In late 2018, a member of the HAU editorial collective suggested the possibility of organizing a book symposium on my recently published monograph, Life in oil: Cofán survival in the petroleum fields of Amazonia. Although I was flattered by the disciplinary attention he thought the book deserved, I was also hesitant. I have always appreciated the content that appears in HAU, but it is a deeply theoretical journal. The word “theory,” after all, is in its name. Life in oil, in contrast, is a book I carefully crafted to be almost entirely free of theoretical framing, terminology, debate, and references. How would readers of HAU respond to a work I intended as a highly accessible, and hopefully engaging, exercise in “ethnography for ethnography’s sake”?

Of course, my objectives in writing Life in oil went well beyond showcasing the value of ethnography. As I describe through the inclusion of biographical information in the central text (rather than the notes), I was drawn to the issue of oil’s consequences for Cofán lives as an undergraduate activist involved in struggles for indigenous peoples’ rights and tropical conservation. Early on, I was exposed to the many corporate reports—generated first by Texaco and then by Chevron—that denied that oil had had any negative impacts on Cofán health or territory. The issue became especially contentious when US courts decided that the allegations of harm made by the plaintiffs’ lawyers in a class-action suit against Chevron were inseparable from the legal team’s reportedly