LAUSR

M Cepek’s Life in Oil is a profoundly nuanced and empathetic ethnography of Cofán people in the Ecuadorian Amazon living for decades in the shadow of oil extraction. Across eight highly readable and well-paced chapters that are interspersed with photographs, Cepek tackles an issue just as likely to be addressed outside as inside the academy. Far from an unknown people or region or hidden issue, the impact of oil on the lives of indigenous people in the Ecuadorian Amazon has been extensively covered by both journalists and scholars. The typical portrait painted in the popular media is one of an economically and culturally impoverished, devastated, and seemingly irredeemable people. Cepek uses a scholarly-yet-accessible approach to mediate the popular imaginary of the Cofán to build a more complex (and by far, more troubling) portrayal of the relationship between indigenous people and oil. Cepek gets behind this narrative to craft a much more nuanced and empathetic account of the effects of oil––in multiple senses––on Cofán lives and livelihoods. Cepek uses the classic tools and techniques of ethnography to break through these stereotypes. By residing in situ, speaking the indigenous language (A’ingae), and trying to understand oil, its impact, and implications of its extraction from the Cofán point of view, Cepek produces one of the more realistic accounts of the effects of oil on everyday life in a community on the frontlines of oil extraction. By the second chapter, Cepek introduces us to Dureno, the main setting of the ethnography. Dureno is the most populous of the 13 Cofán communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Cepek has spent much time there since 2002, and during the most intensive period of his fieldwork, he lived with a host family and deeply immersed himself in the activities of the community––though some of these, including bathing in an oil-contaminated river,