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This chapter reviews previously published palaeovegetation and independent palaeoclimatic datasets to determine the responses of Amazonian ecosystems to changes in temperature, precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations that occurred since the last glacial maximum (LGM), about 21,000 years ago, and it uses this long-term perspective to predict the likely vegetation responses to future climate change. Amazonia remained predominantly forested at the LGM, although savannas expanded at the margins of the basin. The combination of reduced temperatures, precipitation, and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations resulted in forests structurally and floristically quite different from those of today. Evergreen rainforest distribution increased during the glacial-Holocene transition due to ameliorating climatic and CO₂ conditions. However, reduced precipitation in the early-mid Holocene (about 8000-3600 years ago) period caused widespread, frequent fires in seasonal southern Amazonia, with increased abundance of drought-tolerant dry forest taxa and savanna in ecotonal areas. Rainforests expanded once again in the late Holocene period as a result of increased precipitation. The plant communities that existed during the early-mid Holocene period may constitute the closest analogues to the kinds of vegetation responses expected from similar increases in temperature and aridity posited for the 21st century.

This chapter contrasted HadCM3LC simulations of Amazonian forest at the Last Glacial Maximum (21 kya) and a Younger Dryas-like period (13-12 kya) with predicted responses of future warming to provide estimates of the climatic limits under which the Amazon forest remains relatively stable. Simulations indicate that despite lower atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and increased aridity during the LGM, Amazonia remains mostly forested, and that the cooler climate of the Younger Dryas-like period in fact causes a trend towards increased above-ground carbon balance relative to today. The vegetation feedbacks responsible for maintaining forest integrity in past climates (i.e. decreased evapotranspiration and reduced photorespiration) cannot be maintained in the future. Although elevated atmospheric CO₂ contributes to a positive enhancement of plant carbon and water balance, decreased stomatal conductance and increased plant and soil respiration cause a positive feedback that amplifies localised drying and climate warming. The Amazonian forest appears to be presently near its critical resiliency threshold, and even minor climate warming may be sufficient to promote deleterious feedbacks on forest integrity.

Amazonian and Melanesian ethnography takes “gender” to be a fixed, unitary, and relatively unproblematic attribute of persons. For Amazonia and Melanesia, both intra- and interregional comparisons compare like with like, flute cults with flute cults, exchange with exchange. This chapter builds on this analysis with reference to exchange, using some ethnography from the Xingu region of central Brazil as a comparative counterpoint. Northwest Amazon cults are not so much about gender differences and male domination as they are a reflection on the nature of men and women, male and female. The flutes and their attendant cults signify a “generalized capacity to reproduce, which men and women share.” Furthermore, the chapter briefly overviews Amazonian myths that account for the origins of the flutes and trumpets used in initiation. The experiment with an experiment is a relational approach to gender, derived from Melanesia, to the men's secret cults of the northwest Amazon.

There are remarkable resemblances between men's cults in Amazonia and Melanesia. The similarities include myths of matriarchy and role reversal; body imagery that merges male and female reproductive anatomy and physiology; rituals which assign generative, pseudoreproductive powers to men; hyperphallic cult objects in ritual; secrecy and constant vigilance against penetration of the cult by women and noninitiates; and terror and violence directed against those who breach the rules of the cult. This chapter presents the perspective that the cult reflects an effort, at times desperate, to hold together an all-too-fragile masculine self, portraying an “anguish of gender” in which men and women who may be closely related also stand opposed and antagonistic. It concludes by stating that this moral contradiction is the fault line of the cult and may lead to its rapid demise or, at minimum, to personal questioning and uncertainty.

This chapter explores the sources and theoretical implications of remarkable similarities between societies in Amazonia and Melanesia, a comparison which combines the universalist and localist traditions and is the base of anthropological studies. It establishes a common discourse among scholars working with different cultures, stimulates new perspectives on findings from particular cultures, and allows searching for general principles. The chapter suggests that gender is of great importance in the context of many of the small-scale cultures of Melanesia and Amazonia, i.e. the societies of Amazonia and Melanesia are gender inflected. Further, in both Amazonia and Melanesia, the self-concept, social identity, and the anatomy and physiology of the human body are intertwined with theories of conception, maturation, depletion, and death. The comparison also indicates the basis of procreative symbolism in both the cultures. This comparison affords an exceptional opportunity to explore fundamental questions about the conceptualization and examination of the human condition.

This chapter draws a comparison between male cults in a specific part of Papua New Guinea and in a limited region of Amazonia, considering the myth of matriarchy, the exclusion of women, and physical ordeals for boys. It focuses on the rebirth dimension of men's cults, as they appear among two Anga groups and in two related societies of the Vaupés region. The male cults in these two areas have much in common; the elements are acted out, the goals are assigned to them, and the discourses people have in respect to them are quite similar. However, there are certain differences in the representation of the rebirth of the boys during initiation rituals in the Anga and the Tukano areas, which may be related to differences in the ideas the respective populations have concerning the origin of the cosmos and of the living species.

