America and indigenous Amazonia, the thesis speaks to broader questions about indigenous ideas of living well, both in relation to village sociality and contemporary indigenous livelihoods amidst large-scale political and economic transformation.

The Neotropics is the most species-rich area in the world and the mechanisms that generated and maintain its biodiversity are still debated. This thesis contributes to the debate by investigating the evolutionary and biogeographic history of the genus Ceiba. Ceiba comprises 18 mostly neotropical species endemic to two major biomes, seasonally dry tropical forests (SDTFs) and rain forests, and therefore represents an ideal case to shed light on patterns of neotropical plant evolution and diversification. Species of Ceiba, with their swollen, spiny trunks and large, beautiful flowers are one of the most characteristic elements of neotropical SDTF, one of the most threatened biomes in the tropics. Despite this, Ceiba has an historically complex taxonomy with some issues of species delimitation unresolved, especially within a species complex (Ceiba insignis agg.). Initial phylogenetic analyses of DNA sequence data from the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacers (ITS) for 24 accessions representing 14 species of Ceiba recovered the genus as monophyletic and showed geographical and ecological structure in three main clades: (i) a humid forest lineage of three accessions of C. pentandra sister to the remaining species; (ii) a highly supported clade composed of C. schottii and C. aesculifolia from Central American and Mexican SDTF plus two accessions of C. samauma from inter Andean valleys from Peru; and (iii) a highly supported South American SDTF clade including 10 species showing little sequence variation. Within this South American clade, no species represented by multiple accessions were resolved as monophyletic. To investigate unresolved species relationships further, next-generation hybrid capture was used to sequence 377 loci for 103 accessions representing all 18 Ceiba species. This data set was assembled using different approaches (de novo and reference mapping) and with different software and settings to assess their impact in downstream phylogenetic analysis. The 377 loci were concatenated and analysed under the maximum likelihood framework treated as a single partition. The well resolved and sampled NGS phylogenies showed a similar pattern of geographical and ecological structure as inferred using ITS. The genus Neobuchia was recovered within the SDTF Central American and Mexican clade, and should therefore be incorporated within Ceiba. In the South American SDTF clade, there were multiple examples where a monophyletic group recognised as a taxonomic species was nested within another, paraphyletic taxonomic species, which suggests recent, ancestor-descendent species relationships. Within this clade, individual gene trees showed high conflict. Coalescent-based species delimitation analysis and morphological data revealed no clear species boundaries between C. pubiflora and C. glaziovii, and these species should be synonymised. A subset of 111 loci was used to generate a dated phylogeny based on penalised likelihood analysis using the fossil flower of Eriotheca prima from the middle to late Eocene as a primary calibration. The stem node age of Ceiba was estimated as 45 Ma. The rain forest species C. pentandra and C. samauma, and the campos rupestres species C. jasminodora, were resolved with long stem lineages and shallow crown groups. Whilst some SDTF species were very old (e.g., C. trischistandra) and monophyletic, many South American SDTF species were resolved with short stem lineages and relatively deep crown groups, possibly suggesting low rates of extinction in the large Caatinga SDTF region. In addition, several South American SDTF species were not resolved as monophyletic. Such results of younger, non-monophyletic SDTF species and older, monophyletic rain forest species contrast with recent predictions that rain forest species may, on average, have more recent origins than SDTF species and will more often be non-monophyletic. Ceiba has different and distinctive phylogenetic patterns that contradict recent theoretical predictions. It demonstrates that studies of other clades sampled densely with multiple accessions of each species using a multi-locus approach are needed if we are to understand the nature of species and their boundaries, and the diversification process in neotropical trees.

To combat environmental degradation and change, it is imperative that the rainforests are protected and sustainable land use practices are developed in Amazonia. A better understanding of the role of humans in shaping Amazonian environments and the extent to which the forests have been resilient to anthropogenic disturbance is critical to determining the current state of these ecosystems. This research provides the first reconstruction of late pre-Columbian to early post-Columbian land use and its environmental legacy in the Purus-Madeira Interfluve, Central Amazonia. Soil profile samples were collected across a transect approximately 600 km in length between Manaus and Humaitá, covering a large ecological gradient from dense canopy forests to open canopy forests, as well as dry, upland areas (terra firme) and small riverine settings. Archaeobotanical phytolith and terrestrial palaeoecological samples were analysed from four contexts: (i) primary forests; (ii) oligarchic forests dominated by economically useful trees in the terra firme rainforest on natural soils; (iii) an anthropogenic forest with Brazil nut trees on anthropogenic soil; and (iv) a previously undocumented archaeological site next to the Brazil nut stand. The outcome of this study provides evidence that the extent of the preColumbian environmental impact was larger than previously thought, and this shows that humans managed these forests in various ways to varying intensities. The data, therefore, helps to identify the long-term role of human-environment interactions in Central Amazonia and provides valuable information for future environmental and land use regulation policies.

Human expansion is damaging pristine habitats and causing losses to biodiversity; meanwhile some wildlife species are perceived negatively when they cause damage or loss to humans. My main objective was to obtain a better understanding of the interactions between people and giant otters, a top aquatic predator in Amazonia and an international flagship species for tourism. In Chapter 2, I explore perceptions and attitudes towards wildlife using structured interviews and focus groups to find out how the perceptions of giant otters as damagers of fishing nets compared with that caused by other aquatic species. People from three Peruvian Amazon communities, Pacaya-Samiria National Reserve (PSNR), Pucacuro National Reserve (PNR) and Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (MKRCA) all had different perceptions of otters; in PSNR people were more tolerant to the presence of giant otters. In PNR and MKRCA interviewees had highly negative perceptions of giant otters, even though fishing registers demonstrated that giant otters have few interactions with fishermen during fishing and rarely damage nets in comparison to other aquatic predators. Moreover, fish such as piranha, suckermouth catfish, and wolf fish, among others, broke nets at the same frequency as did aquatic predators. Short and long-term outcomes of 'single-hit' conservation education was evaluated for schoolchildren in two communities in Chapter 3. There was no difference between the attitudes of schoolchildren who participated in single-hit session in 2009 and those who did not, however, overall, all participants had significantly more positive attitudes to giant otters after a single hit session in 2014. In Chapter 4, I investigate the relative appeal of giant otters for tourists compared to other species, using questionnaires with tourists in the Peruvian Amazon, to determine their suitability as a flagship species for tourism - a role they are widely assumed to fulfil. While giant otters did not emerge in the top five as important flagship species during the interviews, they do fulfil all the criteria for making an excellent flagship species and remain an attractive candidate for conservation marketing. Building local awareness and a positive relationship between local people and aquatic predators is necessary to ensure their survival. Giant otters are now almost universally present in Amazonia and are potentially easy to focus tourism around - they represent the perfect flagship to promote conservation campaigns and to slow the destruction and degradation of waterways in the Amazon - currently a pressing issue in the region.

