Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Foucault in The Forest
Foucault in The Forest
CEPEK
University of Texas at San Antonio
A B S T R A C T
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the
Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian
Ecuadors Cofan people to question the concept of
environmentality: the idea that environmentalist
programs and movements operate as forms of
governmentality in Michel Foucaults sense. I argue
that, although the Field Museums community
conservation projects constitute a regulatory
rationale and technique, they do not transform
Cofan subjectivity according to plan. By exploring
Cofan peoples critical consciousness of
environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt
on the governmentality paradigms utility for
analyzing the complexities of cultural difference,
intercultural encounter, and directed change.
[governmentality, environmentality, indigenous
conservation, environmental management, Amazonia]
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 38, No. 3, pp. 501515, ISSN 0094-0496, online
C 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1548-1425.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2011.01319.x
American Ethnologist
502
American Ethnologist
Rose writes, it attempts to promote the well-being of its subjects, their good order, their security, their tranquility, their
prosperity, health and happiness (1999:6). In Tania Murray
Lis words, governmentality mobilizes the will to improve,
and the sincerity of its spokespeople is not in question: They
do not knowingly exploit or deceive their subjects, and objective interests do not lurk behind their stated motives
(Li 2007:89). Accordingly, one can see governmentality at
work in schemes for betterment in myriad domains: insurance, health, hygiene, medicine, education, development,
crime, poverty, risk, security, and environmental conservation and management (Agrawal 2005b:217; Darier 1999:22;
Gordon 1991:36; Rose 1999:7).
In an impressively clear and comprehensive article
that uses Foucaults thought to outline an anthropology
of modernity, Jonathan Xavier Inda (2005) highlights three
dimensions of governmentality for ethnographic analysis. First, Inda identifies the reasons, or rationality, of
government, which consist of the forms of knowledge,
expertise, and calculation that make humans intelligible
and susceptible to management. Governmental rationalities comprise discursive fields of conceptualization and justification, which articulate problems that demand expert
intervention. Second, Inda discusses the technics of government, or the mechanisms, instruments, and measures
that authorities use to guide action. Governmental technics, which also include the discursive formation of projects
and programs, make objects visible, calculable, and programmable. Finally, Inda describes the subjects of government, or the selves, persons, actors, agents, or identities
(2005:10) that develop from and figure into governmental
projects and processes. With the last category, Inda aims
to pinpoint the ways in which governmentality forms the
deepest levels of subjectivity, including individual capacities, values, and desires.
In Environmentality, Agrawal adopts the last of Indas
foci as his central theme. In his words, Explaining why,
when, how, and in what measure people come to develop an
environmentally oriented subject position is the ultimate
target of this books arguments (Agrawal 2005b:23). In his
exploration of more than 150 years of humanenvironment
relations in the Indian region of Kumaon, Agrawal tracks
the processes by which rebellious hill men were transformed into individuals who participate in a decentralized
government-in-community inscribed on modern forests
(2005b:11). For Agrawal, environmental subjects are people
who relate to the environment in a specific manner: They
think and act toward it in new ways (2005b:xiiiiv),
it exists for them as a critical domain (2005b:16) and a
conceptual category (2005b:164), and it becomes an object that requires regulation and protection (2005b:226).
In general, Agrawal argues that environmental subjects are
individuals who have been environmentalized (2005b:17)
by governmental projects, programs, and processes. For
503
American Ethnologist
504
American Ethnologist
505
American Ethnologist
506
conservation. She subsequently worked to help Borman receive the Field Museums prestigious Parker/Gentry Award
for Conservation Biology in 1998. Since that time, the ECP
has become deeply involved with projects in Zabalo and
other Cofan communities. ECP staff members hope that the
experience of Zabalo will lead to the creation of global models for community-based conservation. Although the ECP
wants to use science to improve Zabalos sepicho system,
it also wants to document what the Cofan were doing prior
to its entrance so as to publicize the possibility of indigenous conservationism to a world that has grown skeptical
of indigenousenvironmentalist alliances (see Chapin 2004;
Flavin 2005).
ECP personnel think of themselves as enabling technicians rather than convincing proselytizers. Their work presupposes a common endenvironmental conservation
but seeks to introduce new meansscientific methods and
technological instrumentstoward the pursuit of that end.
