Abstract
This article explores how local people in the Amazon negotiate different and conflicting rationalities, how they appropriate meanings and negotiate discourses on nature, gender and modernity. Ethnicity is used here to explore different temporalities and different forms of modernity at the “margins”. This article contextualizes this process of negotiation within the historic process of subordination and commoditization of nature and the subordination and control of indigenous populations in the Amazonian región of Loreto, where cultural
hybridization is part of hybrid livelihoods that reflect and challenge the structural limits defined by the political ecology of Loreto and the contradictory nature of modernity in the Third World. This article use ethnographic data to unveil the ambiguous ethnicity of ribereños and the unfinished and multidirectional process of assimilation of indigenous peoples in the Amazon