Amazonian Geographies
Amazonian Geographies

Author: Jacqueline Vadjunec

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-07-16

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1317982975

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Amazonia exists in our imagination as well as on the ground. It is a mysterious and powerful construct in our psyches yet shares multiple (trans)national borders and diverse ecological and cultural landscapes. It is often presented as a seemingly homogeneous place: a lush tropical jungle teeming with exotic wildlife and plant diversity, as well as the various indigenous populations that inhabit the region. Yet, since Conquest, Amazonia has been linked to the global market and, after a long and varied history of colonization and development projects, Amazonia is peopled by many distinct cultural groups who remain largely invisible to the outside world despite their increasing integration into global markets and global politics. Millions of rubber tappers, neo-native groups, peasants, river dwellers, and urban residents continue to shape and re-shape the cultural landscape as they adapt their livelihood practices and political strategies in response to changing markets and shifting linkages with political and economic actors at local, regional, national, and international levels. This book explores the diversity of changing identities and cultural landscapes emerging in different corners of this rapidly changing region. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of Cultural Geography.

Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia
Sacred Geographies of Ancient Amazonia

Author: Denise P Schaan

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-06-16

Total Pages: 257

ISBN-13: 1315420511

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The legendary El Dorado—the city of gold—remains a mere legend, but astonishing new discoveries are revealing a major civilization in ancient Amazonia that was more complex than anyone previously dreamed. Scholars have long insisted that the Amazonian ecosystem placed severe limits on the size and complexity of its ancient cultures, but leading researcher Denise Schaan reverses that view, synthesizing exciting new evidence of large-scale land and resource management to tell a new history of indigenous Amazonia. Schaan also engages fundamental debates about the development of social complexity and the importance of ancient Amazonia from a global perspective. This innovative, interdisciplinary book is a major contribution to the study of human-environment relations, social complexity, and past and present indigenous societies.

The Geography of South America
The Geography of South America

Author: Thomas A. Rumney

Publisher: Scarecrow Press

Published: 2013-04-18

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 0810886359

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South America is an area of fascination and study for geographers and other scholars from around the world, and its land and people have played important roles in the discovery and distribution of civilizations, resources, and nations for millennia. The region has long stimulated a large amount of research across the many subdisciplines of geography, and Thomas A. Rumney collects, organizes, and presents as many scholarly publications as possible in The Geography of South America: A Scholarly Guide and Bibliography. Every South American nation is included: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Surinam, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Beginning with an overview of the region as a whole, successive chapters, one per nation, are divided by specific subdisciplines of geography: cultural, social, economic, historical, physical and environmental, political, and urban. Each section is then divided by document type: atlases, books, book chapters, articles from scholarly journals, master’s theses, and doctoral dissertations. Although the majority of entries focus on English-language works, selected entries written in Spanish, French, German, and other languages are also included (with the entry titles translated into English and noted accordingly).

Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier
Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier

Author: Nicholas Q. Emlen

Publisher: University of Arizona Press

Published: 2020-03-24

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0816541353

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Extraordinary change is under way in the Alto Urubamba Valley, a vital and turbulent corner of the Andean-Amazonian borderland of southern Peru. Here, tens of thousands of Quechua-speaking farmers from the rural Andes have migrated to the territory of the Indigenous Amazonian Matsigenka people in search of land for coffee cultivation. This migration has created a new multilingual, multiethnic agrarian society. The rich-tasting Peruvian coffee in your cup is the distillate of an intensely dynamic Amazonian frontier, where native Matsigenkas, state agents, and migrants from the rural highlands are carving the forest into farms. Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier shows how people of different backgrounds married together and blended the Quechua, Matsigenka, and Spanish languages in their day-to-day lives. This frontier relationship took place against a backdrop of deforestation, cocaine trafficking, and destructive natural gas extraction. Nicholas Q. Emlen’s rich account—which takes us to remote Amazonian villages, dusty frontier towns, roadside bargaining sessions, and coffee traders’ homes—offers a new view of settlement frontiers as they are negotiated in linguistic interactions and social relationships. This interethnic encounter was not a clash between distinct groups but rather an integrated network of people who adopted various stances toward each other as they spoke. The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.

