Translating Worlds, Defending Land - by Casey High

About the Book

"In 2019, after decades of ecological damage from oil, Waorani people took to the streets of Amazonian Ecuador to protest drilling on their ancestral lands. Working with international activists, lawyers, and other Indigenous groups, they successfully sued the government for selling oil concessions without prior consent. Placing their struggle for territorial autonomy in the global spotlight, this unprecedented legal victory for environmental rights by an Indigenous people reflected the new forms of collaboration emerging in contemporary Amazonia. Translating Worlds, Defending Land explores how Waorani collaborations, whether with environmentalists or academic researchers, bring about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons. Based on fieldwork over a period of twenty-five years, Casey High interrogates what these engagements mean for Indigenous communities and how they offer critical reflection on collaboration as a concept, method, and practice. The alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflect--or require--shared purposes, generating important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. As some young Waorani adults become not just community leaders or environmental citizens, but also skilled researchers and ethnographers, translating between Indigenous understandings of land and the Western language conservation, they create a powerful new voice in international environmental politics"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

In 2019, after decades of ecological damage from oil, Waorani people took to the streets of Amazonian Ecuador to protest drilling on their ancestral lands. Working with international activists, lawyers, and other Indigenous groups, they successfully sued the government for selling oil concessions without prior consent. Placing their struggle for territorial autonomy in the global spotlight, this unprecedented legal victory for environmental rights by an Indigenous people reflected the new forms of collaboration emerging in contemporary Amazonia. Translating Worlds, Defending Land explores how Waorani collaborations, whether with environmentalists or academic researchers, bring about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons.

Based on fieldwork over a period of twenty-five years, Casey High interrogates what these engagements mean for Indigenous communities and how they offer critical reflection on collaboration as a concept, method, and practice. The alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflect-or require-shared purposes, generating important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. As some young Waorani adults become not just community leaders or environmental citizens, but also skilled researchers and ethnographers, translating between Indigenous understandings of land and the Western language conservation, they create a powerful new voice in international environmental politics.

Review Quotes

"Casey High offers us a brilliant ethnography in the form of fluid and intimate writing, which makes the book a page turner. What we see in these pages is the inauguration of a new line of anthropological reflection, in which collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous people ceases to be a simple method and becomes the very object of analysis." --Aparecida Vilaça, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

"In this thought-provoking meditation on the dynamics of collaboration, Casey High explores what it means for anthropology and anthropologists when our epistemic partners start doing ethnography their own way, for their own ends." --Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan

"Narrating in Waorani lands (that are also Ecuadorian), this strong and delicate ethnography also narrates us. Relentlessly written from a 'complex we' the stories it tells make it clear that 'we' have interlocutors and are interlocutors and that therefore, 'we' tell stories about 'them' that are also about 'us'... ethnographic relations as moebius strip!" --Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis

About the Author

Casey High is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Victims and Warriors: Violence, History and Memory in Amazonia (2015).