Michael Cepek | University of Texas at San Antonio (original) (raw)
Papers by Michael Cepek
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of ... more part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Increased conservation action to protect more habitat and species is fueling a vigorous debate ab... more Increased conservation action to protect more habitat and species is fueling a vigorous debate about the relative effectiveness of different sorts of protected areas. Here we review the literature that compares the effectiveness of protected areas managed by states and areas managed by Indigenous peoples and/or local communities. We argue that these can be hard comparisons to make. Robust comparative case studies are rare, and the epistemic communities producing them are fractured by language, discipline, and geography. Furthermore the distinction between these different forms of protection on the ground can be blurred. We also have to be careful about the value of this sort of comparison as the consequences of different forms of conservation for people and nonhuman nature are messy and diverse. Measures of effectiveness, moreover, focus on specific dimensions of conservation performance, which can omit other important dimensions. With these caveats, we report on findings observed b...
American Anthropologist, 2014
The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, Nina G. Jablonski's second book on this critical... more The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, Nina G. Jablonski's second book on this critical topic of skin, expands our current knowledge of how the biological intersects with the social meanings of skin color. Her Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context. Robin Maria DeLugan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. viii + 157 pp.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Sociologia & Antropologia, 2020
Thesis (B.A.)--Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.Includes bibliographical referenc... more Thesis (B.A.)--Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.Includes bibliographical reference (leaves 63-70)U of I OnlyTheses restricted to UIUC community onl
Anthropology and Humanism, 2020
Constellations of Inequality explores a fascinating object: a Brazilian rocket-launching facility... more Constellations of Inequality explores a fascinating object: a Brazilian rocket-launching facility that places quilombolas (descendants of escaped slaves) into tense relations with state officials, military officers, engineers, activists, lawyers, and scholars. By centering quilombola perspectives on the spaceport land's double existence as the foundation of quilombola life and as a key site for national technocratic aspirations, Mitchell produces essential insights into the experience of inequality and the formation of political consciousness. The spaceport is on the Alcântara peninsula, a poor region that is a stronghold of quilombola culture and history. When the government began building the facility in 1986, it lured more than 1,500 quilombolas off the land with false promises of progress and enrichment. Mitchell traces the consequences of this displacement as well as the continuous threats to expand it. At its heart, Constellations of Inequality is about how the Afro-Brazilians of Alcântara are responding to the spaceport's unequal consequences by forging a political consciousness based on ethno-racial identity (as quilombolas and negros) rather than class (as poor, rural workers). The process is contemporary and classic. Mitchell takes E. P. Thompson's approach to the making of the English working class as a model for understanding how "material conditions" interact with cultural and experiential factors to produce unique forms of political consciousness. Mitchell's book is no simple community-based ethnography, though its portraits of quilombola life are vivid and engrossing. Constellations of Inequality is more about the conceptions of inequality and "utopias of redress" that Brazilians employ to see beyond their supposed lot in life. For many Brazilians, Mitchell argues, the concept of "mimetic convergence" is on the wane. The phrase refers to the idea that Brazil and its citizens will achieve equality by mimicking aspects of local and global powers, whether the cultural qualities of white Brazilian elites or the techno-military prowess of the United States. Quilombolas no longer believe they can achieve equality by surrendering their identity through cultural "whitening." Even though the allure of mimetic convergence compelled nationalist officials to build the spaceport in the 1980s, many Brazilians now
Choice Reviews Online, 2008
Identities, 2009
In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy B... more In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy Borman, the "gringo chief" of the indigenous Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Born to North American missionary-linguists, Borman grew up in Cofán communities, attended school in urban Ecuador and the United States, and developed into the most important Cofán activist on the global stage. I consider him alongside other ethnically ambiguous leaders of Amazonian political movements, whom anthropologists have described as "messianic" figures. The historians and ethnographers who write about Amazonian messianism debate the relationship between myth and reason in indigenous political action. Using their discussion as a starting point, I propose the concept of "mythical politics," a type of transformative action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in the shape of individual actors and instantaneous events. I develop my approach through a discussion of the work of Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, three theorists who debate the role of myth in political mobilization. By applying their insights to the case of Borman, I explore the relationship between myth, mediation, and rationality in Cofán politics and political movements more generally.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2010