Even though the knowledge produced by these means is,
like all science, capable of traveling across social lines in
the universalizing language of number, table, and diagram,
the ECP views much of its work in a local light. In its
community-based conservation projects, the main gap it
is interested in traversing is between Cofan environmental
practice and Cofan knowledge of that practice.6 With true
self-knowledge, ECP personnel believe that the people of
Zabalo will be able to manage their resources in a rational
and successful way.
Beginning in 1999, ECP personnel traveled to Zabalo
multiple times each year to teach the use of technological instruments (e.g., notebooks, computers, and measuring devices), to create a basic infrastructure (e.g., a central
project meetinghouse and a system of census trails), and to
communicate the utility of scientific understanding. They
worked to develop five project activities: terrestrial censuses
of Zabalos forest animals, household tabulations of hunting takes, visual censuses of river turtles (Podocnemis expansa and Podocnemis unifilis), beach monitoring of river
turtle nests, and headstarting of river turtle hatchlings in
artificial ponds and nests. During my main fieldwork years
of 2001 and 2002, eight men, who represented the communitys main household groups, worked regularly on ECPsupported projects, and they received a monthly salary for
their efforts.7 The ECP initiated three of the activities (the
turtle visual census, the terrestrial census, and the hunting
tabulations), and it modified the others (beach monitoring
and headstarting).8
All of the ECP-supported activities depend on processes of spatiotemporal unitization, practical regularization, and linguistic standardization and entextualization.
Spatially, rivers are marked off in 250-meter sections for
visual census work and in five broad areas for beachmonitoring work. Census and hunting trails are divided
into 50-meter segments. Temporally, project work is coordi-
American Ethnologist
507
American Ethnologist
monitors can use to pinpoint hunting locations on an accurate map. In addition, participants must maintain a set
of written records: weights and measurements of turtle
hatchlings, dates and locations of monitored turtle nests,
and temperatures and feeding details for the turtle ponds.
For the ECP, rigorous data collection and exact computation and representation present a decisive advantage over
preexisting modes of environmental knowledge. All of the
information compiled by monitors can be put into textual
forms, which display how absolute numbers (e.g., of turtle
nests protected, peccaries killed, or toucans seen) vary according to calendar year as well as to spatial location (e.g.,
of marked-off river section, numbered hunting site, or segmented census trail). And when absolute quantities or computed averages do not suffice to communicate a trend, totals of varying kinds can be placed chronologically next to
each other in a chart, which allows the ups and downs of
a single line to tell the years-old story of an entire territory. Quantified, uniform, and synoptic, scientific representations allow for the discernment of patterns with a level of
exactness that is shared by neither everyday subsistence
nor collective community debate.
Zabalos sepicho system depends on culture- and
context-bound discussions about shifting environmental
conditions. Scientific conservation involves an entirely different kind of object: stable, portable documents with numbers, tables, names, and maps that anyone, anywhere, can
hold in his or her hand and that speak in the same way
about the same things to a Western scientist, a government official, an oil company executive, or a Cofan leader.
With scientific representations in hand, any individual is as
knowledgeable as any other. There is no confusion about
what the forest contains, what Cofan people are taking from
it, and what the community should do if it wants to conserve its resources. For the ECP, the benefits of scientific
representations are self-evident. They depend neither on
the memory and objectivity of particular, isolated individuals nor on the localized trust and sociodiscursive confusion of community discussions. For Cofan people, however,
the yields of scientific knowledge are not convincing in the
same way.
On a few occasions, project participants have engaged
ECP personnel in direct conversations about the logic behind their activities. In one interaction, a Cofan worker
questioned an ECP staff member about the meaning of the
term evidencia. The scientist explained the word by posing
an opposition between census-produced datos (Spanish for
508
American Ethnologist
509
American Ethnologist
510
formalization and quantification to be most useful in transporting knowledge across, rather than within, established
lines of culture and power. Accordingly, they deny sciences
ability to improve community-internal practices. Instead,
they believe that science transforms their knowledge into
a good that can be understood and used by non-Cofan
outsiders.
