3 research outputs found
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Indigenous transformations in the comunidad nativa: rethinking kinship and its limitations in an expanding resource frontier
In Of Mixed Blood, Peter Gow sets out an account of the transformations of kinship and the construction of social relations among Indigenous, mainly Yine (Piro), people of the Bajo Urubamba valley in the early 1980s, when Peruâs âComunidades Nativasâ (âNative Communitiesâ) were receiving their new official titles. We revisit Peterâs proposition by comparing it our more recent ethnographic engagements with Indigenous AshĂĄninka/AshĂ©ninka communities in the region. While tracing continuities from his observations, we also show how social relations now play out in different ways, as certain important resources have become scarcer and the need for money is increasingly central for peopleâs wellbeing. This new context is framed by the expansion of the extractive frontier, a different legal regime of access to land and resources in Comunidades Nativas, and expanding Indigenous groups living in smaller and increasingly degraded areas. In this context, we see not the embracing of new forms of overarching solidarity linked to Comunidades, but rather the shrinking of familial units within these titled territories. The article reflects on Peterâs propositions through vignettes that show how processes of making and unmaking social relations and creating new identities play out in different settings while still maintaining an internal coherence
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[Introduction] Contesting control: Indigenous strategies towards territorial governance in lowland South America
After centuries of conflict and political struggles over land and resources across Lowland South America, recent decades have shown an expansion of the rights of Indigenous Peoples to determine their own futures and manage their territories (Monterroso et al., 2017; Palacios Llaque and Sarmiento Barletti, 2021). This shift is the result of decades of the deployment of strategies undertaken by Indigenous Peoples and their allies to overcome histories of displacement, marginalisation and exploitation by settler societies. These processes of dispossession and resistance have been driven by different actors laying different claims on Indigenous territories in a contradictory process that involves the expansion of the extractive frontier in the region â ranging from hydrocarbon extraction to agroindustrial development â and of initiatives to conserve the biodiversity of the region, including various kinds of protected areas and carbon projects (Ălvarez, 2012; Larsen, 2015). Conflicts have been noted to arise over the management and use of the area's natural resources and how nature and the environment are constructed, but also over the imposition of different forms of governance over the region (Merino Acuña, 2015). The relative success of Indigenous strategies in these contexts has long been of academic concern, highlighting the work of Indigenous organisations and social networks (e.g. Jackson and Warren, 2005; Yashar, 2005).</p
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Connected conservation: rethinking conservation for a telecoupled world
The convergence of the biodiversity and climate crises, widening of wealth inequality, and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic underscore the urgent need to mobilize change to secure sustainable futures. Centres of tropical biodiversity are a major focus of conservation efforts, delivered in predominantly site-level interventions often incorporating alternative-livelihood provision or poverty-alleviation components. Yet, a focus on site-level intervention is ill-equipped to address the disproportionate role of (often distant) wealth in biodiversity collapse. Further these approaches often attempt to âresolveâ local economic poverty in order to safeguard biodiversity in a seemingly virtuous act, potentially overlooking local communities as the living locus of solutions to the biodiversity crisis. We offer Connected Conservation: a dual-branched conservation model that commands novel actions to tackle distant wealth-related drivers of biodiversity decline, while enhancing site-level conservation to empower biodiversity stewards. We synthesize diverse literatures to outline the need for this shift in conservation practice. We identify three dominant negative flows arising in centres of wealth that disproportionately undermine biodiversity, and highlight the three key positive, though marginalized, flows that enhance biodiversity and exist within biocultural centres. Connected Conservation works to amplify the positive flows, and diminish the negative flows, and thereby orientates towards desired states with justice at the centre. We identify connected conservation actions that can be applied and replicated to address the telecoupled, wealth-related reality of biodiversity collapse while empowering contemporary biodiversity stewards. The approach calls for conservation to extend its collaborations across sectors in order to deliver to transformative change.</p