Rethinking the Amazon

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This event took place on 28 September 2021

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Rethinking the Amazon

Watch event again now

This event took place on 28 September 2021

As home to multiple indigenous populations as well as more than 40,000 plant species, 2.5 million insect species and 2,000 mammals, the Amazon comprises the larges rainforest in the world. Increasingly under threat from encroaching development and human activity, its destruction threatens to unbalance the global eco system and decimate the rainforest’s indigenous communities.

Join anthropologist Dr Eduardo Kohn, writer Pola Oloixarac and curator Dr Elisabeth Heyne as they draw from their research to reflect on the potential for engaging with, learning from and protecting the Amazon world.

This event was part of the British Library's 2021 environmental event series, The Natural Word, celebrating underrepresented voices harnessing the power of imagination to change the world.

Speakers

  • Pola Oloxiarac

    Writer

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  • Eduardo Kohn

    Professor of Anthropology

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Pola Oloxiarac

Writer

Pola Oloxiarac is a writer and translator who was awarded the 2021 Eccles Centre Hay Writer’s Award for her proposal for Atlas Lierario del Amazonas, a creative non-fiction project the reveals the secret history of the Amazon region. Pola’s first novel was Savage Theories (2008) and her most recent novel, Mona (2021), explored the world of USA academia through the experience of a Peruvian woman writer of colour. Pola has a philosophy degree from the University of Buenos Aires and has written on culture and technology for various magazines.

Headshot of Pola Oloxiarac

Eduardo Kohn

Professor of Anthropology

Eduardo Kohn is a Professor of Anthropology at McGill University, Montreal. His work, based on decades of anthropological research with Amazonian indigenous people living in one of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on Earth, is dedicated to imagining better ways to live with the living world. His prize-winning and critically acclaimed 2013 book, How Forests Think, argues for radical new ways of understanding our relationship to the larger living world.

Headshot of Eduardo Kohn