This ethnographic account focuses on the conceptions and practices of movement, as narrated by the Makushi people who live along the triple frontier of southern Guyana. The journeys - individual experiences, in particular of women – depict visits to other Makushi communities, to their neighbours and cities in Guyana, Brazil and Venezuela. The travelogues disclose Makushi premises on knowledge and its acquisition: gender, age, temporality and alterity. Exploring these concepts in practice, the ethnography points out the value the Makushi attribute to their encounters with others, situations in which risk and unpredictability are creatively incorporated as part of their sociality.

Shell mound or sambaqui, as commonly named in Brazil, are anthropic intentional mound constructions made by complex hunter-gatherer fishing communities. Typically distributed along shorelines and inland regions of Brazil, these sites are arguably one of the earliest evidence of human presence in South America, with dates ranging from 910-660 to 10,179-9,708 cal. yr. B.P. As archaeobotanical investigations reported the presence of various plant resources in these sites, a debate that has received much attention in recent years is regarding the scale of which the shell mound builders managed these resources. The Monte Castelo (9,495-9,137 cal. yr. B.P - state of Rondônia) and the Tucumã shell mound (4,425-4245 cal. yr. B.P. - state of Pará) will be the case studies of this research. The aim of this thesis is to use phytolith data from archaeological contexts in order to evaluate and discern the extent to which these mound builders managed plant resources. The outcome of this study provides novel evidence revealing the management and consumption of wild and domesticated plants through the mid-Holocene. The data calls for an evaluation on the potential scale of horticulture practices by Amazonian shell mound builders as well as the relative contribution of each domesticated resources to the indigenous diet.

The Portuguese conquest and colonization of Brazil was mediated by the Tupi-Guarani societies that inhabited the Atlantic coast in a discontinuous pattern from the estuary of the River Plate to the mouth of the Amazon. In fact, the extension of Portuguese occupation coincides with the limits of expansion of these Tupi-Guarani societies in most regions, suggesting a historical relation with deep potential implications. This work studies the conquest and construction of the Portuguese colonial frontier in the Lower Amazon and its estuary at the beginning of the XVIIth century, aiming to unveil the nature of the relations between Portuguese and Amerindian societies. The starting point is the hypothesis that the presence of Tupinamba societies from the Brazilian northeast, and of many other groups linked with them through language and culture, helped the Portuguese cause in their dispute for the control of the southern Amazon shores with other European competitors trading in the region. However, this very same dependency on the Tupinamba also acted as a brake on the Portuguese conquest as it headed north. This is supposed by the fact that almost no Tupi-Guarani traces have been recorded on the northern shore of the Amazon. After analyzing native American dynamics in Brazil and Guayana, this work presents a detailed study of the battles and skirmishes fought by opposed European interests, and their natives allies, in the Amazon from 1616 to 1632. The last part is devoted to the analysis of the process of cultural construction on the colonial frontier, through conquest mechanisms that were also deployed on other colonial American frontiers. Among these mechanisms I emphasise the implementation of a set of institutions and the construction of a negative and savage native alterity through narratives that have been reproduced by the regional historiography.

My dissertation traces the life of forest materials from Amazonia into the Andes and beyond to illuminate how the Inkas of the Andean highlands (Western South America) imagined Amazonia and its inhabitants before and after Spanish colonization (c. 1400–1825 C.E.) and, conversely, how Amazonian peoples understood the Inkas and other “invaders,” including colonizing Spaniards and modern tourists. Interaction between the highlands and Amazonian lowlands has been little studied in general, with most interest focused on the realm of political relations and trade. Although the field of visual studies has largely ignored this subject, there is ample visual evidence that Amazonia played a significant role in the Inkas’ imaginary as a place of both subversion and refuge. Likewise, while there is limited Amazonian artifactual and ethnohistorical documentation from the periods in which the Inkas and later Spaniards attempted to control forest peoples, there is sufficient material to suggest a general Amazonian approach to unknown and possibly hostile others. Briefly, as will be discussed in the second half of this dissertation, the Amazonian strategy was to integrate unknown peoples into their relational cosmology. Ideally, and whenever possible, the integration was accomplished through “friend-making,” a process that intended to forestall hostility and foster mutually beneficial relationships.My study of cross-cultural exchanges between the Inkas and neighboring Amazonian peoples engages with the multi-sensorial aspects of forest materials in the form of wooden drinking vessels (keros), exquisite boxes to hold herbs and sweets (coqueras), and Amazonian textile designs (kené) by living artists to help us understand the ways the Inkas and Amazonian cultures adapted to one another, creating and reinforcing each other’s alterity across time.

La amazonia peruana, conocida por ser hábitat de un gran número de especies, ha sido objeto de innumerables investigaciones con la finalidad de comprender mejor su biodiversidad. Uno de los grupos más estudiados en esta parte del Perú es el de los lepidópteros. Sin embargo, a pesar de que hay algunos trabajos en zonas como Loreto, Tingo María e incluso el mismo San Martín, aún quedan muchas partes de la selva por explorar y evaluar. En ese sentido, se considera muy importante la realización de investigaciones como la presente, que tuvo como objetivo determinar las especies de lepidópteros diurnos que habitan el bosque El Pelejo, San Martín, Perú. Los muestreos se llevaron a cabo en un área conservada ubicada dentro de la propiedad de Agroganadera Huallaga S. A. C. Se registraron 31 especies de lepidópteros correspondientes a cinco familias, siendo Nymphalidae la que presentó mayor riqueza de especies. Asimismo, todas las especies registradas en la presente investigación se encuentran en la categoría de Preocupación Menor de acuerdo con la lista roja de especies de la IUCN. Este estudio representa el primer listado de lepidópteros para el Bosque El Pelejo, siendo la base para futuras investigaciones sobre mariposas diurnas en este importante bosque de la Amazonia peruana.

