In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Octávio can explain this. Most of the middle-class urban Amazonians I know affirm their strong kinship connections with people in the countryside through talk that casts ribeirinhos in sentimentally nostalgic terms, as nobly folkloric, if deeply flawed figures. Octávio had other ideas. He considers blood ties subject to transcendence and locates himself on an uneasy border. Though his body be saturated with the genetic stain of the indigene, his spirit can soar, taking flight, south to São Paulo, north to Miami, perhaps east across the Atlantic. His conversation contains echoes of the Amazonian travel accounts of Victorian natural historians, with their descriptions of the easefully decadent life of the interior and the inability of rural people to perform what, in post-Enlightenment terms, was the definitively human action of asserting their will over nature through transforming it into culture. And I also hear traces of the Amazonianist anthropologists and archaeologists of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—famous names: Julian Steward, Alfred Métraux, Betty Meggers, Daniel Gross—with their parallel depictions of a descent into nature, although here it is the draining enervations of Steward’s “tropical forest culture area” rather than race or psychology that determines decline. There are important distinctions, but there is also an epistemic correspondence. Both these share with Octávio what literary critic David Spurr has recognized as a familiar Rousseauian-derived hierarchy of differences: one that “identifies non-European people with … nature, and then places nature in opposition to culture.”5

  Octávio’s account was in many ways more sophisticated than either of these influential narratives. He, at least, understood that the making of places was hard, unremitting work, and, moreover, that it was characterized by tenuousness and insecurity. He demonstrated a rare understanding of the instabilities and incertitudes of global transformations, of the fact that space produced can later be erased, that marks on a map often have little permanence. This awareness stemmed partly from his rootedness in Amazonian localities. Here was a man who, although based in a comfortable office, had spent a good part of his thirty-year logging career on expeditions in the estuary searching for timber. Here was a man who had dragged his own cosmopolitan self through rural communities, trekking into forests, sleeping in the open, grappling with the logistics of timber extraction in difficult, uncomfortable, and technically and emotionally challenging terrain.

  Octávio clearly had a local knowledge, and it was one that involved a certain sensitivity to the insecurities of rural life. But it was positioned in such a way that it obscured the slightest notion of rural agency. As in the European narratives of jungle nature, his account locates Amazonian ribeirinhos as living on and off the land, scratching parasitically at its superficial layer, subject to its vicissitudes, and destined finally to succumb, driven to flee once the shade of the patrão’s protective economic order has been withdrawn. Locality, for Octávio (in this case, Igarapé Guariba), was no more rooted than those ribeirinhos who were now its sole, inadequate markers. With the timber all gone, Igarapé Guariba had no meaning beyond its pitiful residue of abandoned peasants, whose commitment to this piece of land Octávio knew to be entirely transitory.

  Unlike most Victorian naturalists and many post-war Amazonianist anthropologists, Octávio understood that rural Amazonian places assume at least some of their particularity through the transnational mobility of political economy. He had, after all, personally directed a sizable chunk of extra-local capital as it made its blundering way into the interior, chopping down forest and hauling out trees. These extractive projects of the 1970s did not just represent modernity, they actually were modernization in his eyes. And he was hardly alone in viewing the arrival of large-scale capitalist enterprises as the vehicle that would drag Amazonia and its reluctant peasantry into the modern world. This had been a strong-state project premised, like so many others in so many places, on the notion that new subjects would be created through the making of a new nature.6 It would be through the transformation of the Amazonian landscape that those debilitating bonds holding rural people captive to nature finally would be severed.

  After the timber ran out along the northern channel of the estuary and BRUMASA was taken over and liquidated in the late 1980s, Octávio passed into that premature career twilight in which we met. In so doing, he received brutal confirmation that there is nothing permanent about Progress. In his world of unforgiving nature, in which constant vigilance was needed just to stay civilized, rural places could fall out of locality far more easily than they could come to exist within it. And, he believed, once those networks of bourgeois political economy that had wrenched it into history were dissolved, there was nothing standing between Igarapé Guariba and the unforgiving jungle from which it had temporarily emerged.

