4 posts tagged “amazon”

Ecotourism is big business, accounting for millions of dollaers a year. Started in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not until the 1990s that the industry really began to flourish. At that time it was more about adventures on private yachts or safaris to newly accessible part of Africa. In fact, back in 1999 I was a representative at the 9th Annual World Congress on Adventure Travel and Ecotourism held in Tucson, Arizona, where I was involved in getting various ecotour companies to include a cultural component in their Caribbean and Latin American tours. I had some success, but at that time the infrastructure and overall agenda of the industry was not there to really achieve the goals desired. Now, however, this is no longer the case.

More and more ecotour companies are not only including a cultural component, but some are heavily focused on including the local indigenous people in their activities. One such ecotour company is Posada Amazonas located in Infierno in eastern Peru. Infierno and Posada Amazonas are located in the province of Tambopata, several hours by motorized canoe from the capital of Madre de Dios, Puerto Maldonado. The community covers approximately 10,000 hectares on both sides of the Tambopata River and is located within the buffer zone of the Tambopata National Reserve and near the Bahuaja-Sonene National Park.

Read more about indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon and ecotourism here.

One of the most important trends to develop in both anthropology and archaeology during the latter half of the 20th century was the inclusion of indigenous peoples into the larger social science discourse (beyond simply being “subjects” or “objects”). In some countries and in some areas of investigation this inclusive process began at an earlier time then in others. For example, in North America the collaborative process between anthropologists and Native Americans began as early as 1941 (Jones and Stapp, 2008). In other places, such as in South America, the process of including indigenous voices and knowledge in social science research and theoretical discussion did not begin until much later. Despite these differences in time, it has generally been acknowledged that including indigenous peoples in the anthropological and archaeological research process has greatly expanded our knowledge base, data sets, and overall understanding of the human condition. A contemporary example of this is the current collaborative process taking place in the Central Andean region of South America between archaeologists and local indigenous people.

In the yungas (hot valleys in Quechuan) of the eastern cordillera Montana along the eastern face of the Central Andes archaeologists are working with indigenous peoples in several endeavors (see the work of Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump for example). The Montana plays a decisive ecological role at both the continental and global scales – forcing the moist easterly air masses of the South Atlantic anticyclone to ascend and release precipitation that feeds the Amazonian drainage with nutrient-rich, sediment-laden water. The Montana provides an important variable for Amazonian rain forest ecology, structure, and distribution and played an important role in the growth of indigenous peoples’ prehistoric complex societies in the lowland Neotropics, as well as contemporary indigenous groups and cultures. But the Montana physiography is not a homogenous slope landscape; it forms a complex mosaic of landforms that house considerable ecological variation principally based on differences in altitude, precipitation level, and slope gradient.

Read more about indigenous peoples and archaeologists collaborating in the Peruvian Amazon here.

One of the strengths of cultural anthropologists (as opposed to political scientists or mass media researchers) conducting research in the emerging field of media anthropology is that through their deep relationship with a particular place, particular people, and particular media, they are able to more holistically document the visible and audible evidence of cultural production in all of its situated complexity. Jeff Himpele, in Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes,in this way creates a comprehensive media ethnography of La Paz, Bolivia, but he also goes beyond geographic constraints to look at the history of media circulation and distribution in the country as its own unique narrative and constitutive cultural process. Himpele performs an ethnographic service to his readers by offering a focused perspective of an emerging indigenous public media sphere, with increasing political consequence, that largely has been unobserved, unnoticed, unanalyzed, unarticulated, and thus unknown. At base this is a superb example of an intimately engaged, meticulously researched longitudinal ethnography.

Read more about Circuits of Culture: Media, Politics, and Indigenous Identity in the Andes here.

The A’ingae, or Cofan people, have lived between the Aguarico and Guamués rivers for centuries, long before the foundation of the Republics of Ecuador and Colombia, from the Azuela river up to the middle section of the Aguarico basin, and up to present-day Puerto Asís. The Cofan territory was next to the communities of the Siona and Tetetes nations. Long ago, the Cofan people amounted to 15,000 inhabitants (Ingita Gi A'indeccu'fa, 2002), and now, according to the information of the Federation of the Cofan Nation of Ecuador, there are only 162 families with a total of 849 people.

According to CODENPE (Consejo de Desarrollo de las Nacionalidades y Pueblos del Ecuador – Council for the Development of Ecuador’s Peoples and Nations), Ecuador’s COFAN Nation is now in the province of Sucumbios, on the Aguarico river and in the middle section of the Dureno and Cuyabeno river basins; the main settlements are Dovino, Dureno, Sinangüe, Chandia Na’en and Zábalo.

Read more about oil impacts to indigenous peoples of Ecuador here.