Crude Chronicles is one of the best ethnographies of Latin America written in the past decade. Suzana Sawyer’s account demonstrates the usefulness—indeed, the necessity—of ethnography for understanding politics. Simply put, Sawyer was there—whether there was a street protest, the occupation of a government office, a long protest march in the Andes, or high-level meetings between state officials, oil executives, and indigenous leaders. As a result of this sustained involvement, Sawyer’s contribution is far more than an ethnography of an indigenous movement. It is an ethnography of the most important political forces shaping Latin America during the past quarter century: the politics of indigenous rights, identity, corporate power, neoliberalism, land, the nation-state, globalization, and the environment.

With remarkable consistency, Sawyer seamlessly weaves herself and her ethnographic accounts into a larger story about neoliberalism, oil, and indigenous politics. Again and again, Sawyer is in the right place at the right time. The result is a fine-grained treatment of one of the most important indigenous movements in Latin America and its struggles with multinational oil and the Ecuadorian state.

Each chapter begins with an ethnographic description of a particular political encounter. The varied nature of these encounters provides for an engaging read and allows Sawyer to highlight the complicated process through which neoliberalism, capital accumulation, and oppositional political movements interact and constitute each other.

Chapter 1 begins with a 1992 indigenous protest march from the Amazonian lowlands to Quito, Ecuador’s capital. The march, organized by OPIP (Organization of Indigenous People of Pastaza), was in support of indigenous land rights, but it engendered debates about the capacity of the Ecuadorian state to control “progress,” foreign capital, and political opposition. How, and by whom, is the Ecuadorian nation defined? Indigenous opposition was ultimately contained in this instance, but the march helped carve a space for indigenous peoples within the nation by forcing the state to recognize their unique relationship to the land.

Chapter 2 explores attempts by a multinational company to marginalize indigenous opposition to oil interests by garnering state power, positioning itself as the harbinger of modernity, and creating divisions within indigenous groups. One of the strengths of this chapter, and of the book in general, is Sawyer’s refusal to sanitize indigenous politics. Crude Chronicles does have a David and Goliath quality. Indigenous groups possess few resources when compared with ARCO, for example, a multinational whose “economy” is almost double that of the Ecuadorian nation. Yet Sawyer pays close attention to divisions among indigenous groups while taking readers inside the multinational itself. This approach identifies wonderfully complex actors whose motivations, strategies, and actions cannot be mechanically read from their “economic interests.”

The third chapter starts with an indigenous occupation of the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Throughout the book, the Ecuadorian state is situated within (and formed by) the struggle between multinational oil and Amazonian peoples. As the Ecuadorian state seeks to seduce foreign investment and as indigenous peoples are forced to confront privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and decentralization, a crisis of state and nation is provoked, opening up certain political spaces while closing off others.

Chapter 4 takes the reader into meetings between indigenous groups, oil executives, and officials from the Ministry of Energy and Mines. Sawyer, acting as translator for OPIP, is the proverbial fly on the wall, providing a rare look into the process by which state and corporate actors depoliticize the practice of the petroleum industry by attempting to reduce wide-ranging and complex problems to a series of technical fixes.

Chapters 5 and 6 take readers from boardroom to jungle and back again. In response to neoliberal agrarian legislation, indigenous peoples in the Amazon and elsewhere blocked roads and paralyzed Ecuador for over a week in 1994. Although the immediate point of contention revolved around land, the broader issue concerned the place of indigenous peoples within the Ecuadorian polity. The power of the protest, in turn, forced the Ecuadorian state to debate the newly passed Agrarian Development Law with a wide range of groups, including indigenous leaders. Here, again, Sawyer takes readers inside these meetings to examine a neoliberal project that allows the state to relinquish responsibility for its subjects while reducing its role to one of “fiscal responsibility.”

In the end, readers are left with a wonderfully rich, fluid, and revealing account. I highly recommend Crude Chronicles for anthropologists and others interested in indigenous politics, neoliberalism, oil, the environment, development, social movements, and the nation-state.