Amazonia is fundamental for climate change action: it stores an important amount of the planet’s carbon emissions, while also emitting carbon due to deforestation. With higher proportions of primary forest cover, and lower rates of deforestation, Indigenous territories are crucial for climate change mitigation. Yet, the extractive development models of Amazonian countries are threatening the lives and lifeways of Indigenous peoples. This dissertation demonstrates how climate change has become a politically significant object for Amazonian Indigenous organizations. Analyses of Indigenous-led transnational—and plurinational—climate strategies are scarce in the literature. I illustrate how Indigenous climate initiatives in Amazonia incorporate ontological and territorial politics, ancestral knowledges (AK) and the agency of more-than-human beings beyond local scales to global climate politics. To do so, I draw from critical and digital geography, science and technology studies, decolonial and Indigenous studies. My methodology integrates a political ecology of scale approach—i.e., four scales of Indigenous political organization—and Indigenous methods—e.g., open-ended interviews and sharing circles. Fourteen months of fieldwork further involved volunteering with the Coordinator of Indigenous Organization of the Amazon Basin (COICA) and the OPIAC School of Political Training in Colombia.I argue that Amazonian Indigenous climate initiatives are founded on what I call integral territorial ontologies—or conceptions of territories as indivisible entities or lifeworlds that encompass multiple relationships not only between humans and other living beings, but also among more-than-human beings. This dissertation is organized into three articles. In Article I, I analyze COICA’s Amazon Indigenous Initiative to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation (RIA) and argue that RIA is founded on integral territorial ontologies and incorporates more-than-human agency. As such, RIA is tied to territorial defense and challenges understandings of forest/territorial vitality and ordering, as well as the processes of that facilitate the commodification of nature. Article II examines how, through boundary-work—i.e., drawing boundaries around AK—, Indigenous leaders and climate initiatives simultaneously reinforce and move beyond binaries like traditional/modern, local/global, while also scaling-up territorial knowledges. RIA and the OPIAC School take AK beyond the local scale to global climate politics, while also upholding their inextricable link to territories as lifeworlds. In Article III, I argue that forest monitoring programs and technologies co-produce forms of climate and territorial politics in Amazonia. Indigenous organizations imagine and enact territorial defense and autonomy—e.g., incorporating the agency of more-than-human beings in digital tools for territorial planning. But the programs also reinforce a politics of open-access information, strict territorial boundaries, and exclusive rights—that can threaten Indigenous autonomy. In conclusion, this dissertation calls into question what global environmental politics are, and who participates in them. I demonstrate how the central role of Indigenous peoples in global climate politics becomes essential to their purposes of defending Amazonian territories and life itself. Given the urgent and multidimensional threats of climate change, this research begins to shed light on how strategies that emerge from historically marginalized peoples and their lifeways can expand our horizon of imaginable solutions.

Focusing on Brazil, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela, From Format to Forest: Media and the Amazon in the Environmental Crisis calls for urgent attention to the ecological dimension of media by examining a transnational region where colonial and neo-colonial histories unfold alongside the uneven impact of climate change. As it acknowledges the embeddedness of technologies in economies of extraction, this dissertation argues for the Amazon’s centrality to understanding the reciprocity between media and environment. While conveying how trees and rivers not only register historical violence but also suggest critical responses to it, I both foreground the forest’s participation in creative processes as a category to think across the human and non-human and propose format as the analytical tool that accounts for these relationalities. I analyze the function of the canopy in a multisensory virtual reality experience and a forensic architecture investigation that center Indigenous sovereignty; the photographic role of rivers in Sebastião Salgado’s conservationist images of Amazonian landscapes; the potential of embodying a kapok tree through a virtual reality installation; and the implications of using 35mm film to render the forest in Embrace of the Serpent. By unpacking articulations of technology, culture, and nature, these chapters advocate for a film and media theory that recognizes the interconnectedness between human beings and the environment and searches for new relational possibilities to confront the environmental crisis.

The continental collision between Laurentia and Amazonia that generated Rodinia and the Grenville Orogen is proposed to be one of the largest, hottest and longest-lived orogens in Earth history. Subsequent erosion and weathering led to a mountain range’s worth of sediment recycled into clastic systems across North America, otherwise known as the “Great Grenville Sedimentation Event”. The Sunsas orogeny in Amazonia is correlative to the Grenville in North America and is proposed to be the result of final Rodinian collision at 1200-1000 Ma. Despite the connection between the two ranges and the robust sedimentary record in North America, little work has been done to constrain sediment availability on the Amazonian side of the Grenville orogen. This study examined 16 samples collected from western Brazil including quartz-arenite, diamictite, quartzite, and other metasedimentary units, with basement samples for age comparison. Detrital zircons were analyzed for U/Pb isotope ratios using LA-ICP-MS, resulting in approx. 3,000 analyses for the 16 samples. These analyses suggest only a minor sediment contribution to the Amazonian craton from Grenville-age terranes. Instead, most samples exhibit ages characteristic of Amazonian Precambrian basement. The dominance of Geons 15 and 17 indicates that Grenville-aged sediment does not constitute the main sediment-source region and with no significant increase in the number of Grenville zircons in samples collected proximal to the Sunsas orogenic front. We interpret these results to mean that although Laurentian clastic sequences are perpetually dominated by Shawinigan and Ottawan sources, the Amazonian craton was not influenced by the same sediment influx. 40Ar/39Ar analyses from southwest Amazonian document a change in tectonic regime during the Grenville cycle, transitioning from collisional, thrust-dominated along the Laurentian margin to strike-slip in Amazonia. The lack of Grenville-aged sediment supports an asymmetric orogen in which changes in crustal thickness and exhumation prevented erosion and deposition on the Amazonian side making the primary source for sediments the Amazonian tectonic provinces.

