On the morning of June 7, 2018, Suresh Oraon, an indigenous anti-mining activist, was shot dead by men on motorbikes outside a prayer meeting in the Indian state of Jharkhand. Oraon had come to give sarna puja, an act of worship venerating nature as the life-giving force of Jharkhand’s indigenous communities. For the previous ten years, Suresh Oraon had been a leader within an indigenous peoples’ movement in opposition to Central Coalfields Limited, a government-owned mining firm seeking to expand its operations into land owned by Oraon’s village. In the wake of his murder, villagers who had gathered at the sarna puja alleged Oraon’s killers were members of a Maoist paramilitary group that operates across Jharkhand’s many mining regions. Whether such Maoist cadres were actually involved or not, the claims underscore that violence in Jharkhand’s extractive zones is almost always for sale. The political economy of coal rents, mining jobs, and land acquisition has long depended on keeping people like Oraon in line and suppressing claims to a landscape that indigenous groups see not as a source of profit, but as divinity.

In its broadest form, Oraon’s story reflects currents of indigenous activism in a sustained moment of state and corporate land acquisitions now witnessed across the globe. This global turn provides the context for The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives, a new monograph by the cultural critic and decolonial theorist Macarena Gómez-Barris. The first release from the Duke University Press series Dissident Acts, Gómez-Barris’s book aims to provide a new conceptual vocabulary for diagnosing the present and for imagining a future beyond an extractive relationship toward the environment. The book’s area of focus is Latin America, especially the indigenous spaces of the Andes and the Amazon, though the work speaks more generally to the conjoined crises of ecological degradation and neoliberal governmental policies that now threaten the sustainability of the planet. Since the mid-2000s, the term “extractivism” has animated an interdisciplinary project of scholars, primarily based in Latin America, that combines analyses from critical indigenous studies, political ecology, and Marxist geography. At its face, The Extractive Zone offers a translation of these political and policy-oriented debates for a U.S. academic audience. But it is also more than that. Gómez-Barris’s slim volume seeks to push the category of “extraction” beyond its figuration within political economy and to explore its significance as a way of organizing knowledge, aesthetics, and political life.

To establish this claim, the first two chapters of the book are spent developing a critique of extraction as a colonial episteme of visualizing and interpreting the natural world. This colonial episteme has a long history, dating back to the period of Iberian conquest. It persists in the present in places like the Yasuní region of Ecuador, where the Ecuadorian state has sought to extract petroleum from indigenous peoples’ land. Forging a territory of oil extraction in the Yasuní rain forest entails not only the mobilization of capital, infrastructure, and labor, but as Gómez-Barris argues, the devaluation and marginalization of indigenous forms of knowledge about nature. The Yasuní National Park is one of the most biodiverse areas of the world, rendering it an object of scientific fascination for the collection and cataloging of myriad animal, insect, and plant species. Indigenous communities of the Yasuní, according to Gómez-Barris, have a different relationship to this ecological world, one predicated on recognizing the interconnection between human and nonhuman forms of life. This recognition preserves experiential knowledge, rather than abstract intellectual knowledge, about the rain forest, which allows indigenous communities to see this space in its totality as a habitat sustaining many forms of life. Being able to separate human from nonhuman, or part from whole, is a distinctly nonindigenous form of thought, the author suggests, and one that points directly to a worldview that sees such landscapes as needing to be conquered or tamed.

Both the chapter on Yasuní and its partner, which focuses on indigenous spiritual tourism in the Peruvian Andes, are structured by ethnographic examples of the author as a participant in regional ecotourism. The author draws from anecdotal experiences learning about alternative ways of seeing nature while touring through the Amazon and the Andes. Although this method of decentering is presented as an effort to inhabit a “decolonial perspective,” its effects in The Extractive Zone are mixed. Speculations on indigenous knowledge from the vantage of various ecolodges come off as both patrician and hastily construed, producing, even when the author qualifies it, an essentialized representation of “indigeneity” resembling many of anthropology’s founding myths. The idea that one’s worldview can be willed away by appropriating the outlook of the indigenous Other itself has a deep colonial history and indeed seems to trade on a sense of the self that is always already a liberal bourgeois subject. What’s more, the author uses binary epistemes, a Foucauldian concept, to ground the irreducibility of indigenous “difference,” presenting an equally static representation of “Western” knowledge practices. Few science scholars would still ascribe to Western scientific epistemology the monolithic categorizations Gómez-Barris does. The stark opposition drawn between an extractive worldview predicated on Western science and an indigenous one predicated on the experiential appears more determined by the limitations of the episteme as a theoretical tool than on the content of the forms themselves.

The final three chapters of the book, however, complicate these earlier depictions of an indigenous politics as a mere negation of its scientific or extractive other. Analyzing a series of films, images, and political texts, these chapters document rich traditions of aesthetic production and organizing strategies that have taught a variety of Latin American social movements to see extractive landscapes, in Gómez-Barris’s evocative phrasing, “otherwise.” This lineage is highlighted in the author’s account of the Bolivian anarcho-feminist collective, Mujeres Creando, which since 1985 has been a driving force of anti-extractivist direct action and community aid. The group, which is composed of mostly mestiza and indigenous Aymara representing a range of genders, sexualities, and races, provokes within the book a call for greater integration of queer and feminist critique within anti-extractivist movements. Mujeres Creando’s frustration with Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia since 2006 and a member of the Aymara community, for his failure to address issues of patriarchal power and gender violence, warns against any simple identification of indigenous identity with a prefigured emancipatory politics. On the contrary, their example demonstrates how resistance to gendered and extractive capitalism requires ongoing collective work, rather than a politics built from any “static or pure” indigenous tradition (132).

The work of organizations like Mujeres Creando captures one of Gómez-Barris’s most important insights: indigenous communities have been creatively responding to the crises of extractive capitalism for a long time. It is only now, perhaps, with growing scholarly interest in the so-called Anthropocene that the effects of extractive capitalism seem to impact a shared humanity, rather than select communities whose land and resources have long been eroded, expropriated, or destroyed. This is one of several lessons in this timely book. Gómez-Barris’s writing provides an anecdote to technocratic visions of “green capitalism” by foregrounding questions of justice, identity, and the contingency of politics. Scholars interested in the debates animating anti-extractive social movements in Latin America and beyond should begin here.