Book Reviews Rainforest Warriors: Human Rights on Trial. Richard thropologist engaged in long-term research who also wants Price. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. to advocate on behalf of a vulnerable people. The Prices’ 280 pp. activism came at great cost: in 1986 they were awakened in their hotel room, taken on a frightening ride, locked in JEAN JACKSON a room until dawn, hustled onto a ferry to French Guiana Massachusetts Institute of Technology and told to never return (p. 122). Since then they have con- ducted research in French Guiana, interviewing Saramakas Richard Price and his wife Sally Price have lived with and who leave and return to Suriname. studied Saramaka maroons, descendants of self-liberated The human drama is hard to take at times, particularly African slaves, who live in the rainforest of the Republic the violence and suffering during Suriname’s civil war. Es- of Suriname, for over 40 years. Price uses that long experi- pecially moving is the courage and brilliant strategies of two ence to add depth to a gripping account of how Saramakas main leaders, Headcaptain Wazen Eduards and law student resisted the government’s logging and mining concessions Hugo Jabini, who were subsequently awarded the Goldman that threatened their livelihood and produced severe envi- Prize for the Environment. ronmental damage. They had already experienced the de- The government’s interactions with the Saramakas be- struction of many villages by a hydroelectric dam and reser- gan with a 1762 treaty, while the country was still a Dutch voir project. colony. Sovereign entities sign treaties; the Saramakas’ an- Suriname is located near the bottom of the heap with cestors were de facto sovereign because they had the strate- respect to enlightened approaches to indigenous and tribal gic advantage in their forest redoubt, making raids to appre- peoples’ rights. Corruption, hypocrisy, and near-total disre- hend runaway slaves very costly. One question during the gard for its citizens when there is money to be made seem trial had to do with whether such treaties “were and remain to rule in the only country in the Americas that has failed international instruments” (p. 75). As the treaty included to legally recognize and guarantee some measure of pro- several articles specifying the return of fugitive slaves, the tection for its indigenous and tribal peoples. Nor are there government argued that “an agreement of this kind cannot laws that protect indigenous and tribal peoples’ traditional be invoked before an international court of human rights” knowledge. Indeed, the state maintains that it owns all bio- (p. 81). logical and genetic resources. The state denied that it violated any rights of the Price’s account of the remarkable Saramaka struggle Saramakas: “there are no [logging or mining] concessions in this horrible context moves from what life is like for lo- granted without the consent of the Saramaka people and cal villagers all the way up to transnational treaties and authorities” (p. 151). Notwithstanding these assertions, free, the 2008 Inter-American Court trial Suriname v. Saramaka. prior, and informed consent was simply never obtained. The plaintiffs amassed evidence from international orga- The state also set up familiar—and spurious—oppositions, nizations that the country was not taking human rights, for example, traditional versus modern. It argued that while especially the rights of the indigenous and Maroon peo- traditional rights should be recognized, development was ples, at all seriously (p. 132). Depositions were taken, expert paramount, and the specter of permitting states-within-a- witnesses (including Price) were called, and documents state seriously threatened the country’s fragile political and (including several of Price’s books) were filed. The case democratic stability. established several significant precedents with respect to In adjudicating between the state and the Saramakas, indigenous and tribal rights to traditional territories and re- the court ruled that the state should pay the Saramakas ma- sources, in part because of antecedent rulings by that court terial damages, moral damages, and costs, as well as offer and other bodies, for example, the UN Declaration on the other forms of reparation (p. 147). So, it is a victory, but only Rights of Indigenous People. up to a point. Suriname, not surprisingly, while mindful that In places the book reads like a rip-roaring adventure loans from the World Bank and Inter-American Develop- story, with heroism, violent standoffs, cronyism, and sin- ment Bank might dry up, has subsequently done little to ister actors. Price comes across as a role model of an an- meet the court’s demands, apart from rhetoric. