In the year 2000, the presidents of Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia agreed to construct the Interoceanic Highway as part of the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America. Instead of bringing the promised economic benefits to the shared triple-frontier Amazonian region, the highway facilitated trade in extracted natural resources, as well as a traffic in women. Centering "traffic" as both an analytic and a method, Ruth E. Goldstein argues that projects like this 3,500-mile highway have deeply gendered effects, reorganizing political economies of sex, nature, kinship, and care. Life in Traffic underscores how markets for women, plants, and gold are not just intersecting phenomena but historically co-constituted economies. Amazonian extractive industries, too, have global ramifications for a warming planet: as rainforests disappear, so do the oxygen-creating, carbon-sequestering, and life-sustaining abilities of Earth, known to many as Mother.

About the Author

Ruth E. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

Reviews

“Life in Traffic is essential reading for those concerned with the gendered and ethnoracial consequences of extractivism in Brazil, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as with advancing feminist anthropological scholarship.”—Florence E. Babb, author of Women’s Place in the Andes: Engaging Decolonial Feminist Anthropology

“Ruth Goldstein’s narrative style blends a striking capacity to notice, listen to others, and reflect. A deep sense of care extends across Life in Traffic: for people, the things they carry, and the hard experiences that set them in motion or push them to a different place.”—Richard Kernaghan, author of Crossing the Current: Aftermaths of War along the Huallaga River

“In this thoughtful ethnography of life in traffic along the Interoceanic Highway, Goldstein skillfully demonstrates how integral a role road infrastructure plays in shaping gendered and racialized extractive economies amid complicated ethical landscapes. Both the highway and this book are political projects that traverse various sites and disciplines, reminding the reader that there is much to gain by taking the road most traveled.”—Kimberly Theidon, author of Legacies of War: Violence, Ecologies, and Kin