This dissertation provides the first description and analysis of focus in Caquinte, an indigenous Arawak language of Peruvian Amazonia. It investigates the expression of a fundamental distinction in types of focus, namely between information focus and contrastive focus, which I argue is due to the salience of the alternative propositions evoked by a focus. Furthermore, three subtypes of contrastive focus are distinguished: selective focus, corrective focus, and exclusive focus (cf. English only). The analysis of information focus includes focus targeting arguments, verbs, subject-verb units, predicates, and sentences. The analysis of selective and corrective focus begins with arguments as the target of focus, and then covers a heterogeneous class of non-arguments (e.g., locative obliques) and the proposition. The analysis of exclusive focus is conned to arguments as the target of focus.I show that information focus is expressed by a series of verb-initial word orders and no other special marking. Selective and corrective focus of arguments is expressed by constructions involving one of two series of copulas that evoke what I refer to as referential versus polar alternatives. These copulas occur in a preverbal position, and suppress verbal agreement corresponding to the focused argument. Exclusive focus is expressed by the numeral aparo ‘one’ in the same preverbal position, similarly suppressing agreement. Selective and corrective focus of non-arguments and the proposition is expressed by one of two particles morphologically related to the copulas, which are similarly distinguished based on whether they evoke referential versus polar alternatives.I analyze focus in the Question under Discussion (QUD) framework, extending it in a number of ways. I argue that information focus is represented by nonbranching discourse structures, and that contrastive focus of all types is represented by branching discourse structures. The nonsalient alternatives evoked in cases of information focus have no correspondence in the discourse structure (the actual answer corresponds to the one daughter of a nonbranching QUD), whereas the salient alternatives evoked in cases of contrastive focus correspond to the multiple daughter branches of a branching QUD. I analyze the constructions involving the two series of copulas and the morphologically related particles in terms of whether they resolve constituent or polar QUDs. Consequently, I show that selective and corrective focus are not each expressed by a unique construction; rather they differ in their discourse structures. Exclusive focus exhibits similar discourse structures, but is distinguished in the analysis by the composition of the set of alternatives evoked by aparo. In sum, the analysis accounts for distinctions among focus types in terms of differences in the geometry of their corresponding discourse structures, together with specific claims about the set of alternatives in the case of exclusive focus.Finally, I consider an analysis of polarity focus as a type of selective focus that evokes polar alternatives and targets the proposition. I distinguish polarity focus from verum, the latter expressed either by a biclausal construction involving the verb ko ‘be, do,’ or by the clitic =maja, depending on the salience of alternatives. The appendices include an overview of Caquinte history, a selective grammar sketch, and an extensive lexicon.

Anthropogenic landscapes are the product of complex human-environment processes that form distinct features in the landscape, which materially preserve and reflect human behavior. Anthropogenic landscapes in Amazonia likely date back to human colonization of the region around 16,000 BP. Since colonization, humans have been marking, modifying, managing, and engineering the landscape resulting in a mosaic of anthropogenic landscape features across Amazonia. The diversity of ancient landscapes documented in Amazonia reflects the cultural heterogeneity that existed in the past. This research explores the complex human-environmental processes that form distinct, identifiable, lasting features on the landscape and what these features can illuminate about past human behavior and human-environment interaction in Amazonia. Data for this research was collected by the Tupinambarana Project at the pre-Columbian site, Macurany, located along the Middle Amazon River in Parintins, Brazil. Survey and topography revealed four distinct classes of anthropogenic landscape features at the site, including ports, middens, terra preta, and cultural forests. These features are clearly the result of anthropogenesis and represent a range of subsistence, settlement, and infrastructure-building activities pointing to a society that was actively engaged with modifying the surrounding landscape. Geospatial analysis of the patterning of landscape features evidenced at Macurany suggest social organization was decentralized. The notion of a permanent, extensive, continuously settled, and decentralized society practicing intensive landscape engineering in pre-Columbian Amazonia challenges traditional perceptions of habitation density and early urbanization in Amazonia. This research contributes towards an understanding of human-environment interaction, landscape formation processes and urbanization in pre-Columbian Amazonia.

With the technological advent of bioinformatics, next-generation sequencing, and population genomics, recent studies can rely on high-throughput molecular data to investigate the evolution and diversification of Neotropical plant lineages. Here, we review one of the most widespread and dominant plant groups in the Neotropics based on a multidisciplinary approach. We integrate molecular data based on next-generation sequencing, morphological and functional data to unveil the evolutionary history of Protium heptaphyllum (Aubl.) Marchand, a plant taxon recently classified as one of the top hyperdominant trees in Amazonia. The results have direct implications for biodiversity conservation, taxonomy, and systematics of tropical plants. The dissertation chapters are described below.The first chapter aimed to perform the most comprehensive review ever done in a hyperdominant taxa, long considered to be a taxonomically difficult group. By using morphological, genomic, and functional data, we showed that P. heptaphyllum sensu lato represents eight separately evolving lineages warranting species status. In addition, most of these newly discovered lineages are rare and threatened; few if any of them could be considered hyperdominant on their own. There is an urgent need to improve the classification of hyperdominant taxa in order to avoid oversimplified assumptions regarding diversity and functional aspects of tropical regions.The second chapter comprises a taxonomic review and a detailed description of P. cordatum. Molecular phylogeny indicates that populations of P. cordatum should not be classified as an intraspecific taxon within Protium heptaphyllum (Burseraceae), while morphology and near-infrared spectroscopy data provide additional support for the recognition of a separate entity. Species delimitation remains a challenge worldwide and this study demonstrates the importance of using multiple tools to characterize and distinguish plant species in highly diverse tropical regions.In the third chapter, I aimed to generate a novel genomic resource for Burseraceae, a family globally recognized for producing resins and essential oils with medical properties and economic values. In this section, I provide the transcriptome assembly of Protium copal, a widespread aromatic tree in Central America, and describe the functional annotation of terpene biosynthetic genes. Most of the aromatic and non-aromatic properties of Burseraceae resins are composed by terpene and terpenoid chemicals. The identification of terpene genes will be relevant for understanding the synthesis of economically important chemicals in Burseraceae.

Thousands of Andean peasants migrated to the Peruvian Amazon to work in artisanal and small-scale mining as the international price of gold quadrupled in the 21st century. During this time, gold surpassed cocaine in revenue and usurped its place as Peru’s most profitable illicit export commodity. Amidst the gold rush, the past decade also witnessed a growing ecotourism economy that has capitalized on protection of areas with high rates of biodiversity in the Madre de Dios region. In this dissertation, I examine how contingent laborers and their households adapt to global processes of natural resource extraction and biodiversity conservation as they make a living in a rapidly developing region of the Peruvian Amazon where ecotourism and extraction are concurrently booming markets. Green business entrepreneurs, environmental NGOs, and other influential social actors in the region frame extraction and conservation as “contradictory forces” to promote ecotourism and other market-based conservation initiatives as the best responses to unbridled resource extraction. However, my research demonstrates that many households are unencumbered that these work opportunities are seemingly divergent or contradictory. Moreover, I show that households adopt creative strategies of shifting between formal and informal economies as they manage their precarity and work towards greater social mobility.In this monograph, I synthesize political economies of labor, household ecology, and social reproduction theory to construct a framework for understanding how families adapt to the concurrently booming economies of extraction and conservation. This framework helps to understand the agency of social actors in relation to the broader structural forces that limit their opportunities, from the household to the global economy. I identify how extractive lifestyles of the household are transmitted across generations and internalized by young individuals struggling to find their place in a rapidly changing world. This dissertation utilizes a combination of ethnographic methods including life-story narrative elicitation, shadowing, free lists exercises, multimedia elicitation, and digital modalities to understand the myriad forces that shape decision-making about work in extraction and conservation.

