Robyn Constance Yzelman

In 2019, the Bolivian government approved the Beni Land Use Plan, formalizing the expansion of industrial agriculture (soy, sugarcane plantations, and cattle ranching for export) into the Northern Bolivian Amazon, causing widespread deforestation and fires. This threatens the survival of smallholder farmers, who are descended from indentured rubber tapping communities of the 19th and early 20th century rubber boom. These communities continue to center their social relations and livelihoods (Brazil nut and other small-scale forest extraction practices) on converted rubber-era forest trail networks. This dissertation project examines how smallholders use forest trails, with their attendant dynamics of mobility, autonomy, and dependency, to negotiate the impacts of contemporary agrarian extractivism. Engaging anthropological literature on placemaking, materiality, and infrastructure, this project situates trails as the site and product of historical legacies of extraction. During 12 months of fieldwork in Bolivia, I will examine the unique material infrastructures of trail networks and the social, economic, political, ecological and cosmological relations that are cultivated by smallholders. This project thinks together with smallholders in Bolivia and their engagements with forest trails, contributing to an anthropological inquiry on how people, plants, and landscapes intersect in remaking land and social relations amidst environmental destruction.