This chapter examines the prevalence of male hierarchy and exclusiveness in terms of “marked” and “unmarked” fertility cults in Amazonia. Marked fertility cults are those in which male rituals exclude women; symbolically preempt their generative powers; and separate mothers from children. Unmarked cults conduct rituals that link children and mothers through the reproductive process and connect parents and children, men and women through symbolic vocabulary. The chapter demonstrates the complex interweavings of masculinity and femininity in the sacred rituals and intercommunity-exchange ceremonies. In male and female initiation rituals, the construction of metaphorical connectedness is projected outwardly into the external world of peoples, communities, species, and regions of the cosmos. Finally, the chapter suggests that the distinction between marked and unmarked fertility cultism is essentially a reflection of different processes of constructing male ritual hierarchies in contradistinction to everyday social relations characterized by relatively egalitarian relations between men and women.

This chapter presents an argument that gender is itself not a salient category in South American societies (Amazonia and Melanasia). Gender relationships are subsumed and embedded in kinship relationships of affinity and consanguinity, with women being associated with consanguine relationships and men with affinal roles. Alternatively, gender may be subordinated to other, more symbolically prominent, systems of thought, such as the relationship of humans and animals. This argument is supported by an analysis of the role played by the sexual dichotomy in the cosmology and social organization of a particular society (the Jivaroan Achuar of the Upper Amazon) to show that their gender categories are encompassed by a wider set of relationships. Finally, the chapter emphasizes that this is also the case for many other Amazonian societies, and that this sharp contrast with Melanesia is likely to help identify and assess relevant strategies for the comparison of gender relations.

In both Melanesia and Amazonia, cultures vary in the extent to which they bring men and women together in creative relationships or separate them as antithetical and opposed. Cultures of the northwest Amazon find striking resemblances to Melanesia in the stress of life and growth, which is punctuated and perpetuated by periods of sexual separation and continence, and in the specific connections between foodstuffs and the human body. This chapter addresses the question of reimagining the relation of gender, sexuality, and reproduction in Melanesian ethnography. It explores their connection in the literatures on “concepts of conception,” “sexual antagonism,” “pollution,” male/fertility cults, and ritual homosexuality. The chapter concludes by stating that, in both Melanesia and Amazonia, sexuality and reproduction flow into each other and are part of a broader confluence of indigenous philosophies about the cosmic sources of life, health, and growth, and of death, decay, and degeneration.

This chapter examines gender revolutions in which religious change is accompanied by remarkable alterations in traditional relations between men and women. Through examples of three cases studies from Canela, Ilahita, and Kaliai, it examines the circumstances in which societies reject male religious control and raise women to positions of moral authority. Following this, the chapter addresses the question of whether these revolutions produce permanent changes in gender relations, or whether they are merely short-term perturbations, and furthermore takes a look at the political economy of gender. Such accounts of Melanesia and Amazonia have much to tell about the complex processes by which women and men rethink tradition and renegotiate relations of dominance and subordination in times of change. Finally, the chapter indicates that there are still many unanswered questions about the circumstances by which women suddenly move from background to foreground in public discourse about religion.

This afterword discusses some of the recent events described in this book that have continued to unfold in Ecuador. The most important of these is the arrest and imprisonment of seven Waorani men involved in the latest revenge attack against the Taromenani. Just as Waorani make appeals to the Ecuadorian authorities to respect their autonomy, lawyers and other commentators call for the state to recognize the latest massacre of the Taromenani as a form of “indigenous justice,” arguing that revenge killings are necessary for restoring “equilibrium” in Waorani society. Another contentious issue is the ever-expanding oil frontier in Ecuador that continues to pressurize relations between Waorani people and groups living in voluntary isolation. The author concludes by expressing the hope that national and global attention to environmental conservation and indigenous rights in Amazonia will make the growing public concern about these issues less easily ignored in the future.

This chapter examines the politics, aspirations and antagonisms that grew out of the curatorial process underlying the exhibition, The Potosi Principle (Madrid 2010, Berlin 2011, La Paz 2011), and compare them to other Andean exhibitions including Bolivian Worlds (London 1987) and Luminescence: The Silver of Peru (Vancouver 2012, Toronto 2013). The chapter questions the category of contemporary art and examines its avowed potential as radical critique and the claims that it and other exhibition strategies have marginalised indigenous epistemologies and obfuscated historical agency. The implications of this conflict between western and indigenous curators and curatorial collectives on the right of self-expression and the freedom of interpretation and critique; associated ethical conundrums and the viability of epistemological pluralism will be clearly articulated as problems requiring serious museological attention.

This chapter describes the new cosmology of comunidade, or “community,” in Amazonia. It also considers how the Culina Indians have responded to two different forms of missionization, one Catholic, the other Protestant. In particular, it addresses the work of two of the principal missionary groups, the American Protestant Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) and the Brazilian Catholic Conselho Indigenista Missionário, in the discussion of the Culina. CIMI missionaries have initiated several projects among the Culina, all of which have so far failed to stimulate interest or villagewide support. Culina become distinctly uncomfortable in multiethnic or pan-Indian contexts. SIL saw literacy as a means to deliver the Word of God to individuals.