Anthropological Quarterly, 2008
Norman E. Whitten Jr. & Dorothea Scott Whitten, Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazon... more Norman E. Whitten Jr. & Dorothea Scott Whitten, Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 336 pp. Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia represents the culmination of four decades of collaborative research by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten. In their analysis of the cultural patterns and political actions of eastern Ecuador's Canelos Quichua people, the Whittens use fine-grained ethnography to challenge the assumptions of academic anthropologists, governmental planners, and political observers and theorists. As a convincing and accessible account of one people's struggle to comprehend and overcome the challenges of colonial history and a tumultuous geopolitical moment, Puyo Runa stands as a powerful argument for the essential perspective that only long-term, rigorous, and imaginative ethnography can provide. Puyo Runa's eponymous objects are "Puyo Runa," Canelos Quichua people who live in and around the booming town of Puyo, capital of Ecuador's Pastaza province. Part of the Whittens' mission in Puyo Runa is to explore the perduring cultural orientations of the Canelos Quichua while positioning them within a historically developing and regionally articulated ethnic system. Rather than essentialize them as a hermetically sealed "tribe," the Whittens describe them as "a sustained cultural moment of ethnogenetic emergence" (xii) that joins Achuar Jivaroan, Andoa-Zaparoan, and other linguistic and cultural trajectories from within and beyond Ecuador's borders. As portrayed by the Whittens, Puyo Runa are historically engaged, politically committed, culturally creative, and firmly grounded in a dynamic Amazonian lifeway. In the Preface, the Whittens write that Puyo Runa aims "to understand the modern and millennial dimensions of increasingly self-essentialized cultural systems in a setting of wrenching national transformation and competing macro-ideologies" (ix). Over the course of the book's nine chapters, the Whittens pursue this objective by traversing a variety of contexts: Canelos Quichua households, villages, gardens, and forests; protest events in lowland communities and the national capital; and international encounters of various scales. As in the Whittens' previous work, the true gems of Puyo Runa are the thickly detailed accounts of central sociocultural phenomena, including everyday forms of sociality, collective ritual events, styles of ceramic production, and the complementary creativity of male shamans and female potters. …
American Ethnologist, 2011
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonia... more In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian Ecuador's Cofán people to question the concept of "environmentality": the idea that environmentalist programs and movements operate as forms of governmentality in Michel Foucault's sense. I argue that, although the Field Museum's community conservation projects constitute a regulatory rationale and technique, they do not transform Cofán subjectivity according to plan. By exploring Cofán people's critical consciousness of environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt on the governmentality paradigm's utility for analyzing the complexities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change. [governmentality, environmentality, indigenous conservation, environmental management, Amazonia]
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of ... more part of the material is concerned, specifi cally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfi lms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifi c statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Annual Review of Environment and Resources
Increased conservation action to protect more habitat and species is fueling a vigorous debate ab... more Increased conservation action to protect more habitat and species is fueling a vigorous debate about the relative effectiveness of different sorts of protected areas. Here we review the literature that compares the effectiveness of protected areas managed by states and areas managed by Indigenous peoples and/or local communities. We argue that these can be hard comparisons to make. Robust comparative case studies are rare, and the epistemic communities producing them are fractured by language, discipline, and geography. Furthermore the distinction between these different forms of protection on the ground can be blurred. We also have to be careful about the value of this sort of comparison as the consequences of different forms of conservation for people and nonhuman nature are messy and diverse. Measures of effectiveness, moreover, focus on specific dimensions of conservation performance, which can omit other important dimensions. With these caveats, we report on findings observed b...
American Anthropologist, 2014
The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, Nina G. Jablonski's second book on this critical... more The Biological and Social Meaning of Skin Color, Nina G. Jablonski's second book on this critical topic of skin, expands our current knowledge of how the biological intersects with the social meanings of skin color. Her Reimagining National Belonging: Post-Civil War El Salvador in a Global Context. Robin Maria DeLugan. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012. viii + 157 pp.