Although the Cofan have a long history of peaceful interethnic cooperation, they are sick to death of 500 years of
unequal relations with Westerners. In the 21st century, they
do not believe that any Westernerenvironmentalist, humanitarian, or otherwould come to their communities if
not motivated by self-interest and profit. The Cofan maintain a strong set of expectations for such encounters: that
outsiders will attempt to make money off of them, that the
most altruistic foreigners see them as objects of missionarylike charity, and that their only sensible option is to try to
get a fair share of the economic resources that Westerners
possess and produce. With regard to the ECP, Cofan expectations of exploitation are exacerbated by participation
in projects that depend on alien activities, relations, and
equipment to produce a form of knowledge that is of more
use to the outside world than to the Cofan themselves.
No matter how much idealistic practitioners protest
to the contrary, the people of Zabalo believe that Western
conservationists derive value from Cofan lives and Cofan
forests. Obviously, they are right. ECP personnel earn a paycheck for their efforts. They treasure the biodiversity of
Cofan territory. And they hope to transform Zabalo experiences into a general model for community-based conservation. From the Cofan perspective, all of these benefits represent the extraction of a surplus from Cofan activity.
When pressed, most people in Zabalo admit ignorance
about why outsiders come from so far away to work on
conservation. Currently, most Cofan explain their understanding of the word cientista or cientfico (Spanish for scientist) by extension (i.e., by naming ECP personnel). The
most experienced project workers suggest that a scientist
is one who oshachoma atesusu (learns everything) about
macaen jinchocho (how things are) and mingae dajecho
(how things become). Although many ECP personnel are
far too routinized in their work to evince touristlike fascination with wildlife, somesuch as Debby Moskovitz, whom
all project workers recognize as the true ECP nasuexhibit
enthusiastic attachment to the tsampi. They watch birds;
they wander through the forest alone; and they express sincere concern for environmental destruction. In the words
of one worker who has known Moskovitz for years, She
really hates the idea of hurting animals. She really hates
everything like that. She really loves the tsampi. Her true desire is for the tsampi. The house of her heart is the tsampi.
She really loves it. The tsampi as well as animals, everything, turtle, woolly monkey, everything. All that is of the
tsampi.
Even when they recognize outsiders earnest attachment to their environment, the people of Zabalo cannot
imagine any scientist coming to their territory without
earning a living by doing so. The Cofan know that scientific conservation is the semamba (work) of ECP personnel.
Moreover, they are perpetually aware that Westerners are
far wealthier than they, who are but pori ai (poor Cofan).
The Cofan find it most convincing to use cash as the surest
means of calibrating values across deep social divides. No
matter how much Cofan people believe that the ECP and
others appreciate the tsampi, and no matter how much they
understand outsiders as idealistic individuals who want to
help them, they cannot imagine non-Cofan conservationists doing anything without making money. In the words of
one project worker,
Why would you just do this work if I were the only
one being paid? Lets say you look for a project. And
then $10,000 comes to you. You receive it, and you give
me $500, $500, $500, everything to me. With nothing,
would you work? No, you wouldnt. My thought is like
this. The museum people dont have other work. Because of that, they want to work with the Cofan, to help
the Cofan, and to help other people and other lands.
With that, I, too, will take some [of the money]. So
that they can live. Thinking like that, the museum people want to work here.
This interpretation, more than anything else, explains
why Zabalo residents understand ECP-supported projects
as work that they perform for the outside worldand for
which they deserve a paycheck. Some Cofan are beginning
American Ethnologist
projects toward large-scale biological inventories of potential conservation areas in threatened Cofan territories.
Despite their questioning of conservationist intentions
and actions, Cofan people see great potential for their relationship with the ECP and other outside institutions. Even
though most environmentalist NGOs understand payment
to play a minor role in community conservation, the savviest Cofan leaders hope to construct a much larger system of
cooperation on the basis of political-economic reciprocity.
They realize that their forests matter to Westerners. Furthermore, they know that Cofan people are becoming increasingly adept at producing scientific knowledge, which they
want to make available to outside researchers as long as the
exchange is balanced.
