The University of Arizona Press

In Persistence of Good Living: A’uwe Life Cycles and Well-Being in the Central Brazilian Cerrados, anthropologist James R. Welch transparently presents ethnographic insights from his long-term fieldwork in two A’uwẽ communities. He addresses how distinctive constructions of age organization contribute to social well-being in an era of major ecological, economic, and sociocultural change. Welch shows how A’uwẽ perspectives on the human life cycle help define ethnic identity, promote cultural resilience, and encourage the betterment of youth.

Through careful analysis, Welch shows how contemporary traditional peoples can foster enthusiasm for service to family and community amid dominant cultures that prioritize individual well-being.

Urban Indigeneities: Being Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century is the first book to look at urban Indigenous peoples globally and present the urban Indigenous experience—not as the exception but as the norm. Edited by Dana Brablec and Andrew Canessa, the contributing essays draw on a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, architecture, land economy, and area studies, and are written by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. The analysis looks at Indigenous people across the world and draws on examples not usually considered within the study of indigeneity, such as Fiji, Japan, and Russia.

Based on a decade of ethnographic and archival research in Peru, The Unequal Ocean: Living with Environmental Change along the Peruvian Coast reveals how prevailing representations of the ocean obscure racialized disparities and the ways that different people experience the impacts of the climate crisis.

Maximilian Viatori analyzes a multitude of timely topics, including waves and coastal development, the circulation of ocean waste, El Niño warming events, and the extraction of jumbo squid. This book also addresses expanding scholarly interest in the world’s oceans as sites for thinking about social inequities, environmental politics, and multispecies relationships.

Urban life has long intrigued Indigenous Amazonians, who regard cities as the locus of both extraordinary power and danger. Modern and ancient cities alike have thus become models for the representation of extreme alterity under the guise of supernatural enchanted cities. In Urban Imaginaries in Native Amazonia: Tales of Alterity, Power, and Defiance, editors Fernando Santos-Granero and Emanuele Fabiano seek to analyze how these ambiguous urban imaginaries—complex representations that function as cognitive tools and blueprints for social action—express a singular view of cosmopolitical relations, how they inform and shape forest-city interactions, and the history of how they came into existence.

The Carbon Calculation examines how climate science, the policy world, and neoliberalism have mutually informed each other to define the problem of climate change as one of “market failure”—precluding alternatives to market-based solutions.

Raquel Rodrigues Machaqueiro critically highlights the ways in which politics has reinforced a scientific focus on one possible solution to the problem of climate change—namely those that largely absolve the industrialized world from undertaking politically painful transformations in its own economic model.

Continually recognized as one of the “hottest” of all the world’s biodiversity hotspots, the island of Madagascar has become ground zero for the most intensive market-based conservation interventions on Earth. Hottest of the Hotspots: The Rise of Eco-precarious Conservation Labor in Madagascar details the rollout of market conservation programs, including the finding of drugs from nature—or “bioprospecting”—biodiversity offsetting, and the selling of blue carbon credits from mangroves. It documents the tensions that exist at the local level, as many of these programs incorporate populations highly dependent on the same biodiversity now turned into global commodities for purposes of saving it. Providing a voice for those community workers many times left out of environmental policy discussions, Benjamin Neimark proposes critiques that aim to build better conservation interventions with perspectives of the local eco-precariat.

Challenging traditional and long-standing understandings, Our Hidden Landscapes: Indigenous Stone Ceremonial Sites in Eastern North America provides an important new lens for interpreting stone structures that had previously been attributed to settler colonialism. Instead, the contributors to this volume argue that these locations are sacred Indigenous sites.

Editors Lucianne Lavin and Elaine Thomas introduce readers to eastern North America’s Indigenous ceremonial stone landscapes (CSLs)—sacred sites whose principal identifying characteristics are built stone structures that cluster within specific physical landscapes, presenting these often unrecognized sites as significant cultural landscapes in need of protection and preservation.