Journal Articles by Amy Penfield
Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 2020
This article seeks to extend the enduring focus on the body and bodily substance in Amazonia, whi... more This article seeks to extend the enduring focus on the body and bodily substance in Amazonia, which have historically eclipsed other forms of relatedness and ethical practices. Among the Venezuelan Sanema, for instance, morality is enacted predominantly through manufactured items rather than solely corporeal expressions of relatedness. While objects of all forms are receiving increased recognition in the region, they are often explored within a non-dualist frame that foregrounds inalienability, ownership and subjectification. Yet, the Sanema ethnography reveals that dissolving dualisms in this way elides the existence of important categories such as objects. Focusing on how ethical practices are enacted through partible beads and diesel-powered generators in particular, it becomes clear how alienable goods among the Sanema are valued precisely for their ‘objectness’ rather than their personified qualities.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2020
Social Anthropology, 2019
Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The 'wi... more Nestled in the hinterlands of Amazonia, informal gold mining continues largely unnoticed. The 'wild' land scapes that prospectors must negotiate in order to reach and work in these far-flung mine sites consist of unruly forests, raging waterfalls and unpredictable waterways, locales that restrict and confound formal infrastructural development. In such terrains, prospectors must devise innovative 'fluid infrastructures' that allow the mine's continued existence against all odds. Local perceptions of the wilderness in these locales offer insights into remoteness not as regions untouched and inaccessible, but as intimately connected to the diffuse and manifold forms that global economies take. These are zones in which the wild is in fact turned inside out.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2019
Energy is far more than a resource exploited by states and corporations. Yet, at the level of con... more Energy is far more than a resource exploited by states and corporations. Yet, at the level of consumption it is generally thought to be a difficult phenomenon to examine because it is so familiar that we barely notice its role in our lives, or at the very least, its production becomes obscured by this pragmatic daily engagement. The other side to the story – the one in which energy is a provision distributed to and experienced by people in intimate and unanticipated ways - is distinctly perceptible in locales like the Amazon rain forest where conventional energy provisions are absent. This essay explores how everyday encounters with gasoline offer insights into ethical judgements among the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia. The fuel is so pervasive that it is increasingly drawn into gold mining activities, dilemmas of kinship, the animist world of vengeful spirit masters, and ethically infused rumours of disaster. Being a volatile substance – simultaneously vaporous, explosive, narcotic, and caustic – gasoline is also a vital entity that holds a particularly intriguing place in the Sanema’s understanding of personhood and ethics. Indeed, its mysterious and unsettling qualities cause it to become entangled within a composite form of ethics that defines Sanema social worlds.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2017
This article explores the nature of interethnic asymmetry and the dynamic of long-term dependence... more This article explores the nature of interethnic asymmetry and the dynamic of long-term dependence in Amazonia. Drawing on the case of the Sanema and their neighbouring Ye’kwana, the article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of submission and indebtedness with a view to re-thinking where the power might lie in such relationships. The association between the two groups, I argue, is motivated by the Sanema’s pursuit of manufactured items, access to which the Ye’kwana had historically monopolized. The dynamic entered into in order to procure these goods is one of voluntary deference on the part of the Sanema, a demeanour that is actively pursued because it enables morally valued autonomy and a freedom from on-going reciprocity. I conclude that this ‘submissive extraction’ can offer new perspectives on the relationship between debt, predation and freedom.
Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 2016
This article explores an apprenticeship in bureaucracy that the Venezuelan Sanema have experience... more This article explores an apprenticeship in bureaucracy that the Venezuelan Sanema have experienced through their participation in the projects of the late Hugo Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution. The analysis focuses on the maneuverability that paperwork engenders, and thus contributes to an understanding of mobility and the corporeal experiences of state apparatus in contemporary Amazonia. New patterns of movement—travel to and from cities, daily errands, and maneuvering within social spheres—must be understood with reference to the state and its bureaucratic pervasiveness, but also as congruous with customary practices of ‘journeying for knowledge’, which forge an intimate link between physical and social mobility. The new maneuverability that is both prompted and necessitated by the current political setting is equally as important as literacy in navigating bureaucratic structures and accessing state resources.
Book Chapters by Amy Penfield
Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Ve... more Predation is central to the cosmology and lifeways of the Sanema-speaking Indigenous people of Venezuelan Amazonia, but it also marks their experience of modernity under the socialist “Bolivarian” regime and its immense oil wealth. Yet predation is not simply violence and plunder. For Sanema people, it means a great deal more: enticement, seduction, persuasion. It suggests an imminent threat but also opportunity and even sanctuary.
Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.
