ABOUT THIS BOOK

On the conservation frontier of southern Chile, the lives of smallholding settlers, Indigenous Mapuche farmers, environmental activists, entrepreneurs, and conservation scientists all grapple with the enduring impacts of settler-caused environmental depletion, aspirations for a new ethics of care, and the promises of an ecotourism boom. Here, the question of what it means to be human is not simply an existential concern but the reflexive result of experiences of becoming human through and with nonhuman others in an increasingly uncertain world.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Piergiorgio Di Giminiani is an associate professor in anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of Sentient Lands: Indigeneity, Property, and Political Imagination in Neoliberal Chile.

REVIEWS

“In this fascinating account, Piergiorgio Di Giminiani examines the diverse ways ‘being human’ emerges in a conservation frontier in southern Chile. Based on years of fieldwork with Indigenous settlers, forest lovers, timber harvesters, and avian ecologists, among others, Alterhumanism helps us see humanity as a kind of ongoing experiment, full of possibility and contradictions—an important reminder to all of us.”—Laura A. Ogden, author of Loss and Wonder at the World’s End

“Piergiorgio Di Giminiani provides an ethnographically rich and intellectually provocative study of the Anthropocene within the conservation frontier of southern Chile. Plural renderings of ‘the human’ emerge within the entangled, multispecies worlds of Indigenous farmers, national settlers, ecotourists, conservation scientists, birds, and forests. Di Giminiani develops an innovative theoretical approach termed ‘alterhumanism’ that will reward engaged readers within the fields of environmental anthropology, multispecies ethnography, posthumanism, and Latin American studies.”—Marcos Mendoza, author of The Patagonian Sublime: The Green Economy and Post-Neoliberal Politics— -

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Alterhumanism

PART I. FOUR WAYS OF BECOMING HUMAN

1. Hacer Patria: Settlers’ Intimate Nationhood and the Domestication of Frontier Forests

2. Indigenous Settlers? Histories of Resettlement and Care in Mapuche Frontier Life

3. The Experience of Ecocentrism: Enchantment and Human Authenticity in Environmentalism

4. The Birds’ Forest: Conservation Science and Avian Life in the Shadow of Human Disturbance

PART II. REMAKING THE HUMAN IN CONSERVATION

Interlude: Saving Nature, Remaking the Human

5. Becoming Environmentalists: Enclosures and Mediations in Nongovernmental Conservation

6. Becoming Ecological Citizens: State Commons and Indigenous Sovereignties in Participatory Conservation

Epilogue: Crisis and Rewilding in the World to Come

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

About the Author