Frederique Apffel-Marglin

Frédérique Apffel-Marglin, PhD. is Professor Emerita, Dpt. of Anthropology at Smith College and founded Sachamama Center for Biocultural Regeneration (SCBR) in the Peruvian Upper Amazon in 2009 which she directs. She has spent years in India and Peru working with indigenous peoples and with farmers. She was a research associate at the World Institute for Development Economics Research (WIDER) in Helsinki, a part of the United Nations University, for several years in the 1980’s and early 1990’s. Along with the Harvard economist Stephen A. Marglin, she has directed several research projects questioning the dominance of the modern paradigm of knowledge. In the early 1990’s she decided she could no longer continue doing ethnographic fieldwork – which she had continued doing in the Indian State of Odisha – for moral and political reasons. She was then invited by the Peruvian intellectual-activist group PRATEC to collaborate with them in Peru which she did until 2005. From 2005 to 2009 she collaborated with the Upper Peruvian Amazonian Fair Trade Coffee Cooperative Oro Verde until 2009 when she founded her own center in the same region of the Upper Peruvian Amazon in the State of San Martin. At SCBR in the Upper Peruvian Amazon she works with indigenous communities as well as several High Schools in the province, regenerating the most sustainable and climate reducing pre-Columbian anthropogenic soil known as Terra Preta do Indio (black earth of the Indians). She has authored six books as well as edited or co-edited nine more books and published some 70 articles and book chapters. Her more recent books are: Subversive Spiritualities: How Rituals Enact the World (Oxford U. Pr. New York, 2011); Sacred Soil: Biochar and the Regeneration of the Earth with Robert Tindall and David Shearer, (North Atlantic Books/Penguin Random, 2017) and most recently Contemporary Voices from Anima Mundi edited with Stefano Varese, Peter Lang, 2020. She is currently working on a book on Upper Amazonian Shamanism.