Enchanted Forests, Entangled Lives. Spirits, Peasant Economies, and Violence in Northwest Amazonia

"This thesis describes the enchanted, sylvan world of a peasant community from La Macarena, a municipality located in the Colombian Northwest Amazonia. These peasants experience the forest as an animated place, inhabited by different spiritual, animal, and non-human beings with whom they have to deal in order to access some indispensable resources. In this manner, more than a natural place, the forest stands as an intricate network where humans, animals, plants, and spirits have to constantly interact. The value of these social interactions shapes the ways in which peasants use forest resources, engage with particular places, and relate with their neighbours. The enchantment of the forest refers to two different things: firstly, to a set of ontological premises in which places, spirits, and animals are experienced as imbued with agency and personhood. Secondly, to the way in which unequal economic and social forces have been bind together under specific historical conditions in a place as La Macarena. The approach used for describing these sylvan agencies not only concerns the social world of people but also the part of the natural world--i.e. the forest-- with which they interact. By so doing, this ethnography deal with how colonialist imageries of landscapes, extractive economies, and political violence shape the way peasants conceive and manage the forest; but also with how some proprieties of the forest--ecology, patterns of resources distribution-- shape, constraining or amplifying, how people engage with both their natural and social worlds. Through the examination of peasant economic activities such as fur trade, logging, and hunting, the thesis suggests that the enchantment is not only the result of how society, economy, and history permeate landscapes; instead, that such enchantment is closely linked to the way in which ecology is able to shape peasant ontology." --