Guardians of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest: Environmental Organizations and Development
Guardians of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest: Environmental Organizations and Development

Author: Luiz C. Barbosa

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2015-05-08

Total Pages: 268

ISBN-13: 1317577639

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The Amazon region is the focus of intense conflict between conservationists concerned with deforestation and advocates of agro-industrial development. This book focuses on the contributions of environmental organizations to the preservation of Brazilian Amazonia. It reveals how environmental organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and others have fought fiercely to stop deforestation in the region. It documents how the history of frontier expansion and environmental struggle in the region is linked to Brazil’s position in an evolving capitalist world-economy. It is shown how Brazil’s effort to become a developed country has led successive Brazilian governments to devise development projects for Amazonia. The author analyses how globalization has led to the expansion of international commodity chains in the region, particularly for mineral ores, soybeans and beef. He shows how environmental organizations have politicized these commodity chains as weapons of conservation, through boycotting certain products, while other pro-development groups within Brazil claim that such organizations threaten Brazil's sovereignty over its own resources.

Emergent Brazil
Emergent Brazil

Author: Jeffrey D. Needell

Publisher: University Press of Florida

Published: 2015-07-07

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0813055385

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For decades, scholars and journalists have hailed the enormous potential of Brazil, which has been one of the world's largest economies for the last twenty years. But its promise has too often been curtailed by dictatorship, racism, poverty, and violence. Offering an interdisciplinary approach to the critical issues facing Brazil, the contributors to this volume analyze the democratization of the country's media, its nuclear capabilities, changing crime rates, the spread of Pentecostalism and indigenous religions, the development of popular culture, the growth of Brazilian agribusiness, and the implementation of sustainable economic development, especially in the Amazon. The only member of the large, newly industrialized, fast-growing BRICS economies (along with Russia, China, India, and South Africa) in the Western hemisphere, Brazil plays a unique role regionally and throughout the world. Emergent Brazil is a comprehensive and timely collection of essays that explore the country's major domestic concerns and the impact of its trends, institutions, culture, and religion across the globe. Jeffrey D. Needell is professor of history at the University of Florida and former Latin American program associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He is the author of A Tropical Belle Epoque and The Party of Order.

Mapping the Amazon
Mapping the Amazon

Author: Amanda M. Smith

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2021-05-01

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 180034547X

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'Smith’s investigation focuses rigorously on the aesthetic complexities of these texts to demonstrate how, in a way even the authors themselves sometimes do not suspect, new ways arise of understanding their power of eco-criticism. [...] Smith’s contribution is this call, like few today, to awaken new energies in the literary and cultural criticism about the Amazon precisely because she has her feet grounded in the harsh history of the region, while her eyes are focused on different future possibilities for the region.' Felipe Martínez-Pinzón, ReVista

Brazil in the Geopolitics of Amazonia and Antarctica
Brazil in the Geopolitics of Amazonia and Antarctica

Author: Fábio Albergaria de Queiroz

Publisher: Lexington Books

Published: 2023-08-22

Total Pages: 251

ISBN-13: 1666902691

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From a pioneering perspective, the book contributes to the state-of-the-art contemporary Geopolitics by bringing together Amazonia and Antarctica in a single interdisciplinary volume. Three key issues are 1) the interconnectedness between these vital regions, 2) non-linearity, because they may lead to unpredictable effects on the Earth system, and; 3) emergence, which means the varied interactions between Amazonia and Antarctica may lead to unique results.

Governing the Rainforest
Governing the Rainforest

Author: Eve Z. Bratman

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 373

ISBN-13: 0190949384

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Sustainable development is among the foremost ideas that guide societal aspirations around the world. This text interrogates the concept through a critical lens, examining both its history and the trajectory of its manifestations in the Brazilian Amazon.