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Extraction, Conservation, and Household Multiplicity in the Peruvian Amazon

Ulmer, Gordon Lewis, Ulmer
http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8959-7274
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1529926126999277

Abstract Details

2018, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Anthropology.
Thousands of Andean peasants migrated to the Peruvian Amazon to work in artisanal and small-scale mining as the international price of gold quadrupled in the 21st century. During this time, gold surpassed cocaine in revenue and usurped its place as Peru’s most profitable illicit export commodity. Amidst the gold rush, the past decade also witnessed a growing ecotourism economy that has capitalized on protection of areas with high rates of biodiversity in the Madre de Dios region. In this dissertation, I examine how contingent laborers and their households adapt to global processes of natural resource extraction and biodiversity conservation as they make a living in a rapidly developing region of the Peruvian Amazon where ecotourism and extraction are concurrently booming markets. Green business entrepreneurs, environmental NGOs, and other influential social actors in the region frame extraction and conservation as “contradictory forces” to promote ecotourism and other market-based conservation initiatives as the best responses to unbridled resource extraction. However, my research demonstrates that many households are unencumbered that these work opportunities are seemingly divergent or contradictory. Moreover, I show that households adopt creative strategies of shifting between formal and informal economies as they manage their precarity and work towards greater social mobility. In this monograph, I synthesize political economies of labor, household ecology, and social reproduction theory to construct a framework for understanding how families adapt to the concurrently booming economies of extraction and conservation. This framework helps to understand the agency of social actors in relation to the broader structural forces that limit their opportunities, from the household to the global economy. I identify how extractive lifestyles of the household are transmitted across generations and internalized by young individuals struggling to find their place in a rapidly changing world. This dissertation utilizes a combination of ethnographic methods including life-story narrative elicitation, shadowing, free lists exercises, multimedia elicitation, and digital modalities to understand the myriad forces that shape decision-making about work in extraction and conservation.
Jeffrey Cohen (Advisor)
Michelle Wibbelsman (Committee Member)
Nicholas Kawa (Committee Member)
133 p.
Behavioral Sciences; Cultural Anthropology
informal economies; households; labor; social reproduction; precarity; resource extraction, biodiversity conservation; ecotourism; Peru; Amazonia; Madre de Dios

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Ulmer, Ulmer, G. L. (2018). Extraction, Conservation, and Household Multiplicity in the Peruvian Amazon [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1529926126999277

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Ulmer, Ulmer, Gordon. Extraction, Conservation, and Household Multiplicity in the Peruvian Amazon . 2018. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1529926126999277.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Ulmer, Ulmer, Gordon. "Extraction, Conservation, and Household Multiplicity in the Peruvian Amazon ." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1529926126999277

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1529926126999277
128
© 2018, some rights reserved.Creative Commons License Extraction, Conservation, and Household Multiplicity in the Peruvian Amazon by Gordon Lewis Ulmer Ulmer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at etd.ohiolink.edu.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.