RT Journal Article
T1 Timber industry, cosmopolitics, and ontology of trees in Peruvian Amazon
A1 Pérez Gil, Laura
AB Since they were first contacted in the early 1960s, the Yaminawa people of Comunidad Nativa de Raya (Mapuya River, Peruvian Amazon) have been involved in the timber exploitation industry. Over the following decades, most of the Raya men were recruited to locate, cut, and transport valuable timber resources in the forest and even to become minor bosses within the habilitación system. This seems, in some way, contradictory with their sociocosmology that shares perspectival features with those of other Amerindians. Certain animals and plants have agency, desires, and habits analogous to humans and play a central role in the process of the social fabrication of persons. I focus here on some species of large trees and their ontology. Their relationship with human beings should be characterized as ambivalent. On the one hand, they have an intense predatory agency; on the other, they are the source of shamanic power. On the basis of this conception of the vegetal world, I explore the transformation of ideas about the agency of trees in recent decades, which occurred in interaction with the cosmology of the regional society, and enquire about how the Yaminawa people articulate the existence of these predatory human-like tree entities with their, also predatory, involvement in the timber industry
PB Society of Ethnobiology, Sage Journals
SN 0278-0771
SN 2162-4496
YR 2024
FD 2024-09-02
LK https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/131506
UL https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/131506
LA eng
NO Pérez Gil, L. (2024). Timber Industry, Cosmopolitics, and Ontology of Trees in Peruvian Amazon. Journal of Ethnobiology, 44(4), 392-401. https://doi.org/10.1177/02780771241277630 (Original work published 2024)
DS Docta Complutense
RD 1 abr 2026