The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala s Cloud Forest

Paul Kockelman

ISBN 10: 0822360721 / ISBN 13: 9780822360728

Published by Duke University Press, 2016

About this Item

In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman tells the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and eco-tourism to create a theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are created, interpreted, and reconfigured. Num Pages: 208 pages. BIC Classification: 1KLC; HBJK; JHMC. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 154 x 252 x 13. Weight in Grams: 316. . 2016. Paperback. . . . . Books ship from the US and Ireland.

Seller Inventory # V9780822360728

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Chicken and the Quetzal: Incommensurate Ontologies and Portable Values in Guatemala s Cloud Forest
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication Date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822360721
• ISBN 13: 9780822360728
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In The Chicken and the Quetzal Paul Kockelman theorizes the creation, measurement, and capture of value by recounting the cultural history of a village in Guatemala's highland cloud forests and its relation to conservation movements and ecotourism. In 1990 a group of German ecologists founded an NGO to help preserve the habitat of the resplendent quetzal—the strikingly beautiful national bird of Guatemala—near the village of Chicacnab. The ecotourism project they established in Chicacnab was meant to provide new sources of income for its residents so they would abandon farming methods that destroyed quetzal habitat. The pressure on villagers to change their practices created new values and forced negotiations between indigenous worldviews and the conservationists' goals. Kockelman uses this story to offer a sweeping theoretical framework for understanding the entanglement of values as they are interpreted and travel across different and often incommensurate ontological worlds. His theorizations apply widely to studies of the production of value, the changing ways people make value portable, and value's relationship to ontology, affect, and selfhood. 

 

 

About the Author

Paul Kockelman is Professor of Anthropology at Yale University and the author of Agent, Person, Subject, Self: A Theory of Ontology, Interaction, and Infrastructure.