IN AMAZONIA
IN AMAZONIA
A NATURAL HISTORY
HUGH RAFFLES
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
COPYRIGHT © 2002 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicaton Data
Raffles, Hugh, DATE
In Amazonia : a natural history / Hugh Raffles.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-04884-3 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-691-04885-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Ethnology—Brazil—Igarapé Guariba. 2. Ethnology—Amazon River Valley. 3. Indigenous peoples—Ecology—Brazil—Igarapé Guariba. 4. Indigenous peoples—Ecology—Amazon River Region. 5. Estuarine ecology—Brazil—Igarapé Guariba. 6. Estuarine ecology—Amazon River Region. 7. Natural history—Brazil—Igarapé Guariba. 8. Natural history—Amazon River Region. 9. Igarapé Guariba (Brazil)—History. 10. Amazon River Region—History. 11. Igarapé Guariba (Brazil)—Social life and customs. 12. Amazon River Region—Social life and customs. I. Title.
GN564.B6 R34 2002
306′.09811—dc21 2002016909
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Sabon.
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
www.pupress.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR SHARON
Pará, December 15, 1928. Mouth of the Amazon.
A young woman who was on our boat, coming from Manaus, went into town with us this morning. When she came upon the Grand Park (which is undeniably nicely planted) she emitted an easy sigh.
‘Ah, at last, nature,’ she said. Yet she was coming from the jungle.
—HENRI MICHAUX, Ecuador: A Travel Journal
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
CHAPTER 1. In Amazonia 1
CHAPTER 2. Dissolution of the Elements
The Floodplain, 11,000 BP–2002 12
CHAPTER 3. In the Flow of Becoming
Igarapé Guariba, 1941–1996 44
CHAPTER 4. A Countrey Never Sackt
Guiana, 1587–1631 75
CHAPTER 5. The Uses of Butterflies
Bates of the Amazons, 1848–1859 114
CHAPTER 6. The Dreamlife of Ecology
South Pará, 1999 150
CHAPTER 7. Fluvial Intimacies
Amapá, 1995–1996 180
NOTES 207
BIBLIOGRAPHY 265
CREDITS 297
INDEX 299
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many people have read and commented on either single chapters or larger portions of a manuscript that has been in progress for several years; others have made more informal but no less valued contributions. My appreciation runs deep to all—including those whose names have somehow escaped this list: Arun Agrawal, Noriko Aso, Iain Boal, Bruce Braun, Graham Burnett, Jim Clifford, Steve Connell, Bill Denevan, Amity Doolittle, Kate Dudley, Carla Freccero, Jody Greene, Carol Greenhouse, Jimmy Grogan, Donna Haraway, Gill Hart, Julie Harvey, Emily Harwell, Amelie Hastie, Cori Hayden, Gail Hershatter, David Hoy, Jake Kosek, Jean Lave, Celia Lowe, Joe McCann, Doreen Massey, Bill Maurer, Ben Orlove, Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez, Anna Roosevelt, Vasant Saberwal, Suzana Sawyer, Candace Slater, Janet Sturgeon, Neferti Tadiar, Liana Vardi, Michael Watts, Antoinette WinklerPrins, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Dan Zarin. In addition, Don Brenneis, Susan Harding, Susanna Hecht, Dan Linger, Christine Padoch, Nancy Peluso, Michael Reynolds, Jim Scott, K. Sivaramakrishnan, Kristiina Vogt, Eric Worby, Heinzpeter Znoj, and an anonymous reviewer from the Press have made major contributions by reading and responding to one or another version of the entire work. In this regard, I owe particular thanks to David Cleary, who twice provided exceptionally detailed, insightful, and generous readings that considerably advanced the project. I am also more than normally indebted to Don Moore, whose sustained commentary has pulled both me and this book further into Pacific Time than would otherwise have been possible. The book has benefited greatly from the attention of two outstanding copy editors—Maria E. DenBoer and Annie Moser Gray—and from the production skills of Brigitte Pelner and Sarah Green. My thanks also to Lys Ann Shore for preparing the index. Mary Murrell has been everything I hoped for in an editor and more: smart, sensitive, imaginative—and an inimitable lunch companion!