In short, Cofan activists want to convince the world
that Cofan people are the best custodians and investigators of the Amazonian environment. Instead of negotiating short-term interventions aimed at the unrealistic goal of
project self-sufficiency, Cofan leaders seek to create permanent partnerships that recognize the reciprocal costs and
benefits of scientific research and conservationist practice.
In return for protecting and analyzing their forests, they expect steady but modest compensation as well as the political aid that will help them to solidify control over their traditional territory.
Cofan leaders hope to take over many of the roles
that are currently inhabited by better-paid and more securely employed outsiders, whether NGO workers, academic scientists, or state enforcement agents. To date, they
have made significant strides toward realizing their vision.
With a force of approximately fifty state-accredited park
guards, the Cofan nation is directing the management and
protection of approximately 430 thousand hectares of forest. In communities such as Zabalo, Cofan individuals receive coauthorship recognition on peer-reviewed research
articles written by ECP scientists (e.g., Townsend et al.
2005). According to Randy Borman, Cofan peoples intimate
knowledge of and dependence on the forest make them the
perfect agents of effective research and conservation. In his
words, the Cofan are ready to work with and for the world on
rain-forest protection. All they request are the right kinds of
compensation, recognition, and resources:
511
American Ethnologist
Conclusion
Alex Callinicos once described Foucault as the most eloquent advocate of the intellectual movement that seeks to
demote the subject from constitutive to constituted status (1989:87). For much of its history, anthropology has
explored the sociocultural mediation of subjectivity, which
overlaps with more familiar notions of value, desire, belief, and identity. Ethnographers investigate the ways in
which individuals acquire embodied perspectives through
primary and secondary processes of enculturation, which
intersect with larger movements of history and politics.
For most of us, the concept of a constituted subject is an
essential element of our theoretical foundation. We have
never accepted the idea that people are born with a universal, timeless, and fully formed stance toward the world.
Foucaults intervention was to make a demiurge-like
power (Turner 1994:35) the central player in subject formation. In Arturo Escobars words, Foucault envisions a world
in which power-saturated articulations of discourse and
knowledge produce permissible modes of being and thinking while disqualifying and even making others impossible
(1994:5).
In this article, I have questioned the Foucauldian approach to subject formation as articulated in the literature
on governmentality and environmentality. In my ethnographic analysis of scientific conservation in Zabalo, I have
demonstrated that a governmental project did not engender an environmental subjectivity in Cofan participants.
Nor did it preclude a specifically Cofan understanding
of science, conservation, and environmental politics. The
technics of ECP programs affect Cofan stances toward their
forests and their environmental practices but not along the
lines of ECP rationalities. Rather than adopting an external
logic as their own, Cofan project workers maintain a critical consciousness of the activities, relations, instruments,
and products of scientific conservation. They view their collaboration with Western institutions as part of a larger exchange with a world that values the environments that they
know and inhabit. As long as they receive some portion of
the political-economic resources that they seek, Cofan people are more than willing to devote themselves to a form of
labor that they continue to experience as burdensome and
oriented to community-external rather than communityinternal logics and needs.
Although Cofan approaches to science and conservation can reveal a great deal about the particularity of
Western values and assumptions, they are highly specific
in terms of their origin and content. The Cofan understanding of scientific conservation as an indirectly beneficial form of alienated labor has a set of social, cultural, historical, and political conditions of possibility. It is easy to
imagine how another Amazonian peoplenot to mention
populations at other ends of the geographic and political-
512
economic spectrumwould have a completely different reaction to ECP interventions. The Cofan of Zabalo have practiced community conservation for decades. They do it in
a way that depends intimately on their culture and social
structure as well as their experience of petroleum-based development. Cofan difficulties with ECP-supported activities
are generated by a clash between accepted forms of social
and environmental relations and the necessities of regularization, formalization, and intercultural knowledge exchange. The benefits that Cofan people do hope to attain
by cooperating with Western scientists and environmentalists only make sense in relation to the strategizing of Cofan
leaders, who creatively rework Cofan resources into a proposal for a new form of NorthSouth collaboration.
