Vinicius de Aguiar Furuie

With Due Respect weaves together an ethnographic account with oral histories and archival research to tell the remarkable, ongoing story of Amazonian communities created and subsequently abandoned by the nineteenth-century rubber boom. Today, riverside Amazonians are faced against powerful loggers, land-grabbers, state agents, and the effects of climate change, and in response are seeking partnerships that will help them live well with their families in the territory they have occupied and protected for decades. My study demonstrates that the central concept through which riverside Amazonians build and evaluate these vital associations with neighbors, kin, outsiders and other-than-humans is through their definition of respect. Respect for them entails a capacity for mutual recognition that permits collaboration while promoting the autonomy of both parts of a relation, a tenuous balance I theorize as “autonomous partnerships.” I argue that while the present moral-economic demands in this part of the world emerged from a history of patronage and exploitation in Amazonia, riverside Amazonians have developed a unique practice of respect as a means to narrate their history and imagine their future.