Individual chapters have been presented at seminars and conferences at Irvine, Santa Cruz, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., the University of Delhi, the University of London, and Yale, and I thank audiences and commentators at these events, particularly Amita Baviskar, Teresa Caldeira, Fred Damon, Rebecca Hardin, Gísli Palsson, and Adriana Petryna. In London, I remain grateful to James Dunkerley, Stephen Nugent, and the late Michael Eden for providing a home at the Institute of Latin American Studies, enabling my return to academia and departure for Brazil.
In the United States, I have had the great fortune to work in remarkable institutional settings on both coasts. At Yale, Jim Scott, Kay Mansfield, and the Program in Agrarian Studies welcomed me to what became a formative location. As for Santa Cruz: this book would have been very different and, I am certain, far poorer, had it been written anywhere else. I have learned from all my colleagues, and working at close quarters in particular with Don Brenneis, Jackie Brown, Nancy Chen, Susan Harding, Dan Linger, Ravi Rajan, Lisa Rofel, and Anna Tsing has been equal parts humbling and inspiring.
In Brazil, I am indebted to Jaime Rabelo and Marcirene Machado, Fernando Rabelo and Lúcia, Moacir José Santana, Mary Helena and Fernando Allegretti, Hélio Pennafort, Waldiclei Pereira Ramos, Waldir Pereira, the staff at the SEPLAN library, the Museu Histórico do Amapá, the public library in Macapá, and the Archivo Público in Belém, to Trish Shanley, Célia Maracajá, Toby McGrath, Harry Knowles, and to Dora, Lene, and Walmir, who always found room for my rede. I am also grateful to Joe McCann for the memorable visit to the Arapiuns basin that is recorded in Chapter 2, and to Michael Reynolds for his friendship on that and other journeys. Above all, though, I owe a permanent debt of gratitude for the extraordinary generosity, kindness, patience, and humor of those I name only by pseudonym: the residents of Igarapé Guariba, Rio Preto, Fazendinha, Macapá, and elsewhere in Amazonia, whose lives animate the pages of Chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7.
The research on which this book is based was funded by the Joint Council of Latin American and Caribbean Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies with funds provided by the Ford Foundation; the National Science Foundation; the Program in Agrarian Studies at Yale University; the Yale Center for International and Area Studies; the Yale Tropical Resources Institute; and by faculty research funds granted by the University of California, Santa Cruz. I was able to complete the writing thanks to the award of a University of California President’s Research Fellowship in the Humanities and an S.V. Ciriacy-Wantrup Fellowship in Natural Resource Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. I am grateful to Michael Watts for acting as my faculty mentor at Berkeley and to all the above institutions for their generous support.
In addition to the people who figure in its pages, I have written this book for my family in Britain and Ireland, especially for my parents. I dedicate it to Sharon Simpson, lifelong best friend, partner-in-crime. So many years sharing our dreams, anxieties, and passions. Always talking, always thinking, never stopping! So many distances traveled. And always together, even when apart. In
every respect, this book is the outcome of our two lives entwined.
IN AMAZONIA
1
IN AMAZONIA
Dreams of Avarice—My Heart Goes Bump!—Landscape as Text … and as Biography—Igarapé Guariba—Another Discovery—Environmental Determinisms and Narrative Acrobatics—Spaces of Nature—A Natural History—Collecting and Reflecting—Traces of Trauma—Sawdust Memories
Let’s begin in 1976. It was late summer that year when a crew from the Companhia de Pesquisas e Recursos Minerais, the geological survey of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines, shot this infrared aerial photograph of the Rio Guariba, by then almost a river. They didn’t find what they were looking for, at least not here, although there was plenty of gold and magnesium close by. But their image is worth treasuring anyway. Its tactility holds this book in place—exactly where it should be.
