Frontier Intimacies

[A] highly engaging and original work...Paola Canova offers significant new insights in her beautifully detailed account of situated lives and transgressive, racialized desires in one of the continent’s most remote and legendary regions. We come away with admiration for the profound ways in which indigenous peoples, and specifically women, are negotiating the brute force of capitalist commodification of bodies and things in this complex, masculine liminal space of the South American Chaco.

~Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology

This is undoubtedly an ethnography of great significance and impact, both for the field data collected and for the author’s analysis, which allow us to explore one of the many ways in which indigenous modernities are constructed in a context of sharp economic and sociocultural change. Above all, Canova’s book helps to place current indigenous women, with their practices, their experiences, and their discontents, on the center of the stage.

~Journal de la Société des américanistes

A remarkable ethnography that shows precisely what anthropology is capable of doing: illuminating worlds that seem irrational or unsavory and helping the reader see the logic behind them.

~Nancy Postero, University of California, San Diego, author of The Indigenous State: Race, Politics, and Performance in Plurinational Bolivia

In Frontier Intimacies Paola Canova offers an insider’s grasp of colonialism in Paraguay’s Central Chaco to counter the distant gaze of analyses that have assigned curajodie (Ayoreo women that "match intimate relations with economic transactions”) to the 'suffering slot.’ Without shying away from the multiple and interlocking forms of racialized and gendered violence and inequality that characterize life in this ‘frontier,' the book offers a vibrant ethnography of Ayoreo women’s affirmation of agency against the odds. An invaluable contribution to thought in times of #NiUnaMenos and #metoo.

~Mario Blaser, Memorial University of Newfoundland–St John's, author of Storytelling Globalization from the Chaco and Beyond

Pleasant to read...Frontier Intimacies is an excellent ethnography relevant not only for those specialized in Ayoreo or the Chaco but also for those interested in frontier dynamics, with its intertwinement of violence and agency, exploitation and conspicuous consumption, affective bonds and racialized desires.

~Journal of Anthropological Research

This book is an invaluable contribution to knowledge of how extremely marginalised communities develop strategies to function in spaces in which, despite the power of the dominant culture, they develop and perform their own ways to understand gender, labour and sexual intimacy challenging the moral assumptions and economic rules of the dominant society.

~Bulletin of Latin American Research