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Something immediately struck Ainlay as off.
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The two women found a space to sit in a guest hut, and Ross said that she and the shaman were in love. The day before the Dixons were set to depart, Ross asked Ainlay if they could speak privately. The family went on walks in the jungle with the shaman’s son, who rattled off the names and medicinal uses of the plants they came across. Over the next few days, the Dixons’ children played soccer with the village kids. The novelty of the experience was tempered by the presence of another American - a strawberry-blonde Harvard Divinity School student named Lily Ross, who had been living in the village for the past few weeks, working for a grassroots nonprofit and researching shamanic practices. They sat in a thatched roof hut while he blew pungent tobacco smoke on them, invoking a charm of protection. That night, the shaman held a welcome ceremony for the new guests. Eventually, they arrived at a small village where they were introduced to the village chief, a well-known shaman who’d had tourists flocking to his remote village ever since he’d been featured on a news show in Ecuador. To get there, the family took a 4x4 as far as they could down a rutted road, which soon dwindled to a trail they made the rest of the way on foot.
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At the beginning of the twenty-first century, when American support for international cooperation is once again in question, Gilpin’s warnings about the risks of American unilateralism sound ever clearer.Ainlay Dixon, her husband, and three of their four children were in a town in central Ecuador, midway through a South American tour, when a guide approached and offered to take them on a four-day jungle excursion to see the “authentic” Amazon: an indigenous village led by a real shaman. Gilpin’s exposition of the in.uence of politics on the international economy was a model of clarity, making the book the centerpiece of many courses in international political economy. Exploring the relationship between politics and economics first highlighted by Adam Smith, Karl Marx, and other thinkers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Gilpin demonstrated the close ties between politics and economics in international relations, outlining the key role played by the creative use of power in the support of an institutional framework that created a world economy. For Gilpin, a great power such as the United States is essential to fostering international cooperation. In this book, Robert Gilpin argues that American power had been essential for establishing these institutions, and waning American support threatened the basis of postwar cooperation and the great prosperity of the period. By the 1980s many contended that these institutions - the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (now the World Trade Organization), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund - were threatened by growing economic nationalism in the United States, as demonstrated by increased trade protection and growing budget deficits. After the end of World War II, the United States, by far the dominant economic and military power at that time, joined with the surviving capitalist democracies to create an unprecedented institutional framework.