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"In this engaging book, Stephen Nugent offers the first in-depth historical anthropology of the most widely recognised feature of the Amazonian region - the dramatic rise and fall of the Amazon rubber industry, Examining rubber in the Amazon from the perspective of a long-term extractive industry that linked remote forest tappers to technical innovations central to the industrial transformation of Europe and North America, the book emphasizes the links between the social landscape of Amazonia and the global economy. It challenges widely held assumptions about the hyper-naturalism of the 'lost world' of the Amazon where 'the challenge of the tropics' is still to be faced and the 'frontiers of development' are still to be settled. Through a critical examination focused around the rubber industry, Nugent addresses myths that continue to influence perceptions of Amazonia. This book should be required reading for all those interested in the Amazon, and will be relevant to scholars of anthropology, political ecology, geography, history of Latin America, the industrial revolution, and development studies."--Provided by publisher

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: Marxism in the American Anthropological Tradition -- Part II: The Debate about the Articulation of Modes of Production -- Part III: Dependency Theory, World Systems Theory and Pre-history -- Part IV: The Development of Peasantries under Capitalism -- Part V: The Crisis of Representation and Writing Culture -- Part VI: Working over History: Cultural Idealism and Materialism -- Part VII: Fighting over Commodities and History -- About the Editor

The Amazon Indian is an icon that straddles the world between the professional anthropologist and the popular media. Presented alternately as the noble primitive, the savior of the environment, and as a savage, dissolute, cannibalistic half-human, it is an image well worth examining. Stephen Nugent does just that, critiquing the claims of authoritativeness inherent in visual images presented by anthropologists of Amazon life in the early 20th century and comparing them with the images found in popular books, movies, and posters. The book depicts the field of anthropology as its own form o

"Important study examines peasant/caboclo society of the lower Brazilian Amazon, a largely neglected population in the anthropological literature on Amazonia. After discussing various representations of caboclos as 'marginal societies,' analysis focuses on local community organization, economic processes, and their relation to national development. Finally, author discusses implications of recent proposals for sustainable development for deconstructing the 'invisibility' of the caboclo"--Handbook of Latin American Studies, v. 57

The primary topic in this discussion is the brief career of anthropological structural Marxism and the possibility of its continued relevance. That issue is framed by a more general one: on what basis are explanatory theories adopted and discarded in anthropology? The discussion of structural Marxism is framed within recent debates about the desirability of socio‐cultural anthropology's traditional associations with other sub‐fields of anthropology, and it is argued that the isolation of sub‐fields is a regressive theoretical move.