The quilombo – the name commonly used to describe fugitive slave settlements in Brazil – is firmly ensconced in Brazilian historical memory. My objective is to demonstrate the process by which quilombos in western Maranhão evaded and resisted the repression of the state in order to create autonomous cultural and geographical spaces in the state of Pará and defend those spaces well after abolition when faced with the exploitation of their labor and land for the benefit of a nascent mining economy. Fugitive slave activity was a well-known and continuous phenomenon in western Maranhão, particularly in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Dense forests and abundant rivers offered a path to freedom for enslaved Africans. Quilombos profoundly shaped the land through various methods such as the creation of trails, the exploitation of rich alluvial gold deposits, and planting of various fruit trees. Quilombo inhabitants accumulated a knowledge of the land only matched by its indigenous inhabitants, establishing a territoriality recognized for decades thereafter.This territoriality allowed quilombo descendants to bargain with state actors on the basis of their knowledge of gold deposits and geography along the Maranhão-Pará border region. Quilombo descendants formed permanent communities in this region and avoided capture, even while maintaining relationships with local judges, police officials, and representatives of the Brazilian Empire tasked with building a telegraph line in northern Brazil. With the advent of abolition, quilombo descendants were ignored as mining concessions delivered their lands to foreign capital. Their resistance took on many forms, but I will especially demonstrate how quilombo descendants used a deft understanding of major political events such as the Revolution of 1930 to defend their land and autonomy, fighting for freedom after abolition. By demonstrating the complex nature of interactions between quilombolas and dominant political and economic structures and the nature of subaltern resistance therein, I will add new layers to historiographies of slave resistance as well as Afro-Brazilian political engagement following the abolition of slavery.

Ideophones, which “simulate an event, an emotion, a perception through language,” have been claimed to be a universal category (Voeltz & Kilian-Hatz 2001:3); however, they are generally understudied and are often considered marginal to the linguistic system. Focusing on their markedness, studies of ideophones often ignore how ideophones participate in the larger grammar of a language. Recognizing the often marked, expressive nature of ideophones in comparison with other word classes in a language, while also accounting for the fact that they can operate within the larger grammatical structure of that language, Dingemanse’s (2017) integration-expressiveness continuum bridges this gap. This model illuminates the place of ideophones in Wao Terero, a language isolate spoken in the Amazonian region of Ecuador: how the word class is treated, with specific reference to morphosyntactic integration and expressiveness. Wao Terero exhibits ideophones that constitute their own intonation unit, are reduplicated, occur at a clause boundary, modify verbs, co-occur with light verbs such as ‘do’ or ‘say’, co-occur with verbs that are seemingly synonymous with the ideophone creating complex predicates, and take verbal morphology. These different types of constructions in which ideophones can occur show how they participate in the larger grammatical structure of Wao Terero—namely that they can span the integration-expressiveness continuum with instances of ideophones that are syntactically free, highly morphosyntactically integrated, and everywhere in between. While the continuum implies a proportional inverse relationship between integration and expressiveness, the scalar nature of the prosodic features—such as length, pitch, intensity, and voice quality—that contribute to an ideophone’s expressiveness leads to complications in the application of the continuum to all Wao Terero data. Despite the individual examples that challenge its validity, the continuum appears to account for the majority of the Wao Terero data analyzed. Furthermore, beyond explaining the nature of the data synchronically, the continuum is also shown to be useful in terms of diachrony by exploring probable grammaticalization pathways.

Time and the Other in the Anthropocene is a reflection on the contemporary transformation of the figure of the human (anthropos) into a geological agent and the way this is linked to a pluralization of time, on the one hand, and a pluralization of ontology, on the other hand. Specifically, it examines the conceptual link between the disintegration of the notion of Nature in the contemporary and its connection to the new pluralism in anthropology which has arisen as a response to the climate crisis. I consider the way this new pluralism, associated with what has been dubbed “the ontological turn” in anthropology, is strikingly being formulated, no longer through the question of the relativity of cultures, but rather that of natures. This move towards an analysis of various ways of being or what could be called a pluralist realism, I suggest, is one of the most original and crucial responses to climate crisis in that it foregrounds the question of the multiplicity of the modes of composing worlds which the Anthropocene has made a matter of dire necessity to think today. Using the novel framework Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour’s comparative anthropology, I foreground the anthropologies of Amazonia and Melanesia as two examples of other modes of composing the world. I reflect on the manner in which the ontological predicates of the Amazonian (or Amerindian) and Melanesian world allow us to view fundamental modern concepts – nature and culture, subject and object – otherwise. As essentially anthropomorphic worlds, my implicit suggestion throughout is that Amazonia and Melanesia worlds stand in a stark counterpoint to anthropocentric ones with regard to the most basic principles of what counts as “being” and “human” being. By extending or attributing what we call “agency” and “subjectivity” to every other being in the world, Amazonians and Melanesians also turn these very categories from our point of view unrecognizable. Showing us that being and the world have been thought on entirely different premises and with entirely different concepts, the properly transcendental equivocation of these categories enables us to develop a new comparative vision and invites us to begin the collective work of imagining another mode of being human per se on the new Earth in which we live.

In this thesis, I argue that the anthropological study of Kichwa-speaking peoples in the Ecuadorian Amazon is characterized by two categories of analysis: one with a focus on structuralist topics of interest and the other with a decidedly political economy overtone. Through a selective literature review of each theoretical shift, I offer a critical analysis of both of these trends, examining their origins, strengths, productions, and erasures, as well as their relative successes in reflecting Kichwa self-interpretations. I also describe how these trends build off of each other, forming, in part, out of reactions to the other’s shortcomings while still falling short of either the political or religio-cultural aspects of Kichwa life. In sum, structuralism lacks emphasis on power and politics, while political anthropology tends to undermine the importance of ethnography and unique indigenous cosmologies.Because of these limitations, I propose that the best way to bridge the gap between the structural and the political is through political ontological literature, which brings to light indigenous cosmology and radical difference while also highlighting how indigenous uniqueness is played out in the political arena. Although not without its own failings, political ontology attempts to bring together the benefits of both of these theoretical shifts without falling into their traditional traps. Political ontological analyses have been applied to indigenous peoples elsewhere in Latin America, but it has yet to be applied to lowland Kichwa. Furthermore, such an analysis is vital in order to understand anthropologists’ intellectual approaches to difference, including indigeneity as difference.