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 40, No. 2, pp. 399–418, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2013 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12029 American Ethnologist Volume 40 Number 2 May 2013 Because the issues are so timely and relevant to so sense of the dramatic events following the island’s inde- many cases worldwide, Rainforest Warriors offers plenty for pendence from British rule in 1960. Especially after the readers not very concerned with what happened in a small birth of the illegal state of the “Turkish Republic of North- South American country. There is the broader significance ern Cyprus” (TRNC) in 1983, the study of the island’s pol- of the court’s 2007 decision: for the first time the court ad- itics and peoples was for the most part confined within dressed a people’s “corporate” (collective) rights, instead of the limits of an imaginary and a vocabulary borrowed from viewing them merely as an aggregation of individuals or as the realms of international relations and peace and con- a community–village. The Saramaka people’s right to recog- flict studies. In her remarkably rich and innovative book on nition as a corporate legal identity was established, despite northern Cyprus and its Turkish–Cypriot community, Yael the lack of such a possibility under current Suriname law. Navaro-Yashin begins by asking two perceptive questions The court also awarded monetary damages for the first time that go against the current: (1) how is the sense of state- to an indigenous or tribal people because a state had caused hood produced and sustained in a polity whose sovereignty environmental harm to its lands and resources. The court’s is not internationally recognized? and (2) what are the man- ruling that the right to self-determination “cannot be re- ifest ways of feeling and sensing shared by the members stricted when interpreting the property rights guaranteed of this polity? She then goes on to document and investi- under Article 21 of the American Convention” meant that gate the administrative practices, material items, and the the Saramakas had right to manage, distribute, and effec- affective states informed by the efforts for carving a mo- tively control their territory. Such legal decisions will have noethnic presence out of, what was until the Turkish Armed repercussions well beyond Suriname. Forces’ invasion of the north in 1974, a multicommunal ex- It will be up to the reader, however, to supply this istence. The fantasy involved in crafting the northern part of wider significance to the narrative because the book has lit- Cyprus as a distinct spatial–political entity despite its lack of tle theory or comparative analysis. Price could have men- recognition by the international community is recognized tioned the considerable scholarship on territorial claims- by some of the Turkish–Cypriots through the notion of the making in South America—or the entire hemisphere. A make-believe state (uyduruk devlet). And, yet, the ghostly discussion of antilogging struggles in, say, Borneo would presence of the Greek–Cypriots retained in the spaces and have strengthened the book, as would a discussion of the objects that they left behind withstands this make-believe definitions of indigenous and tribal. In addition, Price’s dis- quality to haunt the current inhabitants of this postwar ge- cussion of the legal status of indigenous collectivities is too ography. The phantasmatic practices of bureaucracy and brief. He also should have paraphrased some of the long everyday life for statehood and nationhood, in other words, quotes. Providing full text at times is warranted; those that are countered by the phantomic forces exerted by the places matter here come from the transcript of the trial. Most read- and people that they intend to obliterate in the first place. ers won’t be interested in the long quotes that appear ear- This strained relation between the phantasmatic and lier, so why not include them in the endnotes? The space the phantomic, however, is taken only as the departure freed up would have allowed Price to provide more bio- point of a much broader intellectual project aimed at locat- graphical information about Eduards and Jabini. Also, given ing the anthropology of the political at the heart of a nu- the plethora of acronyms, a glossary is needed. anced antihumanist philosophical trajectory. Throughout Such shortcomings aside, the book will interest schol- the book, Navaro-Yashin thinks through northern Cyprus ars and advocates interested in human rights, environ- and its unusual legal and political status by critically en- mentalism, social movements (in particular Latin Ameri- gaging with various philosophers (Derrida, Latour, Tarde, can Afro-descendant campaigns), the evolution of interna- Spinoza) and research agendas (affect, subjectivity, space, tional human rights law, and the increasingly important law) to go beyond the analytical separation between the cat- role of international institutions like the UN and the Inter- egories of the interior and the exterior; the tangible and the American Court. It is a superb example of the value of long- spectral; and the human and the nonorganic.