This book provides in-depth insights into the construction of the first road to reach riparian communities and the main access point to a national park in the Amazonian rain forest. It is based on an ethnographic investigation in Peru’s Manu Province in the Amazon, which explored diverse local attitudes towards the construction of a road in the overlapping buffer zone of two protected areas: the Manu National Park and the Amarakaeri Communal Reserve.
The book reveals the applicability of Harvey and Knox’s concept of ‘enchantments of infrastructure’ in the case of first roads, but also makes accessible wider debates in political ecology such as territoriality and frontier development. The promise of first roads sparks feelings of aspiration and anticipation of the advent of development through speedy travel, economic connectivity and political integration. Yet these developments seldom take shape as expected. The author explores the perspectives, social dynamicsand political maneuvers that influence first road building processes in the Amazon, which have applicability to experiences and strategies of road development elsewhere.
Author Biography:
Eduardo Salazar Moreira is a PhD student at the School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. After two years working for a not-for-profit organization in the Manu province of Peru’s southern Amazon, Eduardo began his research about the Manu Road as part of the MSc in Environment and Development at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. His Master’s dissertation is the basis for this book and the research he will continue to conduct through his PhD studies.Marcela Palomino-Schalscha is Lecturer in Geography and Development Studies at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand. Her research interests lie at the intersection of social geography, development studies, and political ecology, with a special emphasis on Indigenous rights. Most of her work is located in Latin America, where she theorises the politics of scale and place, diverse and solidarity economies, decolonisation, identity politics, Indigenous tourism, and relational ontologies. More recently, she has also embarked on the use of arpilleras, textiles with political content, as more-than-textual research methods to explore the experience of refugee-background and migrant Latin American women in New Zealand. She is the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Development (Cupples, J., Palomino-Schalscha, M., & Prieto, M. (Eds.), 2018, Routledge), and Indigenous Places and Colonial Spaces: The Politics of Intertwined Relations (Gombay, N., & Palomino-Schalscha, M., 2018, Routledge). She is also Co-editor of ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies.
