THE MILLENNIUM CITY: OIL POLITICS AND URBANIZATION IN THE NORTHERN ECUADORIAN AMAZON
Public Deposited- Last Modified
- August 10, 2023
- Creator
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Lyall, Angus Curran
- Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Geography
- Abstract
- Oil production in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon has facilitated the urbanization of some of the world’s most biodiverse rainforests. New highways into the jungle, snaking pipelines, and population centers have followed in the wake of oil explorations and drilling over the last fifty years. Oil companies and the state have also sought indigenous consent to oil production in their territories in exchange for infrastructures, such as roads, electrification, and, in a few cases, urban-like settlements. Researchers, environmentalists, and engaged citizens have denounced urban development in indigenous territories as an unsustainable imposition of Western culture on otherwise isolated, unwilling or unwitting communities. However, such narratives overlook the social legacies of prior waves of colonial capitalism in the northern Amazon. Histories of racism and racial capitalism are often erased by ahistorical representations of the Amazon as a timeless, uniform space of pre-Hispanic cultures, effectively obscuring the violence that produced modern Amazonía. In this dissertation, I detail the history of an indigenous community of subsistence farmers, fisher-people, and hunters that recently negotiated with the state oil company to receive an urban-like settlement in the rainforest. I describe their newfound hardships in a place at the far margins of market society, where they lack food, money, and maintenance, and I document nostalgia for farm life. Yet, by the same token, I describe their collective struggles to sustain this so-called “Millennium City,” rather than abandon it. For generations, racism has been a motor driving these families to pursue integration into market relations, Western education, and urban spaces, as strategies to mitigate the physical and symbolic violence of dominant, white society. Today, negotiations over oil production between indigenous communities, the state, and companies in the northern Amazon unfold on an uneven social terrain shaped by centuries of oppression. This dissertation draws on multiple periods of fieldwork over six years that included interviews, video ethnography, and focus groups in the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, as well as archival research in the Amazon and Andes.
- Date of publication
- 2020
- Keyword
- DOI
- Resource type
- Advisor
- Valdivia, Gabriela
- Colloredo-Mansfeld, Rudi
- Havice, Elizabeth
- Lentz, Christian
- Pickles, John
- Degree
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Degree granting institution
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
- Graduation year
- 2020
- Language
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