Without engaging the sociocultural subtleties of Cofan
peoples discourse, practice, and politics, I never would
have understood as much as I do about the ways in which
scientific conservation does and does not transform their
environmental understandings. From my perspective, immersed and open-minded ethnography is essential to any
adequate investigation of governmental projects, especially
in contexts of cultural difference and intercultural encounter. By devoting the bulk of our analytic attention to
the rationalities that governmental agents bring to bear on
their work, as researchers, we grant them a power that they
do not possess. In our implicit acceptance of the slippage
from rationale and technique to subjective effect, we do a
disservice to the critical capacities of the people with whom
we work, and we commit an error that is both intellectual
and ethical in nature.
I mention one more potential problem of the governmentality paradigm. In addition to its naive stance on interveners ability to transform subjectivities, it risks overestimating the grip that governmental rationalities have on
governmental agents themselves. After years of experience
with Zabalo workers and residents, ECP personnel began
to understand Cofan perspectives on their programs. Although many of the projects that I have described continue
to function, other NGOs have stepped in to finance them.
After 2005, ECP officials decided that the Cofan vision of scientific conservation did not match their own. Rather than
abandoning their partnership with Cofan people, however,
the ECP returned to its traditional strengthorganizing biological inventories that can influence states to create protected areas with the cooperation of local populations.11
After a Field Museum inventory helped to convince the
Ecuadorian government to declare the Cofan-Bermejo Ecological Reserve (RECB) in 2002, the ECP decided to conduct more inventories in Cofan territory, the most recent
of which occurred in 2008. Both the ECP and Cofan leaders know that the authoritative reports of a prestigious
North American institution can help Cofan people to consolidate control over their threatened lands. Even if they
do not see to eye to eye with the Cofan on questions of
American Ethnologist
Notes
Acknowledgments. Drafts of this article profited from exchanges
with a number of colleagues: Debby Moskovitz, Dan Brinkmeier,
Alaka Wali, Clark Erickson, Terence Turner, Andrew Gilbert, Chris
Krupa, Jill Fleuriet, Jamon Halvaksz, Jerry Jacka, John Kelly,
Donald Donham, and three anonymous reviewers. In addition, I received helpful feedback from participants in my graduate seminar
on Culture, Environment, and Conservation as well as attendees
of the Workshop on Culture, Society, and Environment at the University of Texas at San Antonio. For their financial support of my
research, I thank the University of Chicago, Macalester College, the
Field Museum of Natural History, the National Science Foundation,
the Tinker Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the
Mellon Foundation. Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to
all of the Cofan people with whom I continue to work in Quito and
eastern Ecuador.
1. Shortly after I defended my dissertation in 2006, the ECP
joined the Field Museums Center for Cultural Understanding and
Change (CCUC) under the newly created Division of Environment,
Culture, and Conservation (ECCo). A few years later, the CCUC
merged with the ECP. ECCo is now the official designation for the
museum branch that continues the work of the ECP. I retain the former label in this article because it was the only term used by both
Cofan people and museum personnel during my fieldwork. In addition, many museum employees continue to use the label to identify
themselves and their work in unofficial contexts.
2. Aingae is the primary language of everyday life in Zabalo, and
it is my main means of communication with Cofan people. Unless
otherwise noted, all Cofan quotations are my direct translations
from Aingae.
3. ECP personnel have no editorial control over my research, and
they want me to be as truthfully critical as I can. Nevertheless, I
want to state that I consider myself a conservationist and that I admire the expertise, openness, motivation, and ethical approach of
the ECP.
4. In other works (Cepek 2006, 2008b), I explore the importance
of ecotourism in generating Cofan conservationism. From their
earliest days in their new community, the Cofan of Zabalo guided
Western backpackers on canoe trips and forest hikes. According to
the testimony of Cofan individuals, working with tourists helped
them to appreciate the forest as an object that could hold aesthetic
and commercial value without being materially transformed.
5. In 1993 and 1994, the people of Zabalo engaged in a radical
and successfulcampaign against Ecuadors state oil company,
which they forced out of their territory by kidnapping oil workers,
burning down a heliport, and publicizing their actions in the national and international media with the help of non-Cofan allies
(Cepek 1996).
6. Another main activity of the ECP is the design and execution
of rapid biological inventories, which program personnel organize
with teams of national and international scientists as well as local
inhabitants, to demonstrate the biological value of unprotected areas. One inventory led to the establishment of the Cofan-Bermejo
Ecological Reserve, a 55,541-hectare park inhabited by four Cofan
communities.