The Amazon rainforest is experiencing widespread land-use/land-cover change, much of which is driven by agricultural expansion and shifts in agricultural management. These changes have contributed to high annual greenhouse gas emissions, changing regional climate due to shifts in energy balance, and disruptions to nutrient cycles, occurring on a scale large enough to have ramifications for the larger earth system. This dissertation investigates how human land use for agriculture affects Amazonia’s contribution to climate regulation and nitrogen cycling and the tradeoffs between agricultural production and ecosystem ecology. First (Ch1), I model the impact of agricultural expansion on four important ecosystem services (agricultural production, carbon storage, biodiversity, and regional climate regulation) using data from a combination of remote sensing, model output, and geostatistical datasets. I find that different regions within Amazonia are of primary importance for each non-agricultural ecosystem service, suggesting that using complementary conservation strategies that target a collection of environmental goals could minimize the ecological impacts of expanding agriculture. Second (Ch2), I show that at the site-level, patterns of trace gas concentrations throughout the soil column differ between eastern Amazonian forest and deforested soybean fields, indicating that agricultural expansion can affect the carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycles at depth in Amazonian soils. Amazonia’s current croplands are also undergoing management intensification. I conduct a multi-year field campaign to measure how emissions of nitrous oxide (N2O), a powerful greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) change after fertilizer addition on an industrialized farm in Mato Grosso, Brazil. I find (Ch3) only modest increases in N2O emissions on intensified croplands in comparison to Amazon forest, suggesting that cropland intensification may not necessarily lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions in southeastern Amazonia. These projects use multiple spatial scales, multiple ecosystem response variables, and multiple approaches to quantify the ecological consequences of agricultural expansion and intensification in the Amazon rainforest. As global change continues, determining how to utilize dynamic tropical landscapes while minimizing ecological disruption will be key to tropical sustainability.

This dissertation is an ethnographic examination of an environmental policy known as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation-the "+" signifies improved carbon stocks). REDD+ was designed to lessen climate change by reducing deforestation in Amazonia-a goal that would be achieved by paying landholders to keep their forests standing. This proposal has been highly influential at United Nations (UN) environmental forums. I study REDD+ as a scheme that, in the region of Amazonia in which I worked, reflects peasant and scientific understandings of tropical forests. REDD+ proposals engage forests as humanized spaces long transformed by global capitalist dynamics and that will be further transformed by purportedly unavoidable socio-environmental crises. I claim that this policy marks a profound shift in the ecological imagination. Environmental debates at the UN have often portrayed Amazonia as "pristine Nature"-a non-human realm that experts believed could be made into an inside in which they could further contemporary modes of human living. In contrast, I argue that REDD+ schemes engage Amazonia as a human-shaped space of intensifying environmental crises that experts cannot bring under control. In chapter one I explore the links between REDD+ proposals and midtwentieth-century development projects in Brazil, focusing on how developmental planners and REDD+ proponents both assumed that Amazonia's transformations by the forces of industrial capitalism were unavoidable. In chapter two I examine descriptions of REDD+ offered by Amazonian peasants. They saw this policy as yet another instance of economic forces that challenges poor peasants to establish particularly hostile relations with humans and non-humans alike. I examine the scientific practice of pro-REDD+ scientists in chapter three. I show that Amazonbased environmental scientists investigate Amazonia as a shifting socio-natural situation that will continue unraveling in the foreseeable future. Chapter four studies REDD+ contributions to UN negotiations that climate diplomats themselves see as insufficient to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change. My multi-sited approach advances the understanding of contemporary environmental politics by examining REDD+ as radical philosophical-anthropological proposition: that humans should learn to endure the worlds they have made into precarious spaces.

This dissertation revisits the term ‘world’ to examine its function in the construct ‘New World’, focusing on seventeenth-century imaginings of the Amazon River at a time when geopolitical affairs were challenging what appeared to be a categorical concept. Analyzing a series of mid-century expeditions from opposing parties and geographical extremes of the river, Jesuit annual reports in which subsequent settlement designs are laid out, official documents with similar aspirations, chronicles describing life in the tropical rainforest, and visual sources including a still life painting where this material is rendered, the colonial Amazon is read through these texts in a way that seeks to understand the system they collectively shape—the ‘world’ that, in other words, they form. The crux of the analysis then becomes an engagement with the question of what it means to be in this world shaped predominantly by water, and in particular what it means for those who exist within it in a mode that does not agree with its design. That ‘world’ is understood as an entity which is ‘whole’ is a premise that sets the context of the first chapter which explores renditions of an incomplete New World in ontological terms. Elaborating on this direction, the second chapter uses a mid-century expedition, recorded by the Jesuit Cristóbal de Acuña, to explore the mechanics of world shaping wherein the Amazon’s topography is conceptually rearranged to align with geopolitical interests. The handling of nature is further examined in the third chapter through a Dutch a still life painting of colonial Brazil and a Portuguese letter advocating the transplantation of crops to the colony. Here ‘tropical nature’ is treated as a concept that is fashioned in response to erstwhile renditions of these worlds, turning the shaping process into a revisionist undertaking. Using Amazonian archaeology in conjunction with annual reports of Jesuit 'aldeas', the final chapter examines the project’s central question through Amerindian responses to the world order established in these occidental texts. Tensions generated by conflicting spatial configurations are read as instances of indigenous agency coming into view and demonstrating the possibilities for defining the New World otherwise.

