Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Predatory Economies is an ambitious work centered on the Sanema people of northern Venezuela, with broader implications for understanding the dynamics of local-global interactions among Indigenous peoples, state systems, and internationally based extractive economic practices throughout the world. The text focuses particularly on extractive practices in pink tide Latin American socialist systems such as Venezuela that have repeatedly failed to deliver promised prosperity, participation, and environmental protection. This work is fascinating for the ways Penfield (Univ. of Bristol, UK) highlights the centrality of the predator-prey dynamic within many Amazonian societies and expands this dynamic beyond "fierceness, cruelty, and violence" to encompass "nonaggressive schemas of empathy, emulation, and manipulation" (p. 3). Six engaging chapters cover the ways in which cultural practices such as shamanism, sorcery, healing, and kinship relationships are applied in negotiating with oil, gold, and other profit-motivated institutions within capitalist systems, which are based on little more than predatory forms of negative reciprocity. Penfield's work demonstrates the value of conducting holistic, interethnic-focused, and system-based anthropological work in grasping the difficulties and necessities of state-based citizenship acts, many of which resist the machinery of capitalism while falling prey to some of the same strategies they utilize.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.