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Michael Cepek , A Future for Amazonia: Randy Borman and Cofán Environmental Politics (Austin, TX : University of Texas Press , 2012), pp. xvi+256, £45.00, hb; $60.00, $24.95 pb.
Reviews
It has not always been easy to convince the students taking my course on environmental knowledge that one is not born indigenous but becomes indigenous through living with the land intelligently. I hope that Michael Cepek's very engaging book about Cofán conservationist politics will do the trick. This unusual monograph has a brilliant story to tell: indigenous intelligence is alive and kicking, and the global ecological challenges the world faces at the dawn of the twenty-first century can be solved. They will not be solved through uni-directional harvesting of knowledge, however, but through the fostering of genuine exchanges between those who retain an understanding of the ecological and cultural specificity of their environments and researchers seeking to understand the web of relations between ecology, culture and history. The book convincingly shows that diversity should be understood in terms of ecosystemic relations and commitment to ways of life and patterns of resource use that create new standards of living, as well as new social, cultural and political forms. The indigenous intelligence developed by the Cofán people and their allies comes from knowing one's place through dwelling in it. By focusing on a unique experiment, a lifelong alliance forged by a white man with an indigenous community, the author convincingly shows that political mobilisation starts with solving problems that are close to home, and that defending indigenous political rights requires both open-ended pragmatism and essential commitment to core values.
The book presents the experimental pragmatics of Cofán political mobilisation with elegant simplicity. In three chapters, the first half of the book discusses the singular making of a nation and of its most powerful chief, Randy Borman. Like the Tetetes, a neighbouring group now extinct, the Cofán were fated to disappear in the wake of...