Predatory Economies

A great read that goes beyond well-rehearsed ideas about Amazonian cosmology to explain why concepts such as predation are integral to the means by which Amazonian people engage with their neighbors, the state, and extractive economies. Rather than simply dwelling on differences between Penfield’s Sanema informants and other Venezuelans, her detailed and textured ethnography shows how the state and its promises are imbricated in people’s lives, hopes, frustrations, and failures. This is exactly the kind of book that helps contextualize and give substance to key concepts that have emerged in regional scholarship in recent years. Its clear and engaging presentation, along with its depiction of Amazonian people living at the margins of wider Latin American political and economic processes, guarantees this book’s importance beyond the field of Amazonian ethnography. I very much look forward to using it in my courses.

— Casey High, University of Edinburgh, author of Victims and Warriors: Violence, History, and Memory in Amazonia

Predatory Economies is an utterly engaging story of Sanema lives entangled in predation and desire amid the rush of gold, oil, and gasoline in Bolivarian Venezuela. Penfield brilliantly combines the best traditions of Amazonian ethnography with an astute analysis of the wider tentacles of predatory capitalism, offering a Sanema lesson on the ills wrought by the fever of endless growth. 

— Bret Gustafson, Washington University in St. Louis, author of New Languages of the State: Indigenous Resurgence and the Politics of Knowledge in Bolivia

Penfield’s work demonstrates the value of conducting holistic, interethnic-focused, and system-based anthropological work in grasping the difficulties and necessities of state-based citizenship acts, many of which resist the machinery of capitalism while falling prey to some of the same strategies they utilize.

— CHOICE