Sentient Lands

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor of anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad CatÓlica de Chile.

• List of IllustrationsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Sentient LandsPart I. People and Land1. Historical Debts: Race, Land, and Nation Building in Southern Chile2. Being from the Land: Place, Memory, and Experience3. Working the Land: Environmental Anxieties, Care, and the Quest for Endurance4. Owning the Land: Entitlement, Assimilation, and Other Dilemmas of PropertyPart II. Land Claims5. Mapping Ancestral Land: The Power of Documents in Land Claims6. Negotiating Ancestral Land: Claimants, Bureaucrats, and the Realpolitik of Sacredness7. The Future of Ancestral Land: Uncertainties of World Making in a Reclaimed TerritoryGlossaryNotesReferencesIndex

"Sentient Lands is a rewarding read that is both theoretically sophisticated and conceptually innovative. The book deserves to be widely read in anthropology and beyond for its contributions to indigenous studies, land rights, and neoliberal governance in Latin America."—Joe Bryan, The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology"More than a compelling ethnography following one community’s process of land restitution, the book is an important meditation on the relationship between competing ontological views about ancestral indigenous territory."—Patricia Richards, Bulletin of Latin American Research“Di Giminiani offers a compelling and historically grounded exploration of Mapuche territorial claims. He illustrates the importance of understanding these claims in terms of both strategic engagement with neoliberal norms and embodied understandings of land as subject rather than object.”—Kathryn Hicks, Department of Anthropology, University of Memphis“Di Giminiani skillfully describes and analyzes the fragmentation and ambiguities within Mapuche farmers’ lived worlds using theoretical currents from anthropology (e.g., economic and political anthropology, landscape anthropology, and Amazonian and Andean studies) and beyond (e.g., geography and philosophy).”—JosÉ Antonio Kelly, author of State Healthcare and Yanomami Transformations“Deftly interweaving political economy, phenomenology, and the so-called ontological turn in the social sciences, Di Giminiani has produced an ethnography indispensable for understanding the potential role of Indigenous mobilization in the Anthropocene.”—Mario Blaser, Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies, Memorial University of Newfoundland