Children of the Rainforest

Shaping the Future in Amazonia

By Camilla Morelli; Foreword by Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi; Afterword by Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi

SERIES: Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies

Rutgers University Press

Children of the Rainforest explores the lives of children growing up in a time of radical change in Amazonia. The book draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with the Matses, a group of hunter-gatherer forest dwellers who have lived in voluntary isolation until fairly recently. Having worked with them for over a decade, returning every year to their villages in the rainforest, Camilla Morelli follows closely the life-trajectories of Matses children, watching them shift away from the forest-based lifestyles of their elders and move towards new horizons crisscrossed by concrete paving, lit by the glow of electric lights and television screens, and centered around urban practices and people. The book uses drawings and photographs taken by the children themselves to trace the children’s journeys—lived and imagined—from their own perspectives, proposing an ethnographic analysis that recognizes children’s imaginations, play, and shifting desires as powerful catalysts of social change.

This brief summary of Children of the Forest barely conveys the significance of this grand accomplishment. Seldom has childhood been studied so thoroughly nor yielded so many original findings. This is a must read for anthropologists who study childhood and scholars across the spectrum interested in the process of social change. David Lancy, Anthropology Book Forum

While it is often argued that children are the leading change agents in Indigenous communities, Camilla Morelli provides one of the first and the most thorough documentation of this phenomenon.' David F. Lancy, author of The Anthropology of Childhood: Cherubs, Chattel, Changelings

This is a highly innovative book that offers a remarkable perspective on the immense social change facing the Matses since the 1960s through the eyes and lives of children. It is as eminently readable as it is theoretically challenging and offers a truly exceptional ethnography that will appeal to a wide audience. This is one of the most insightful and inspiring books on Indigenous people that I have read in recent years.'
Andrew Canessa, author of Intimate Indigeneities: Race, Sex, and History in the Small Spaces of Andean Life

Children of the Rainforest is a much awaited and fine-grained analysis of Amazonian childhood! Morelli's ethnographic account is timely, highly informative, and moving. Olga Ulturgasheva, coeditor of Animism in Rainforest and Tundra: Personhood, Animals, Plants and Things in Contemporary

Camilla Morelli is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Bristol, UK.

Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi is an Indigenous Amazonian anthropologist with a degree in anthropology from the Universidad Nacional de la Amazonía Peruana (UNAP) in Iquitos, Peru.

Foreword by Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi
Introduction

1 The Child in the Forest: A Glimpse into the Childhood
of the Past

2 River Horizons: Moving toward the Big Water

3 The Sound of Inequality: Children as Agents
of Economic Change

4 Consuelo’s Dolls: Shifting Desires and the Subversion
of Womanhood

5 Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Rainforest:
The Spoken Weapons of Masculinity

6 Yearning for Concrete: Children’s Imagination
as a Catalyst for Change

7 Urban Futures: When Dreams of Concrete
Come True

Conclusion

Afterword by Roldán Dunú Tumi Dësi
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index

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