Full Description
Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Matses, a group of hunter-gatherer forest dwellers who have lived in voluntary isolation until fairly recently. Having worked with them for over a decade, returning every year to their villages in the rainforest, Camilla Morelli follows closely the life-trajectories of Matses children, watching them shift away from the forest-based lifestyles of their elders and move towards new horizons crisscrossed by concrete paving, lit by the glow of electric lights and television screens, and centered around urban practices and people. The book uses drawings and photographs taken by the children themselves to trace the children's journeys-lived and imagined-from their own perspectives, proposing an ethnographic analysis that recognizes children's imaginations, play, and shifting desires as powerful catalysts of social change.
Contents
Foreword by RoldÁn DunÚ Tumi DËsi
Introduction
1 The Child in the Forest: A Glimpse into the Childhood
of the Past
2 River Horizons: Moving toward the Big Water
3 The Sound of Inequality: Children as Agents
of Economic Change
4 Consuelo's Dolls: Shifting Desires and the Subversion
of Womanhood
5 Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Rainforest:
The Spoken Weapons of Masculinity
6 Yearning for Concrete: Children's Imagination
as a Catalyst for Change
7 Urban Futures: When Dreams of Concrete
Come True
Conclusion
Afterword by RoldÁn DunÚ Tumi DËsi
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index
