Note: We are soliciting two additional abstracts in order to submit this panel for consideration as an invited session by the March 1 deadline for invited sessions. To be considered, abstracts need to be received by the panel organizers by Friday, February 26. If the panel is not accepted as an invited session, we will still submit it as a regular session, perhaps in expanded form.

Organizers: Sean T. Mitchell, Rutgers-Newark, NJ (seantmitch@gmail.com)
Evan Killick, University of Sussex, UK (e.killick@sussex.ac.uk)
Chair: Jeremy M. Campbell, Roger Williams University, RI (jeremy.m.campbell@gmail.com)
Discussant: To be Determined

We seek paper abstracts to complete a panel for the 2010 meeting of the American Anthropological Association, The Circulation, Exchange and Politics of the Ecopolitical Future in Amazonia. To be considered for what we hope will be an invited session, we must receive your 250 word abstract by February 26, 2010.

The “lungs of the world,” as the internationally circulating cliché goes, the Amazon is often regarded as crucial to the future of life and climate on planet Earth. Yet what conceptions of the political and environmental future circulate locally in Amazonia? How do these conceptions shape local practice among the many kinds of people and groups who live and act in the contemporary Amazon? And what are the relationships between the ecopolitical futures that are imagined in the Amazon and those that circulate internationally about the region?

The Amazon’s integration into international economic, political and ideological networks is not new for a region which has been linked to various international projects for over half a millennium and which, as the archaeological record has increasingly made clear, has long been made and remade by human intervention. Yet, strangely, much of the ethnographic work on Amazonia has a timeless character, sometimes seeming to focus on uncovering longstanding continuities in the culture and practice of the region’s various populations. This focus appears to have hindered serious analysis of local conceptions of the region’s future and the ways in which it is imagined.

This panel starts from the premise that anthropology is uniquely placed to examine the production and circulation of notions of the ecopolitical future. Anthropologists often start with the uses and conceptions of the environment in particular contexts but their work also connects to the constructed and varied visions of ‘nature’ in global circulation. This movement between the local and global also holds for our consideration of politics. Moreover, anthropological endeavor itself is part of this circulation, feeding various conceptions of the people, politics and environments of the region.

We seek ethnographically-based papers that examine these issues. Please send your 250 word abstract to Sean T. Mitchell (seantmitch@gmail.com) and Evan Killick (e.killick@sussex.ac.uk) by February 26, 2010.