Entangled Edens

Anthropologist Candace Slater spent fifteen years gathering oral histories and tales from a range of communities across the Amazon. Her book weaves those accounts from present-day Amazonians together with critical readings of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Walter Bates, the nineteenth-century naturalist.

Slater's central argument is that the narratives people tell about the forest, and the ideas that shaped them and continue to shape how the region is viewed, deserve the same serious attention as scientific research. She contends that understanding where these stories come from, and what effects they have, matters for efforts to protect the rain forest.