Paola Canova – författare

Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.

Until the 1960s, the Ayoreo people of Paraguay's Chaco region had remained uncontacted by the world. But as development encroached on their territory, the Ayoreo began to experience rapid cultural change. Paola Canova looks at one aspect of this change in Frontier Intimacies: the sexual practices of Ayoreo women, specifically the curajodie, or single women who exchange sex for money or material goods with non-Ayoreo men, often Mennonite settlers.Weaving personal anecdotes into her extensive research, Canova shows how the advancement of economic and missionary frontiers has reconfigured gender roles, sexual ethics, and notions of desire in the region. Ayoreo women, she shows, have reappropriated their sexual practices, approaching intimate liaisons on their own terms and seeing the involvement of money not as morally problematic but as constitutive of sexual encounters. By using their sexuality to construct an intimate frontier operating according to their own logics, Canova reveals, Ayoreo women expose the fractured workings of frontier capitalism in spaces of rapid transformation. Inviting broader examination of the ways in which contemporary frontier economies are constructed and experienced, Frontier Intimacies brings a captivating new perspective to the economic development of the Chaco region.

This volume traces the socioeconomic and environmental changes taking place in the Gran Chaco, a vast and richly biodiverse ecoregion at the intersection of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, and Paraguay. Representing a wide range of contemporary anthropological scholarship that has not been available in English until now, Reimagining the Gran Chaco illuminates how the region’s many indigenous groups are negotiating these transformations in their own terms.The essays in this volume explore how the region has become a complex arena of political, cultural, and economic contestation between actors that include the state, environmental and NGOs, and private businesses and how local actors are reconfiguring their subjectivities and political agency in response. With its multinational perspective, and its examination of major themes including missionization, millenarian movements, the Chaco war, industrial enclaves, extractivism, political mobilization, and the struggle for rights, this volume brings greater visibility to an underrepresented, complex region.