Life on the Amazon

This is an innovative contribution to anthropology's interest in how identity is created and defined. Dr Harris uses two forms of ethnographic writing to explore the historical and social identity of a village of caboclo fisherpeople who live on the banks on the River Amazon. He intersperses his analytical chapters with narrative sections that describe more freely what the people do and how they do it. He thus moves beyond notions of identity that define themselves in collective, ethnic or class terms, by focusing on people's practical engagement with their environment. As the first full-length study of a modern Amazonian floodplain peasantry, this volume also contributes to debates in ecological and economic anthropology and to studies of the peasantry in Latin America.