Journal of Latin American Geography, 2018
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory
Sociologia & Antropologia, 2020
Thesis (B.A.)--Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.Includes bibliographical referenc... more Thesis (B.A.)--Univeristy of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996.Includes bibliographical reference (leaves 63-70)U of I OnlyTheses restricted to UIUC community onl
Anthropology and Humanism, 2020
Constellations of Inequality explores a fascinating object: a Brazilian rocket-launching facility... more Constellations of Inequality explores a fascinating object: a Brazilian rocket-launching facility that places quilombolas (descendants of escaped slaves) into tense relations with state officials, military officers, engineers, activists, lawyers, and scholars. By centering quilombola perspectives on the spaceport land's double existence as the foundation of quilombola life and as a key site for national technocratic aspirations, Mitchell produces essential insights into the experience of inequality and the formation of political consciousness. The spaceport is on the Alcântara peninsula, a poor region that is a stronghold of quilombola culture and history. When the government began building the facility in 1986, it lured more than 1,500 quilombolas off the land with false promises of progress and enrichment. Mitchell traces the consequences of this displacement as well as the continuous threats to expand it. At its heart, Constellations of Inequality is about how the Afro-Brazilians of Alcântara are responding to the spaceport's unequal consequences by forging a political consciousness based on ethno-racial identity (as quilombolas and negros) rather than class (as poor, rural workers). The process is contemporary and classic. Mitchell takes E. P. Thompson's approach to the making of the English working class as a model for understanding how "material conditions" interact with cultural and experiential factors to produce unique forms of political consciousness. Mitchell's book is no simple community-based ethnography, though its portraits of quilombola life are vivid and engrossing. Constellations of Inequality is more about the conceptions of inequality and "utopias of redress" that Brazilians employ to see beyond their supposed lot in life. For many Brazilians, Mitchell argues, the concept of "mimetic convergence" is on the wane. The phrase refers to the idea that Brazil and its citizens will achieve equality by mimicking aspects of local and global powers, whether the cultural qualities of white Brazilian elites or the techno-military prowess of the United States. Quilombolas no longer believe they can achieve equality by surrendering their identity through cultural "whitening." Even though the allure of mimetic convergence compelled nationalist officials to build the spaceport in the 1980s, many Brazilians now
Choice Reviews Online, 2008
Identities, 2009
In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy B... more In this article, I investigate the sociocultural grounding and sociopolitical position of Randy Borman, the "gringo chief" of the indigenous Cofán people of Amazonian Ecuador. Born to North American missionary-linguists, Borman grew up in Cofán communities, attended school in urban Ecuador and the United States, and developed into the most important Cofán activist on the global stage. I consider him alongside other ethnically ambiguous leaders of Amazonian political movements, whom anthropologists have described as "messianic" figures. The historians and ethnographers who write about Amazonian messianism debate the relationship between myth and reason in indigenous political action. Using their discussion as a starting point, I propose the concept of "mythical politics," a type of transformative action that concentrates enabling forms of socio-temporal mediation in the shape of individual actors and instantaneous events. I develop my approach through a discussion of the work of Georges Sorel, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci, three theorists who debate the role of myth in political mobilization. By applying their insights to the case of Borman, I explore the relationship between myth, mediation, and rationality in Cofán politics and political movements more generally.
Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2010
Anthropological Quarterly, 2008
Norman E. Whitten Jr. & Dorothea Scott Whitten, Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazon... more Norman E. Whitten Jr. & Dorothea Scott Whitten, Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008. 336 pp. Puyo Runa: Imagery and Power in Modern Amazonia represents the culmination of four decades of collaborative research by Norman E. Whitten Jr. and Dorothea Scott Whitten. In their analysis of the cultural patterns and political actions of eastern Ecuador's Canelos Quichua people, the Whittens use fine-grained ethnography to challenge the assumptions of academic anthropologists, governmental planners, and political observers and theorists. As a convincing and accessible account of one people's struggle to comprehend and overcome the challenges of colonial history and a tumultuous geopolitical moment, Puyo Runa stands as a powerful argument for the essential perspective that only long-term, rigorous, and imaginative ethnography can provide. Puyo Runa's eponymous objects are "Puyo Runa," Canelos Quichua people who live in and around the booming town of Puyo, capital of Ecuador's Pastaza province. Part of the Whittens' mission in Puyo Runa is to explore the perduring cultural orientations of the Canelos Quichua while positioning them within a historically developing and regionally articulated ethnic system. Rather than essentialize them as a hermetically sealed "tribe," the Whittens describe them as "a sustained cultural moment of ethnogenetic emergence" (xii) that joins Achuar Jivaroan, Andoa-Zaparoan, and other linguistic and cultural trajectories from within and beyond Ecuador's borders. As portrayed by the Whittens, Puyo Runa are historically engaged, politically committed, culturally creative, and firmly grounded in a dynamic Amazonian lifeway. In the Preface, the Whittens write that Puyo Runa aims "to understand the modern and millennial dimensions of increasingly self-essentialized cultural systems in a setting of wrenching national transformation and competing macro-ideologies" (ix). Over the course of the book's nine chapters, the Whittens pursue this objective by traversing a variety of contexts: Canelos Quichua households, villages, gardens, and forests; protest events in lowland communities and the national capital; and international encounters of various scales. As in the Whittens' previous work, the true gems of Puyo Runa are the thickly detailed accounts of central sociocultural phenomena, including everyday forms of sociality, collective ritual events, styles of ceramic production, and the complementary creativity of male shamans and female potters. …
American Ethnologist, 2011
In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonia... more In this article, I analyze the encounter between the Field Museum of Natural History and Amazonian Ecuador's Cofán people to question the concept of "environmentality": the idea that environmentalist programs and movements operate as forms of governmentality in Michel Foucault's sense. I argue that, although the Field Museum's community conservation projects constitute a regulatory rationale and technique, they do not transform Cofán subjectivity according to plan. By exploring Cofán people's critical consciousness of environmentalist interventions, I aim to cast doubt on the governmentality paradigm's utility for analyzing the complexities of cultural difference, intercultural encounter, and directed change. [governmentality, environmentality, indigenous conservation, environmental management, Amazonia]