This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many Indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.  The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental groups and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region.  Contributors: Nancy Postero | César Ceriani Cernadas | Hannes Kalisch | Rodrigo Villagra | Federico Bossert | Paola Canova | Joel Correia | Bret Gustafson | Mercedes Biocca | Silvia Hirsch | Denise Bebbington | Gastón Gordillo | Guido Cortez

The Gran Chaco region of South America constitutes a cultural area that is little known and largely misunderstood by the majority of people living outside its borders. From the earliest period of European contact, the societies under consideration here defended their territory and resisted first colonial and later national policies of domination and assimilation. The unique forms such resistance took constitute the subject of this book. Contrary to common assumptions, the hunter-gatherer values forged out of a unique environment have shown remarkable resilience throughout the centuries. It is the variety and relentless nature of cultural resistance that is documented in the various chapters presented here. The points of view expressed are those of scholars trained in a variety of academic settings (England, Sweden, U.S., Argentina) each with its unique perspective and frame of reference. Four of the seven writers are Argentine, three of whom have received training and experience in the U.S. Yet, it is the individual voices of indigenous people themselves that tell the story of contemporary life as experienced in the various societies concerned. They tell about the conditions that shape their lives and engender resistance to full assimilation into the white man's world. These are the voices of the future.

Examines the inscription of historical forces in the senses of place of the Tobas, an indigenous people of the Argentinean Chaco region whose recent history has been torn between exploitation in sugar plantations and relative autonomy in the bush.

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In Paraguay’s Chaco region, cattle ranching drives some of the world’s fastest deforestation and most extreme inequality in land tenure, with grave impacts on Indigenous well‑being. Disrupting the Patrón traces Enxet and Sanapaná struggles to reclaim their ancestral lands from the cattle ranches where they labored as peons—a decades-long resistance that led to the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights and back to the frontlines of Paraguay’s ranching frontier. The Indigenous communities at the heart of this story employ a dialectics of disruption by working with and against the law to unsettle enduring racial geographies and rebuild territorial relations, albeit with uncertain outcomes. Joel E. Correia shows that Enxet and Sanapaná peoples enact environmental justice otherwise: moving beyond juridical solutions to harm by maintaining collective lifeways and resistance amid radical social-ecological change. Correia’s ethnography advances debates about environmental racism, ethics of engaged research, and Indigenous resurgence on Latin America’s settler frontiers.