School of Social and Political Science

Background

Casey High’s research explores the conflicts, collaborations and transformations in contemporary Amazonian social life. His fieldwork with Waorani communities in Ecuador over the past 25 years has focused on memory and violence, language, and environmental activism in response to oil development on indigenous lands. His work situates current social transformations at the interface of indigenous Amazonian modes of thought and broader social and political processes in Latin America. His interests also include collaborative research methods, as well as the gendered and generational aspects of inter-ethnic relations, indigenous politics and urban migration in Amazonia. Since 2009 he has been involved in a collaborative project to document the Waorani language, Wao-terero, and has written on practices of translation in Amazonian environmental politics.

His first book, Victims and Warriors: Violence, History and Memory in Amazonia (Illinois, 2015), explores indigenous forms of social memory in relation to colonial and missionary representations of the past, and how past violence figures in Waorani political engagements and inter-generational relations. His second book, Translating Worlds, Defending Land: Collaborations for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Politics in Amazonia (Stanford, in press), explores how indigenous peoples’ collaborations with environmentalists and academic researchers are bringing about new possibilities, challenges, and imaginative horizons in contemporary Amazonia. It describes how, whether as environmental leaders or researchers, some young Waorani adults are gaining a powerful political voice as they translate between Indigenous understandings of land and the international language of conservation. The book argues that the alliances, misunderstandings, and conflicts that emerge in these contexts challenge the assumption that productive collaborations reflect--or require--shared purposes. This has important implications for an engaged anthropology open to reconsidering what constitutes ethnographic knowledge and who it is for. 

He is the co-editor, with Luiz Costa, of the The Lowland South American World (forthcoming in 2024), a 40-chapter volume featuring the work of 48 authors from around the world, including several indigenous authors. He is also co-editor of two books on contemporary anthropological theory and practice. These include How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography, and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge (2008, with Liana Chua and Timm Lau) and The Anthropology of Ignorance: Ethnographic Perspectives (2012, with Ann Kelly and Jon Mair). Before joining Social Anthropology in Edinburgh he was a postdoctoral researcher at the CNRS in Paris, and a lecturer in anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Selected publications

Books

In press. Translating Worlds, Defending Land: Collaborations for Indigenous Rights and Environmental Politics in Amazonia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

In press. The Lowland South American World. Co-edited with Luiz Costa. London: Routledge.

2015. Victims and Warriors: Violence, History, and Memory in Amazonia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

2012. The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. With Jon Mair and Ann Kelly, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan (Culture, Mind and Society Series).

2008. How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. With Liana Chua and Timm Lau, eds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Journal special issues

2020. Conserving and Extracting Nature: Environmental Politics and Livelihoods in the New “Middle Grounds” of Amazonia (co-edited with R. Elliott Oakley). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2).

Journal articles

2023. "Civilized Elders and Isolated Ancestors: The Multiple Histories of Contemporary Amazonia." Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America 19(1): 39-55. 

2020. "'Our Land is Not For Sale!' Contesting Oil and Translating Environmental Politics in Amazonian Ecuador." Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2): 301-323.

2020. "Conserving and Extracting Nature: Environmental Politics and Livelihoods in the New “Middle Grounds” of Amazonia." (co-authored with R. Elliott Oakley). Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology 25(2): 236-247.

2018. "Bodies That Speak: Languages of Differentiation and Becoming in Amazonia. Language and Communication 63: 65-75.

2016. "A Little Bit Christian": Memories of conversion and community in post-Christian Amazonia." American Anthropologist 118(2): 270-283.

2015. "Keep on Changing: Recent Trends in Amazonian Anthropology." Reviews in Anthropology. 44(2): 1-24.

2013. "Lost and Found: Contesting isolation and cultivating contact in Amazonian Ecuador." Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory. 3(3): 195-221.

2012. "Between Friends and Enemies: The Dynamics of Inter-Ethnic Relations in Amazonian Ecuador." With E. Reeve. Ethnohistory. 59(1): 141-162.

2010. "Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity." American Ethnologist. 37(4): 753-770.

2009. "Remembering the ‘Auca’: Violence and Generational Memory in Amazonian Ecuador." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 15: 719-736.

2009. "Victims and Martyrs: Converging Histories of Violence in Amazonian Anthropology and U.S. Cinema." Anthropology and Humanism. 34(1): 41-50.

2007. "Indigenous Organizations, Oil Development, and the Politics of Egalitarianism." Cambridge Anthropology. 26(2): 34-46.

Book chapters

In press. "Amazonian Environmental Activism at COP26: A Conversation with Uboye Gaba." (with U. Gaba). In C. High and L. Costa, eds. The Lowland South American World. London: Routledge.

In Press. "Reimagining Lowland South America: An Introduction." (with L. Costa). In C. High and L. Costa, eds. The Lowland South American World. London: Routledge.

2021. "The Nature of Loss: Ecological Nostalgia and Cultural Politics in Amazonia." In O. Ange and D. Berliner, eds. Ecological Nostalgias: Memory, Affect and Creativity in Times of Ecological Upheavals. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 84-106.

2016. "Warriors, Hunters, and Bruce Lee: Gendered Agency and the Transformation of Amazonian Masculinity." In D. Hodgson, ed. The Gender, Culture, and Power Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pp. 253-263.

2015. "Ignorant Bodies and the Dangers of Shamanism in Amazonia." In T. Kirsch and R. Dilley, eds. Regimes of Ignorance: Anthropological perspectives on the reproduction of non-knowledge. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 91-114.

2014. "Dayuma's Story: Personal biography and intercultural relations in urban Amazonia." In S. Oakdale and M. Course, eds. Fluent Selves: Autobiography and personhood in Lowland South America. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Pp. 35-68.

2012. "Shamans, Animals, and Enemies: Locating the Human and Non-Human in an Amazonian Cosmos of Alterity." In Personhood in the Shamanic Ecologies of Contemporary Amazonia and Siberia. M. Brightman, V. Grotti and O. Ulturgasheva , eds. Oxford: Berghahn. Pp. 130-135.

2012. "Between Knowing and Being: Ignorance in Anthropology and Amazonian Shamanism." In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. J. Mair, C. High and A. Kelly, eds. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 119-136.

2012. "Making Ignorance an Ethnographic Object." With J. Mair and A. Kelly. In Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. Palgrave Macmillan. Pp. 1-32.

2008. "Introduction: Questions of Evidence." With L. Chua and T. Lau. In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 1-19.

2008. "End of the Spear: Re-imagining Amazonian History and Ethnography through Film." In How Do We Know? Evidence, Ethnography and the Making of Anthropological Knowledge. Pp. 76-96.

Review Articles

2023. Comment on “The Gendering of Anthropological Theory since 2000: Ontology, Semiotics, and Feminism” (Joshua Reno and Britt Halverson). Current Anthropology 64(5): 475-619. 

2010. "Agency and Anthropology." Review article in Ateliers du laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative (LESC). No. 34.