7. Two coordinators are responsible for directing the work and
supervising data entry. During my research, each of them received
$150 a month. Each of the monitors received $100 a month.
513
American Ethnologist
References cited
Agrawal, Arun
2005a Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government, and
Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India. Current Anthropology 46(2):161190.
2005b Environmentality: Technologies of Government and the
Making of Subjects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Braun, Bruce
2000 Producing Vertical Territory: Geology and Governmentality
in Late Victorian Canada. Cultural Geographies 7(1):746.
2003 The Intemperate Rainforest. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Callinicos, Alex
1989 Against Postmodernism: A Marxist Critique. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Cepek, Michael
1996 Reorganization and Resistance: Petroleum, Conservation,
and Cofan Transformations. Bachelors thesis, Department of
Anthropology, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign.
2006 The Cofan Experiment: Expanding an Indigenous
Amazonian World. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago.
2008a Bold Jaguars and Unsuspecting Monkeys: The Value of
Fearlessness in Cofan Politics. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 14:334352.
2008b Essential Commitments: Identity and the Politics of Cofan
Conservation. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 13(1):196222.
2009 The Myth of the Gringo Chief: Amazonian Messiahs and the
Power of Immediacy. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and
Power 16:227248.
Chapin, Mac
2004 A Challenge to Conservationists. World Watch Magazine,
NovemberDecember: 1731.
514
Darier, Eric
1999 Foucault and the Environment: An Introduction. In Discourses of the Environment. Eric Darier, ed. Pp. 134. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Escobar, Arturo
1994 Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of
the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James
1994 The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Field Museum
2005 Environmental and Conservation Programs. http://www.
fieldmuseum.org/researchcollections/ecp, accessed March 1.
Fisher, William
1997 Doing Good? The Politics and Antipolitics of NGO Practices.
Annual Review of Anthropology 1997:439464.
Flavin, Chris
2005 From Readers: A Challenge to Conservationists: Phase II.
World Watch, JanuaryFebruary: 520.
Foucault, Michel
1978 The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. New York:
Vintage.
1991 Governmentality. In The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller
eds. Pp. 87104. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gordon, Colin
1991 Governmental Rationality: An Introduction. In The
Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Graham Burchell,
Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller eds. Pp. 151. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Inda, Jonathan Xavier
2005 Analytics of the Modern: An Introduction. In Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Government, and Life Politics. Jonathan Xavier Inda, ed. Pp. 122. Malden, MA:
Blackwell.
Kimerling, Judith
1991 Amazon Crude. New York: Natural Resources Defense
Council.
Kipnis, Andrew
2008 Audit Cultures: Neoliberal Governmentality, Socialist
Legacy, or Technologies of Governing? American Ethnologist
35(2):275289.
Li, Tania Murray
2007 The Will to Improve: Government, Development, and the
Practice of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Little, Paul
1992 Ecologa poltica del Cuyabeno: El desarollo no sostenible
de la Amazona. Quito: ILDIS, Abya-Yala.
Luke, Steven
1999 Environmentality as Green Governmentality. In Discourses
of the Environment. Eric Darier ed. Pp. 121151. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Marx, Karl
1964 The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Dirk
Struik, ed. New York: International.
Moore, Donald
2000 The Crucible of Cultural Politics: Reworking Development in Zimbabwes Eastern Highlands. American Ethnologist 26(3):654689.
Ollman, Bertell
1976 Alienation: Marxs Conception of Man in Capitalist Society.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
American Ethnologist
Turner, Terence
1994 Bodies and Anti-Bodies: Flesh and Fetish in Contemporary
Social Theory. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Thomas Csordas ed. Pp. 2747.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vickers, William
2003 The Modern Political Transformation of the Secoya. In
Millennial Ecuador: Critical Essays on Cultural Transformations and Social Dynamics. Norman Whitten Jr., ed. Pp. 4674.
Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
accepted December 23, 2010
final version submitted January 10, 2011
Michael L. Cepek
Department of Anthropology
University of Texas at San Antonio
One UTSA Circle
San Antonio, TX 782490649
michael.cepek@utsa.edu
515