Predatory economies: The Sanema and the socialist state in contemporary Amazonia By Amy Penfield. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2023. 248 pp.

Examining the modalities of predation among the Sanema people in Venezuela, Predatory Economies offers a careful ethnographic account of life in contemporary Amazonia.Drawing from fieldwork in 2009-11, Penfield works to untether the concept of predation from its presumed biological, often violent, connotations to explore how preying and being preyed on invoke a much larger repertoire of submission, persuasion, and appropriation.The author shows how the Sanema both deploy and fall victim to predatory strategies in their own economic pursuits and engagement with non-Indigenous actors, including institutions of the socialist Chvez state.In this endeavor, the lens of predation offers a nuanced perspective on navigating life amid market economies, political organization, and environmental precarity.The book opens with the theoretical stakes of predation.Penfield proposes to move beyond narratives of aggression to consider predation in more nuanced terms.For the author, predation can be usefully understood as encompassing the nonreciprocal appropriation of objects of value, as well as energy, attention, loyalties, and souls.These resources can be taken with force or through other strategies of coercion, enticement, empathy, emulation, or manipulation.By expanding the conceptual range of nonaggressive tactics of predation, Penfield can theorize predation as a strategy that the Sanema use to negotiate both self and community in a changing world, and in doing so she offers a new perspective on a well-trodden trope in Amazonianist anthropology.Penfield moves through a history of predation among the Sanema, exploring predatory dynamics in hunting, shamanism, and relationships with other Indigenous groups in chapter 1. Central to this is the Sanema's changing orientation toward the Venezuelan state.As chapter 2 shows, this includes the Sanema's self-reported desire for manufactured goods, which they have historically obtained from the neighboring Ye'Kwana Indigenous people in exchange for labor.Part of the interest in Penfield's theoretical opening of predation is that it subverts dichotomies of submission and dominance by showing how