James Andrew Whitaker is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Troy University. He also holds honorary research appointments at Mississippi State University and the University of St Andrews. He has conducted fieldwork with the Makushi in Guyana since 2012. His research combines ethnographic fieldwork with archival analysis to examine histories and ontologies in Amazonia and West Africa. He has published numerous articles in anthropological journals and has recently co-edited Climatic and Ecological Change in the Americas: A Perspective from Historical Ecology (2023).