It was a famously hot summer in London. I was working in a gray stone warehouse in the East End docks, loading and unloading delivery trucks and stacking crates of beer and wine in tall towers on wooden pallets. That building is still standing, but like most of the warehouses down there it’s been transformed: gutted, scrubbed, and converted into luxury condominiums. Back then, every Thursday, all the workers—transients like myself and those hoping for the long haul—formed a snaking line up a narrow, deeply shadowed stairwell to a battered doorway on the top-floor landing. Every week, as the person ahead exited, I would knock on the closing door, enter the cramped office, and say my name to the company accountant seated behind a desk piled high with tumbling stacks of papers. And every Thursday, with the same motions and with the same half-smile, the accountant would calculate my wages, shuffle the money into a new brown envelope, and, as if to himself, repeat the same unsettling phrase: “Beyond the dreams of avarice….”
That same summer, an ocean away, in a world of which I still knew nothing, the Brazilian dictatorship was chasing avaricious dreams of its own. Late in 1976, as I grappled with an irony beyond my sensibility, the generals were forcing convulsive inroads into their northern provinces, brushing aside Indian, peasant, and guerrilla resistance, creating fortunes, chaos, and despair. It was an aggressive territorialization, one that would radically change the dynamics and logic of regional politics and produce an unforeseen geopolitical re-siting that the military and their civilian successors have ever since struggled to disavow, a now-familiar ecological Amazonia subject to planetary discourses of common governance.1
Meanwhile, between the contours of the military maps, people were making new worlds of their own. The survey image does not lie. Though we cannot see it yet, that river is growing, and in growing it transforms the lives that transform it. And the water that flowed past as I piled boxes by the Thames at Wapping Stairs where Jeffreys the Hanging Judge once attempted flight disguised as a sailor, that lapping water on which Ralegh was finally captured, his pockets stuffed with talismans of Guiana, and on which young Bates and Wallace, heading to Kew in 1848, talked of tropical travels soon to come, that murky water is the same rushing tide that washes in and out, a monstrous pump, sweeping the land out to sea and remaking this place I have called Igarapé Guariba.
I arrived in Igarapé Guariba in 1994 looking for oral histories. I was in the northern Brazilian state of Amapá and was captured by the landscape, its blatant physicality and its enduring imaginaries. It was especially thrilling to be in an airplane here on a cloudless flight and to be held by that iconic view of dense and boundless forest veined by sharply golden rivers, by a long-anticipated panorama that was already part of my experience well before I saw it for myself.
On the ground, of course, although the consciousness of vista never really dissolves, it all looks different—a matter of ethnography and the practice of history, and a rationale for this book. There is a passage in Walter Benjamin’s One-Way Street about this, written in an age when commercial air travel was still exotic, a meditation on embodied experience, on the perspectival dislocations of new technologies and the traditions of Judaic scholarship. Benjamin, alive to the materialities of practice and to the liveliness of objects, compares the difference between passing over and walking through a landscape to the difference between reading a text and copying it. But it is the first term of his analogy that catches my attention:
The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane…. The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and, of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.2
Benjamin draws his European landscape with a mind’s eye trained on the darkening horizon that presages his own suicide. His country road leads inexorably to 1940 and his death at the Franco-Spanish border. And the mood of detachment affected by his passenger is also of a time and place. When the clouds part unexpectedly to reveal a glimpse of the deep green forests of Pará receding to a haze, my heart goes bump—just like that!—and a visual lexicon I hardly knew I possessed takes over. Laid out below is the Amazon as seen in a thousand picture spreads, an entity already grasped whole, a planetary patrimony, about which I have no sense of what I bring and what I find.