The chapter by Penfield focuses on multifaceted responses to extractivism by drawing on field res... more The chapter by Penfield focuses on multifaceted responses to extractivism by drawing on field research among the Sanema of Venezuelan Amazonia. The Sanema’s location in the resource-rich forests of the Venezuelan petro-state means that extraction has a twofold bearing on their lives: first as the indirect phenomenon of oil wealth disbursed to citizens and second as the intimate reality of gold mining in their territory. In contrast to the more common depiction of indigenous resistance to extraction, Penfield shows how the Sanema’s responses are deeply interwoven with their social and cosmological ethos, particularly as relates to transforming notions of personhood. Rather than connoting a movement towards individualism and social degeneration, Penfield shows how the wealth associated with extraction may also facilitate sociality, reciprocity, and compassion on a daily basis. Moreover, these encounters with different forms of extraction play out as a gradual incorporation
into the national and global economies.
Book Reviews by Amy Penfield
As a consequence, the continuity within the volume is predominantly located at the level of subje... more As a consequence, the continuity within the volume is predominantly located at the level of subject matter. In terms of methodology and the reconsideration of sensory studies as a viable discipline, there is less of a dialogue between the individual chapters. This, however, is merely a footnote, for, most importantly, Performance and the senses is a significant and ambitious contribution to research on ritual and religious experience.
Events by Amy Penfield
Papers by Amy Penfield
Review of Elizabeth Emma Ferry, Minerals, Collecting, and Value across the US-Mexico Border. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2016
This thesis explores the value of manufactured items among the Sanema, a hunting and horticultura... more This thesis explores the value of manufactured items among the Sanema, a hunting and horticultural people of Southern Venezuela. By extending the ‘virtue ethics’ approach prevalent in the study of Amazonian societies, I suggest that artefacts are as much a component of Sanema virtuous conviviality as corporeal practices. Manufactured items are meaningful in a distinct way to the often-studied crafted artefacts, which are widely seen to embody the human subjectivities of the maker. Instead, the valuable prefabricated properties of industrial goods, which I refer to as ‘affordances’, can allow morality to be conceptualised and materialised. The focus on manufactured items reflects the recent influx of such goods into Sanema lives that feature centrally in their daily narratives of personhood, sociality and ethical practises. In drawing attention to these industrial goods that emerge from the wider national context, I contextualise Sanema experiences within the contemporary setting of ...
Review of Drazin, Adam and Susanne Küchler (eds.) 2015. The social life of materials: studies in materials and society. London and New York: Bloomsbury
Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society, Apr 9, 2020
Indigenous Life Projects and Extractivism, Oct 3, 2018
The image is becoming increasingly familiar: rows of muscled warriors clad with bright feather he... more The image is becoming increasingly familiar: rows of muscled warriors clad with bright feather headdresses and heavy bead collars march forward. Spears are grasped by some, megaphones by others, with those at the centre clutching banners loudly denouncing mining in bright red letters. These are perhaps the more striking-and certainly most wellknown-images of indigenous responses to mining in South America. There are certainly subtler portrayals depicting steadfast but wise spokespersons fighting for the dignity of their people amidst oil prospecting and large-scale gold mining projects on indigenous territory, among them Davi Kopenawa Yanomami of the lowlands and Máxima Acuña de Chaupe of the Andes. Both these forms of representation portray resource extraction as the epitome of environmental degradation, unethical treatment of local communities, and neoliberal power differentials that generate poverty on a global scale (see e.g. Kirsch 2014; Li 2015;
This article explores the nature of interethnic asymmetry and the dynamic of long-term dependence... more This article explores the nature of interethnic asymmetry and the dynamic of long-term dependence in Amazonia. Drawing on the case of the Sanema and their neighbouring Ye’kwana, the article seeks to gain a deeper understanding of submission and indebtedness with a view to re-thinking where the power might lie in such relationships. The association between the two groups, I argue, is motivated by the Sanema’s pursuit of manufactured items, access to which the Ye’kwana had historically monopolized. The dynamic entered into in order to procure these goods is one of voluntary deference on the part of the Sanema, a demeanour that is actively pursued because it enables morally valued autonomy and a freedom from on-going reciprocity. I conclude that this ‘submissive extraction’ can offer new perspectives on the relationship between debt, predation and freedom. Valentín crouched in the dark corner of the Ye’kwana communal house without saying a word. His eyes were fixed firmly on the floor ...
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Journal Articles by Amy Penfield
Book Chapters by Amy Penfield
Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.
into the national and global economies.
Book Reviews by Amy Penfield
Events by Amy Penfield
Papers by Amy Penfield
Amy Penfield spent two and a half years in the field, living with and learning from Sanema communities. She discovered that while predation is what we think it is—invading enemies, incursions by gold miners, and unscrupulous state interventions—Sanema are not merely prey. Predation, or appropriation without reciprocity, is essential to their own activities. They use predatory techniques of trickery in hunting and shamanism activities, while at the same time, they employ tactics of manipulation to obtain resources from neighbors and from the state. A richly detailed ethnography, Predatory Economies looks beyond well-worn tropes of activism and resistance to tell a new story of agency from an Indigenous perspective.
into the national and global economies.