Dr Amy Penfield’s book Predatory Economies has received an honourable mention for the Latin American Studies Association (SVS) Fernando Coronil Book Prize. Here is what the panel said about the book:

“Penfield’s enthralling book entraps us in an astute, rich, and nuanced ethnography of the Sanema in Venezuela during Chávez’s apogee. In this, one of the most significant anthropological studies of the past decades on Indigenous peoples living in today’s Venezuela, Penfield crucially highlights the Sanema’s predatory relationship with the predatory machine of the bureaucratic Bolivarian state and the resulting encounters and dis-encounters. Predatory Economies, moreover, contributes to recent literature on Amazonian ontologies and epistemologies by expanding the semantic register of the concept of predation, drawing on the Sanema’s distinct uses of predation to not only include violent theft and hunting but also trickery, cunning, and sly relations.”