Abstract

This book presents current research in the political ecology of indigenous revival and its role in nature conservation in critical areas in the Americas. An important contribution to evolving studies on conservation of sacred natural sites (SNS), the book elucidates the complexity of development scenarios within cultural landscapes related to the appropriation of religion, environmental change in indigenous territories, and new conservation management approaches. Indigeneity and the Sacred explores how these struggles for land, rights, and political power are embedded within physical landscapes, and how indigenous identity is reconstituted as globalizing forces simultaneously threaten and promote the notion of indigeneity.

Sarah Hitchner is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Center for Integrative Conservation Research and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Georgia in Athens, GA, U.S.A. She is a cultural anthropologist specializing in sacred sites and cultural landscapes of Southeast Asia.

“The effect of the whole [volume] is to emphasize the importance of saving sites locally sacred to Indigenous or majority peoples, and to take full account of how they are regarded and how they must be reverently and civilly managed to keep from offending…Highly recommended.” • Choice

“This volume has multidisciplinary implications, and includes geographers, cultural anthropologists, and archaeologists, as well as the leader of an indigenous group as authors. This book will be an excellent complement to other existing texts in the field of ecological anthropology.” • William Balée, Tulane University

Fausto Sarmiento, is a Professor of Geography and Director of the Neotropical Montology Collaboratory at the University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, U.S.A., where as a mountain geographer and expert on Andean ethnoecology, he develops transdisciplinary approaches to critical biogeography and political ecology to achieve sustainable biocultural heritage conservation.