| Enchanted Ecology is an ethnography of Izozog, a community of 9000 Guarani-speakers inhabiting twenty-five villages along a seasonally-flooded riverbed in lowland Bolivia. The thesis is based on twenty months' field research. I followed the Izoceño experience with two multilaterally-funded biological research projects that integrate local with scientific knowledge. One involves a small laboratory that has been built next to the house of an Izoceño paye (shaman) as part of an attempt to process a traditional medicinal plant into a commercial pharmaceutical product. The other, on a much larger scale, is an initiative to integrate Izoceño practices with conservation science in the management of a new national park protecting the dry tropical forest ecosystem of the South American Chaco.; The dissertation tracks Izozog's ongoing dynamics as an Arawak-Guaraní hybrid society unfolding across time according to internally-generated possibilities and constraints, while also analyzing Izozog as an innovative incubator for contemporary global constructions of nature and of culture. I identify novel political-economic forms shaping contemporary Izoceño experience. Specifically, I show the Izoceño are capturing a rent on their environment and attempting to generate revenue from a monopoly on cultural knowledge. These processes, because they frame material nature as “valuable in existence” and immaterial culture and knowledge as “valuable in exploitation,” reverse dominant economic valences but—within the Izoceño community—are in considerable accord with cultural structures of long historical standing.; The circumstances of my research also exemplify the fact that indigenous groups like the Izoceño are often understood—and sometimes come to understand themselves—as having redemptive, even magical, relationships to medicine and to the environment: or, in my analytical terms, to bodily “micro-nature” and ecosystemic “macro-nature.” In flagging this set of relations, I challenge contemporary analyses of political and social mobilization on the part of traditional and indigenous peoples that ascribe their successes (or lack thereof) to the performative enactment (or essential existence) of difference and identity. Instead, I suggest that putatively utilitarian means—having to do with technique and information—are also utilized by, and sometimes demanded of, these groups. |