In Igarapé Guariba, I asked people about where they lived—the rivers, trees, and mudflats, the fishes, birds, and mammals—searching for signs of the potent environmental Amazon of contemporary imagination. In answer, as conversation turned to the past, their memories called up another place situated right here in this same geographical location but unmistakably different, another place entirely; a place distinct not only in its sociality but also in its physical characteristics. Slowly, through the months of talking, a biographical landscape, at once material and fantastic, one born from the politics of history and molded out of everyday life, began to take shape.
When the four founding families of Igarapé Guariba sailed across the endless expanse of the Amazon delta in the late 1950s, passing between islands and hugging the shore, they found only a stream running out of the forest to meet their boats and announce their new home. The water from which the community took its name was, as Pedro Preto put it, a “besteira,” a joke, a silly little thing. A creek not a river, an igarapé not a rio, it must have been no more than a mile long, narrowing from about 50 yards where it met the open sea of the Amazonas to less than 20 yards at its headwaters in the rocks of a shallow waterfall.
They were soon followed by Raimundo Viega, the owner of forest and savanna that stretched between three rivers and the boss for whom they had crossed the estuary from the islands of Afuá. Raimundo built a sawmill, and he hired men in Macapá, the state capital, to come out and work it for him. The settlers, meanwhile, collected timber and seeds and they planted fields of banana and watermelon. And they sold it all to Raimundo, always the Old Man, in his white-painted store on the bluff at the mouth of the stream.
Igarapé Guariba was a beautiful place, with a magical abundance of wildlife and trees. In that twinkling time, the fish found their own way into your nets. But how could it last? Soon any wood worth cutting was gone. The closest now was in the distant forest lining the horizon above the waterfall, the same area returning hunters reported rich with game and forest fish, and with truly fertile bottomlands. To get there meant pushing and dragging a canoe for hour after hour, opening the heavy curtain of tall papyrus grass that closed behind as you went forward, camping upstream for weeks on end.
It was Raimundo Viega who ordered the streams cut and the channels dug. It was Pedro Preto, Benedito Macedo, and the others who pushed themselves day after day, summer after summer, and year after year through the fields and swamps, hacking and digging, opening waterways, engineering what would turn out to be a whole new world.
Using canoes and motorboats to navi
gate Igarapé Guariba, traveling this impressive and mercurial river along which the village straggles, emerging on the broad, often choppy lake into which its waters empty, following the disorienting tracery of channels and creeks that vanish into the upstream forest, it was impossible for me to believe this landscape had existed for less than thirty-five years. It was so massive. So perfect in its limpid beauty. So complete in its deep surfaces and crowded banks. So resonant in its towering buriti palms, its lazy flocks of pure white egrets. So deeply green and forested. So natural.
Yet, time and again people told the same story: when we arrived, there was just a little stream, so shallow children could wade its mouth. It ended at a waterfall. Beyond, there were only fields. Then we cut the channels. Now look at it!
Such a simple story. But astonishing nonetheless. There had been no warning of this in the scholarly or popular literature. The accounts of manipulations of rivers and streams in Amazonia were scattered, minor, and largely unknown.3 I wouldn’t find them until I returned to the United States and dedicated myself to the task. It was not just that nothing of such a scale had previously been reported: the idea that the rivers and streams of the region were subject to systematic human manipulation had never been seriously entertained. Here was something new. Yet the story presented an awkward irony, and telling it placed me in the very tradition of European discovery I had intended to challenge. For, in many places, despite the drama of their scale and emotional resonance, these streams would be fairly unremarkable. But because they were made in Amazonia, they have a special status. In Amazonia, they immediately run up against sedimented histories of a primal nature, histories that have circulated and multiplied ever since Europeans first came here in the sixteenth century, situated their geographical imaginations, and returned home with wide-eyed accounts of their adventures. In Amazonia, visitors have struggled to locate new experiences on old intellectual maps, returning again and again to discover the region, as if for the very first time.
In Amazonia Page 1
