Mobility and Migration in Indigenous Amazonia

Contrary to ingrained academic and public assumptions of indigenous lowland south Americans as historically bound to particular landscapes, there is widespread archaeological, linguistic, ethnobotanical and ethnohistorical evidence to suggest that migration, displacement and dislocation have been the rule, and not the exception. This original and thought-provoking collection of case studies examines some of the ways in which migration, and the concomitant process of ecological and social change, have shaped and continued to shape human-environment relations in Amazonia. Drawing on a wide range of historical time frames (from pre- conquest times to the present) and ethnographic contexts, different chapters examine the complex and important links between migration and the classification, management, and domestication of plants and landscapes, as well as the incorporation and transformation of environmental knowledge, practices, ideologies and identities.

Miguel N. Alexiades is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Kent, Canterbury (UK) and the Cultural Landscapes and Resource Rights Program Manager at People and Plants International (PPI). He is the editor of Selected Guidelines for Ethnobotanical Research: A Field Manual (1996, New York Botanical Garden Press) and Forest Products, Livelihoods and Conservation: Case-Studies of NTFP Systems (2004, Center for International Forestry Research).