ABSTRACTThe Last Move of the Ribeirinho: Indigenous Sovereignty and Servitudein the Middle and Lower Rio Negro Basin, Brazilian AmazoniabyFrancisco Boavista PontualDoctor of Philosophy in Environmental Sciences, Policy, and ManagementUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Claudia J. Carr, ChairThe ribeirinhos (mestizo or "generic indian" river dwellers) amount for the largest indigenous contingent in the Pan-Amazonia, yet have remained virtually invisible and unrecognized in spite of being a living and diversified cultural entity undergoing their ethnic transfigurations since the 18th century. During the past decades, many ribeirinho households from rural communities located in the Middle and Lower Rio Negro Basin have left behind their subsistence grounds and moved to the nearest towns in what seems to be an anomalous phenomenon of rural-to-urban migration. The observed migrations seem to lack the most common Amazonian push factors ⎯ such as land grabs, loss of ecosystem services, and forced displacements; while the common pull factors ⎯ such as access to urban-based public services and the job market ⎯ are either of very low quality or simply not available.In this study, I wanted to understand who are the present-day Middle and Lower Rio Negro ribeirinho, how their livelihoods have been changing throughout the centuries, why they have such high mobility and how can it serve their long-term survival strategies, and how they seemed to keep a say about their lives after many centuries of service dedicated to a myriad of patrons?I provide a comprehensive historical background and analysis on the ribeirinho ethnogenesis and general history, as well as the origins and evolution of patron-client relationships during the past four centuries. Based on the contexts derived from this initial analysis, I designed and conducted the first Middle and Lower Rio Negro regional scale household survey of ribeirinho families and rural communities to shed light on their present-day identities, socio-political organization, cultural perceptions and expressions, household micro-economy, livelihood dynamics, drivers of mobility and main survival strategies. I argue that the apparently paradoxical exodus from a supposedly "better" rural existence to a "worse" semi-urban or urban one is in fact a present day expression of ribeirinho historical survival strategies that kept them alive as cultural entities, and is now delivering a response to opportunistic circumstances of the 21st century. The future of the ribeirinhos and the Rio Negro basin depends on the development priorities and policies yet to be adopted and implemented by the Brazilian government. The ribeirinhos have been the main driving force of all Amazonian socio-economic cycles, where they have played roles of servitude as a means of keeping their sovereign capacity to self-determine their own way to survive and take care of their families. This study suggests that -- if the coercive patrons are substituted by a supportive and functional State -- the ribeirinhos seem to be willing to shift their livelihoods and use of their profound ecological and geographical knowledge and regional experience towards socio-economic activities associated with sustainable rural development projects.

This study examines language contact among Matsigenka, Quechua, and Spanish in Yokiri, a small coffee-producing frontier community on the Andean-Amazonian borderland of Southern Peru. The community was formed by the intermarriage of Andean agricultural migrants and Matsigenka people from a wide variety of places and circumstances across the region, including a Dominican mission and a handful of Andean colonist plantations that used enslaved Matsigenkas for labor. Yokiri is therefore the site of profound linguistic and cultural variation, and the community members have very different experiences with commercial agriculture and orientations to the rural agrarian society. For this reason, Yokiri defies descriptions of Andeans and Amazonians that attribute monolithic ontologies, values, and linguistic repertoires to 'ethnic groups' and other imagined human aggregates. To understand this phenomenon, this study examines how language is used in three major interactional contexts in Yokiri (public meetings, negotiations with coffee merchants, and talk in the home and fields), and how each of these communicative domains is tied to different ideologies that regiment the patterns of language use. Language choice and code-switching are central to how the people of Yokiri are negotiating their place within the agrarian society that has emerged around them. A number of linguistic changes have arisen from this profound and intimate multilingualism, including the restructuring of the Matsigenka noun classification system, the borrowing of Spanish discourse markers in both Quechua and Matsigenka, and the circulation of 1) a poetic device used in narrative performance, and 2) reportative evidentiality (a grammatical resource for marking second-hand information). This analysis suggests that Yokiri is an incipient 'discourse area', in which areally-distributed pragmatic phenomena cross-cut genetic linguistic groupings. In this sense, Yokiri is similar to other places in South America where widespread multilingualism has led to localized areas of discursive and structural convergence; however, this study challenges the prevailing scholarly and popular view of Andeans and Amazonians as radically separate in cultural, social, and linguistic terms, and proposes that inter-indigenous language contact is as common between macro-geographical regions such as the Andes and Amazonia as within them.

This dissertation is a historical ethnography of colonization and conversion in Northwest Amazonia and their relationship to emergent notions and practices of indigeneity in the region. I trace the historical configuration of the different modes of colonization and evangelization through which the indigenous peoples have been incorporated first into the rule of empire (Spain and Portugal) and later into the body politic of nation-states (Colombia, Venezuela and Brazil). Catholic missions were the main frontier institution in the region until the end of 19th Century, when they started to compete with capitalist forms of colonization, and later in the 20th Century with other forms of evangelization, most notably evangelical Christianity. In the latter case, capitalist colonization and evangelization did not map directly onto each other given that evangelical conversion of indigenous communities was conceived as a threat to the sovereignty and authority of the state, which was previously mediated by Catholic missionaries. While the predominant interpretations of the massive conversion of Puinaves and Curripacos to Christianity emphasize these changes in terms of assimilation to settler society or as the outcome of messianic traditions, this historical ethnography emphasizes the role of indigenous agency in regional processes of conversion and colonization. New forms of Christian indigeneity since the 1940s thus emerged both in relation to other colonial projects and in opposition to them, transforming social relationships within indigenous communities as well as between natives and white settlers. Indigenous appropriation of evangelical Christianity brought changes in ideas and practices related to the their past, culture, civilization, self, community, modernity and indigeneity. Conversion became a mode of subjectivation through which moral selves and communities were produced. New forms of development promoted by the state contributed to the emergence of new forms of indigenous leadership and community organization. State developmental projects and programs in the region articulated new forms of indigenous leadership and correlated ideas of what an indigenous community should be. The dissertation concludes by analyzing the political conflicts that have taken place in the region between environmental NGOs, indigenous political organization and the regional government regarding the implementation of multicultural legislation approved in 1991.

This Master’s Thesis investigates the 1637-39 Teixeira’s expedition and how it transformed the Amazon region at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It assumes that this expedition was a key historical event to challenge the balance of power in the area. It shows through historical documents how ethno-geographic knowledge was an essential tool in the discursive construction of the Amazon Natives, undermining their cultural landscapes and initiating the process by which geographical knowledge enabled European territorial power. Foucault’s framework to approach and expound on the relationship between knowledge and power is the theoretical system of analysis that helps to understand the meaning embedded in the historical documents under scrutiny.

Spatial variation in tree community composition and assembly is due in large part to dispersal limitation, spatial variation in environmental conditions, and interactions among competing trees. The relative importance of these processes may be governed by landscape structure and environmental conditions. (I) The movement of frugivores between remnant forests and successional areas is vital for tropical forest tree species to colonize successional habitats. I found that avian frugivores crossing forest edges were generally insensitive to percent cover and clustering of pasture trees. If pastures were abandoned the distance from forest edges would not likely limit frugivore visitation and seed deposition under pasture trees in my study. (II) Relatively little is known from a theoretical conservation perspective about how reserve size affects communities assembled by abiotic and dispersal limitations. Simulated small reserve systems increased the distance between environments dominated by different species, diminishing the importance of source-sink dynamics. I found a trade-off between preserving different aspects of natural communities, with greater [alpha]-diversity in large reserves and greater [gamma]-diversity across small reserve systems. (III) Functional trait diversity of co-occurring organisms may be indicative of the processes that structure communities. Across spatial scales, an axis of leaf succulence exhibited the strongest evidence for niche-based assembly among co-occurring Ficus individuals, whereas specific leaf area (SLA) showed the strongest evidence for niche-based assembly among species. Trait analyses of co-occurring individuals had greater power than analyses at the species level, especially for traits with high intraspecific variation. Environmental filtering may be stronger at higher elevations due to drought stress. (IV) Individual fitness is a function of the interaction between traits and environment, or environmental selection. I estimated spatial selective gradients affecting a subtropical tree community and found that the trait axes with the strongest selection were also those with the least spatial variation. Interestingly, factors associated with selection were quite different for growth versus survivorship. The trait-by-environment interactions I identified are strong candidates for spatial niche differentiation, and may explain how tree species coexist in this diverse subtropical forest.

