Life in Traffic : Women, Plants, and Gold along South America's Interoceanic Highway.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Goldstein, Ruth E.

Series:

California Series in Public Anthropology Series

California Series in Public Anthropology Series ; v.63

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource (342 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Berkeley : University of California Press, 2026.

Summary:

In the year 2000, the presidents of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia agreed to construct the Interoceanic Highway as part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America. Instead of bringing the promised economic benefits to the shared triple-frontier Amazonian region, the highway facilitated trade in extracted natural resources as well as a traffic in women. Centering "traffic" as both an analytic and a method, Ruth E. Goldstein argues that projects like this 3,500-mile highway have deeply gendered effects, reorganizing political economies of sex, nature, kinship, and care. Life in Traffic underscores how markets for women, plants, and gold are not just intersecting phenomena but historically co-constituted economies. Amazonian extractive industries, too, have global ramifications for a warming planet: as rainforests disappear, so do the oxygen-creating, carbon-sequestering, and life-sustaining abilities of Mother Earth.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: On the Road and Vestiges of "Virgin" Wilderness

Chapter 1: The Roots of Plunder

2. Women, Rubber, and Highway Robbery

3. Histories of Conquest, Consent, and the Gender of Progress

4. Collisions, Conflict, and Convivencia

5. Traffic Lines Between the Andes and the Amazon

6. When Mines Are Like Women and Other Riddled Relations

Conclusion: Riddles, Roads, and Life in Traffic

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index.

Notes:

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

9780520427372

OCLC:

1591015614