Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon ─ The Kayapo's Fight for Just Livelihoods

Indigenous groups are facing unprecedented global challenges in this time of unparalleled environmental and geopolitical change, a time that has intensified human rights concerns and called for political and economic restructuring. Within this landscape of struggle, the Kayapo, an indigenous nation in the central Brazilian Amazon, emerge as leaders in the fight.

Radical Territories in the Brazilian Amazon sheds light on the creative and groundbreaking efforts Kayapo peoples deploy to protect their lands and livelihoods. Now at the front lines of cultivating diversified strategies for resitance, the Kayapo are creating a powerful activist base, experimenting with non-timber forest projects, and forging strong community-conservation partnerships. Tracing the complex politics of the Kayapo’s homeland, Laura Zanotti advances approaches to understanding how indigenous peoples cultivate self-determination strategies in conflict-ridden landscapes.

Kayapo peoples are providing a countervision of what Amazonia can look like in the twenty-first century—neither dominated by agro-industrial interests nor by protected, uninhabited landscapes. Instead, Kayapo peoples see their homeland as a living landscape where indigenous vision engages with broader claims for conservation and development in the region.

Weaving together anthropological and ethnographic research with personal interactions with the Kayapo, Zanotti tells the story of activism and justice in the Brazilian Amazon, and how Kayapo communities are using diverse pathways to make a sustainable future for their peoples and lands. The author interweaves Kayapo perspectives with a political ecology framework to show how working with indigenous peoples is vital to addressing national and global challenges in the present time, when many environmentally significant conditions and processes are profoundly altered by human activities.

Laura Zanotti is an associate professor of anthropology at Purdue University. She is the co-editor of Negotiating Territoriality: Spatial Dialogues Between State and Tradition. She is an environmental anthropologist who partners with communities to examine how local livelihoods and well-being can be sustained in a just future. She has partnered with the Kayapo, an indigenous community in Brazil, for more than ten years. She is currently working on global projects on “media sovereignty” and digital landscapes, environmental justice, and valuing nature, and community resilience and healing.