Book & CD. There are few topics so large yet so uncovered in the academic literature as the Amazon Basin. Much of the area that connects nine South American states, hundreds of indigenous peoples, dozens of multinational corporations, and the worlds lungs, remains unexplored and demographic density is still low. But development throughout the basin has occurred with a ravaging appetite: loggers have decimated parts of the region with their fishbone patterns of extraction; large-scale agribusiness has moved into a power vacuum; coffee and sugar in earlier times -- soya, ranching, and mining industries in more recent times -- have resulted in significant deforestation, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere; and the booms and busts of traditional commodities like rubber latex, nuts and turtle eggs impact negatively on the social and economic structure of the basin. In the background to these developments there is a resurgence of economic nationalism as countries prepare their futures around a pending crisis over food security and global climate change. Hydrocarbons potentials -- the possibility of oil and gas fields underground in Amazonia -- complicate the situation as indigenous communities, sharecroppers, landless peasants, and others advocate for their respective rights, using ancient methods of protest as well as digital activism through the Internet. This important book sets out how the Amazon Basins indigenous self-determination meets corporate profiteering, where the future of natural resource stewardship is hotly debated, where subsistence living, extreme poverty, and the vagaries of the international commodities markets are revealed. The environment and the law is seen to be at the heart of the intersection of sustainable development and unfair trading practices.

Christine Hunefeldt documents in impressive, moving detail the striving and ingenuity, the hard-won triumphs and bitter defeats of slaves who sought liberation in nineteenth-century urban Peru. Drawing on judicial, ecclesiastical, and notarial records-including the testimony of the slaves themselves-she uncovers the various strategies slaves invented to gain their freedom. Hunefeldt pays particular attention to marriage relations and family life. Slaves used their family solidarity as a strategy, while slaveowners used the conflicts within families to prevent manumission. The author's focus on gender relations between slaveowners and slaves, as well as between slaves, is particularly original. Her eye for ethnographic detail and her perceptive reading of the documentary evidence make this book a rich and important contribution to the study of slavery in Latin America. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

How and to what degree are women worldwide gaining and using power? This book offers the first genuinely comparative assessment of this key question by exploring the conditions, actions, and accomplishments of women in Latin America and Asia. Encompassing 60 percent of the world's population and experiencing far-reaching transformations, these two regions offer a vital window into our understanding of the experiences of women globally. Revealing both basic similarities and fundamental differences, this volume offers thoughtful insights about the changing conditions of women, on the one hand, and, on the other, about patterns of social change throughout Asia and Latin America.

This book tells the story of how ordinary Peruvian men and women experienced their lives, and especially their marriages, in a patriarchal society and how, through the struggles involved in divorce, women tried to defend their rights and in the process helped bring about change in society more broadly.

Careful examination of more than one thousand cases of conjugal suits filed in Lima's archbishopric, as well as wills in notarial records, allowed the author to trace over time quarreling spouses' relationships, attitudes, and perceptions of gender, life cycle, race, and class and to study their evolving moral expectations and the varying pace of social change.

The history of this marital dialogue reveals the construction of a new terminology, based on liberal ideas imported from England and France, that found its way into domestic life and influenced how conflicts were perceived and resolved. Far from opening doors for women, liberalism maintained women's inferior status but also shifted the ground on which women waged battles for survival.

By the end of the nineteenth century, many women had concluded that basic patriarchal and Christian arrangements were a sham, and they sought ways to cope within a system rife with hypocrisy. This book shows how women and children, made destitute by intimate tyranny, challenged this tyranny by finding new means of defense and social support.