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Life in Traffic

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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 Amer...
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  • 16 June 2026
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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 Mother Earth.

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Price: $29.95
Pages: 312
Publisher: University of California Press
Imprint: University of California Press
Series: California Series in Public Anthropology
Publication Date: 16 June 2026
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780520427358
Format: Paperback
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Ruth E. Goldstein is Assistant Professor of Gender and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.