The objective of this report is to explore the design characteristics for a repository of indigenous Amazonian digital cultural heritage objects. I first examine the design objectives in relation to the available collection of digital objects. I then analyze the characteristics and expectations of the user community, and the implications of these expectations for repository design. I report on the specific intellectual property rights (IPR) laws and ideals applicable to this collection. I review possible copyright and licensing systems to protect indigenous IPR. In particular, I discuss the Mukurtu content management system (CMS) and its associated Traditional Knowledge licenses. I then report on my efforts to use the Mukurtu CMS as a means for making the collection available to the user community and for long-term digital preservation. I conclude with ideas about how Mukurtu or a similar content management system could be used for long-term management and preservation of indigenous Amazonian digital cultural heritage.

I explore the production of social, cultural, and natural space in the Madre de Dios (Amazonia Perú) biosphere. Following a political ecology approach, I focus on the experiences of locals who worked primarily in gold mining, timber, and other extractive economies prior to becoming tourism guides and examine how the transition to an institutionally regulated livelihood around ecotourism has reshaped the ways they perceive and constitute themselves in relation to concepts of family, nature, insiders and outsiders, ownership, and modernity. I argue that tour guides navigate through a constellation of dialectical relationships that bisect local, national, and global connections and mediate articulations between local labor (the ecotourism guides), national tourism markets (including the Peruvian state), and the global economic system (including NGOs, lodge operators/owners).

My dissertation investigates inconsistencies in the ways Amazonia has been presented to the public and within archaeology as a discipline. It does so by bringing methods from the earth sciences to bear on sites that resist interpretation under widely accepted models for habitation of pre-Columbian Amazonia. Terra Preta de Índio, a type of Amazonian Dark Earth, is a dark soil produced by deliberate human action that functions as key evidence for intensive environmental and landscape remodeling in pre-Columbian Amazonia. Terra preta sites have been recognized in recent decades as likely resulting from large, permanently settled populations previously believed to be absent from Amazonia. My dissertation reconstructs patterns of daily life and village organization at a terra preta site, Antônio Galo, as a means of constructing an alternative narrative about Amazonia's past.Prevalent narratives about Amazonia cast the region as homogenous and static, exotic, yet culturally decadent. These deeply embedded images of Amazonia have roots in early narratives of `discovery' and `exploration,' which are tightly interwoven with colonialist projects. Historically, archaeological contributions to knowledge about Amazonia, which make use of notions of social complexity that emerge from colonialist notions about `civilization,' also cast Amazonia as empty and its people as passive in its development. Through an exploration of place, I examine the construction of these narratives, and then employ data that speak to Native Amazonians' active role in constructing the landscape to propose alternative narratives for Amazonia and its people.In order to detect material traces of past acts of remodeling embedded in the archaeological soil and sediment matrix, I developed a geoarchaeological approach to investigating the household scale at Antônio Galo. I approach the matrix as a particulate body that mediates the relationship between people and their environments and also serves as the stage upon which lives are enacted. Moving away from indices of social complexity, which do not adequately address the scale of daily life in Amazonia, I examine macroscopically visible and invisible traces of the past to reconstruct places created and inhabited by people in the past. Field observations of landscape and environmental remodeling are supplemented by chemical, sedimentological, and microartifactual signatures that help to identify and characterize ancient habitation surfaces and features. Through this nuanced understanding of the various iterations of activity areas, houses, and villages that existed at Antônio Galo, I consider village organization, spatial parsing of activities, and the movement of bodies, in an attempt to recapitulate the lives of people that created and inhabited these places in the past.

Deforestation of tropical forests is one of the most pressing environmental problems of the twenty-first century, leading to the loss of environmental services such as climate regulation and biodiversity. The expansion of the agricultural frontier by small landholder farmers continues to be one of the major drivers of land use change in the Amazon region. Much of the recent research in the Brazilian Amazon has been focused on modeling their behavior in order to prescribe policies that can curb current deforestation rates and promote more sustainable land use practices. The availability of more sophisticated remote sensing and economic modeling tools has led to the proliferation of agricultural household level models that attempt to explain land use change processes at the farm level. This dissertation tests the household life cycle theory in one of the oldest colonization fronts in the Brazilian Amazon: Rondônia, now a post-frontier. The study examines household and farm level changes over time for specific aspects of the frontier process that can be tested using the household life cycle theory. This study introduces important additions to the life cycle theory in order to consider the more dynamic and complex set of factors that characterize modern frontier processes. Specifically the study examines: (1) property fragmentation and expansion processes, (2) property ownership, turnover and change, and (3) land use change processes at the property level. These are linked to changes in the social and economic features of the smallholder farmer as it moves along its life cycle. The central hypothesis is that these changes in property and land use dynamics can be explained by the corresponding changes in the life cycle of the household as the frontier evolves over time into a post-frontier. It was found that the household life cycle theory did not adequately explain land use change processes over time. As the frontier evolved into the modern post-frontier, the labor and drudgery constraints associated with the initial frontier processes, as exemplified in the household life cycle theory, became less relevant. The Sauerian concept of cultural successions and the concept of scale from hierarchical ecology are used in order to explain the apparent inconsistencies found between the household life cycle theory and land use change processes over time and at different scales of analysis. The household life cycle theory is a useful theoretical framework from which to examine the effects of household level factors on land use; however, this must be embedded within concepts of time and scale that determine their differentiated impact and behavior. Existing plans to expand road infrastructure into the Amazon region will open-up previously inaccessible rainforest regions to agricultural frontier expansion at a scale unprecedented since the mid-eighties. Findings from this study reveal that policies based on household life cycle postulates will have limited impacts in reducing deforestation rates and promoting sustainable land use practices. Appropriate accounting of the social and environmental costs of future infrastructure development projects should consider associated frontier agricultural expansion costs to discourage further deforestation.