Prathima Muniyappa (Critical Conservation ’18) has been awarded a January Term Research Grant by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies to work on a project in Loreto, Peru with the NGO–VASI (Amazonian Vision for Integrated Sustainability) that endeavors to lift local communities out of a competitive resource-heavy extraction industry into a selective high-quality sustainable business.
Prathima’s research focuses on the combination of the rights/agency of Indigenous people and natural ecosystems as they confront the effects of modernity and institutions on their environment. Indian state-sponsored rhetoric continues a longstanding pattern that marginalizes indigenous and tribal communities’ access to forests and frames their habitation as detrimental to environmental conservation. Prathima proposes to redesign Sacred Groves as a form of community- led resource management in order to show that indigenous cultural folkways can reverberate at the scale of landscape to have positive environmental consequences. Her work aims to outline a practice that dissolves the duality between nature and culture and actively (re)designs ritual to create a path for indigenous agency. The work in Peru will provide her with a comparative case study.
