The SSL ‘Book of the Month’ feature highlights a book in our collection that has been chosen by one of our Subject Consultants. This may be a recent addition to our stock or an existing item that we would like to share with you.

April’s Book of the Month was selected by Helen Worrell, Subject Consultant for Anthropology.

Casey High

Translating worlds, defending land : collaborations for indigenous rights and environmental politics in Amazonia

Stanford University Press, 2025

Available as an eBook via SOLO

Book Overview

This book is a result of long term fieldwork in Amazonian Ecuador, the author critically explores collaboration as a method for engagement with indigenous communities. It expands on the scholarly debates around engaged anthropology and who ethnography is for. This ethnography is a key contribution to the understanding of the process of anthropological research and the communities they engage with. 

Reviews

“Casey High offers us a brilliant ethnography in the form of fluid and intimate writing, which makes the book a page turner. What we see in these pages is the inauguration of a new line of anthropological reflection, in which collaboration between anthropologists and Indigenous people ceases to be a simple method and becomes the very object of analysis.”

Aparecida Vilaça, Museu Nacional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

“In this thought-provoking meditation on the dynamics of collaboration, Casey High explores what it means for anthropology and anthropologists when our epistemic partners start doing ethnography their own way, for their own ends.”

Stuart Kirsch, University of Michigan

“Narrating in Waorani lands (that are also Ecuadorian), this strong and delicate ethnography also narrates us. Relentlessly written from a ‘complex we’ the stories it tells make it clear that ‘we’ have interlocutors and are interlocutors and that therefore, ‘we’ tell stories about ‘them’ that are also about ‘us’… ethnographic relations as moebius strip!”

Marisol de la Cadena, University of California, Davis

How can I access it?

This title is available as an eBook which can be accessed from any Bodleian Library computer or used remotely, by logging on to SOLO with your SSO.

What would your SSL Book of the Month be? Do you have a favourite book in our collection? If so, we would love to know what it is. Add a comment below or email us.