  THE PATRÃO

  Especially compelling in Octávio’s account of Igarapé Guariba was his conflation of rural society into a single, undifferentiated caboclo, a countryperson, a hick. What people in Igarapé Guariba expressed as a foundational cleavage—the line between ribeirinhos and patrão—was eclipsed in his narrative. Instead, Octávio offered a view of the world in which the site of irreducible difference was the gulf between the modernization project of BRUMASA and that of the patrão of Igarapé Guariba, Raimundo Viega, the Old Man.

  Until a few years before he died in 1983, Raimundo Viega was O Patrão. This did not mean that he was simply the landowner. He had purchased the land in the 1940s after working his way as a cowboy, a rubber-tapper, a small farmer, a boat-builder, and, by some accounts, as a regatão, an itinerant trader sailing between the settlements that dot the rivers and coastline around Macapá.7 He had accumulated a little capital, married, bought his first piece of land in the municipality of Afuá on Marajó Island, and cultivated a network of ribeirinho clients—or “partners,” as his wife Dona Rita once corrected me. In explaining the underpinnings of life in Igarapé Guariba when his father was in control, Nestor, Raimundo’s son, suggested why his mother might have made this distinction:

  It was a type of exchange. You have some land. You put in someone who these days we’d call a freguês, a client. The responsibility of the patrão is to make land available to the freguês without the obligation of paying rent…. He plants his crops and takes them to the [patrão’s] store and, with the produce he’s bringing, grown on that land, the freguês buys merchandise. It was an exchange of work for goods.

  Powerful emotional ties and obligations fostered and underwrote this transactional framework. Nestor is making explicit the often unspoken intimacies of aviamento, that intricate, persistent, Amazonian system of credit that emerged during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and involved large numbers of intermediary merchants moving capital (in the form of a variety of transformable goods) from places like Liverpool to other places like Igarapé Guariba, and back again.8 To Viega’s family, real leadership of Guariba involved more than merely managing economy. It was an experiment in modernist social engineering, an enactment of enlightened humanitarianism, and a continuance of traditional forms of Amazonian solidarity. The terms in which Nestor and his mother frame the story of Igarapé Guariba were powerfully expressed twenty-five years earlier in a local newspaper column written by Edinaldo Gomes, a journalist and family friend:

  It was only because of Raimundo Viega’s fibra, his will, that people came to help with the occupation of Igarapé Guariba, an area unknown until 1940. That was when the brave pioneer, impelled by circumstance, resolved to drag it from a state of abandonment and exploit the potential that was already there only awaiting courage and the absolute willingness to work—two virtues Viega possesses even today.9

  For Gomes, this effort was a collaboration. The people who “came to help” were the ribeirinhos, who, I was told many times, by residents of Igarapé Guariba as well as by members of the Viega family and their associates, prospered under the paternalist regime that was soon established.

  The great Brazilian historian of Amazonia, Arthur Cézar Ferreira Reis, writing in the 1950s, describe
d the Amazon patrão as follows:

  He is neither an opportunist nor someone who has got where he is by dint of birth or money. Originally, he was a backwoods scout, a forest explorer, who succeeded through possession of the virtues and qualities needed for victory. Experienced in the forest, ambitious, capable of imposing himself to willfully discipline men, successful in gaining the confidence of his suppliers. Sometimes he was the founder of a plantation, a seringal, sometimes an ex-worker who had managed to climb among his comrades and substitute himself for the former patrão, inheriting, by legal means, ownership rights to the plantation.10

  Reis is talking specifically about the rubber trade. But his militaristic construction of the patrão in self-made heroic terms corresponds remarkably with the language used by Gomes and by Viega’s family. The discourse of struggle is not just tied to that of enlightenment, it constitutes it. Viega understands his fregueses because he himself was once where they are now. Moreover, their dependence on him imposes responsibility. As Nestor told me:

  Papai always said: “One hand washes the other, and both wash the face.” So if you help me, I’ll help you. In those days when he was helping [his fregueses], papai understood that everybody needed each other. There’s no mystery in this.

  Reis continues his discussion by outlining another characteristic of the patrão: his violence. This was a politics repudiated by the Viega family. In a well-run community, there is no need for heavy-handed enforcement. Yet, in describing this side of what he effectively conveys as the self-fashioning dualities of the emergent peasant boss, Reis throws light on Octávio da Gama’s account of undifferentiated rurality:

  We need to understand the social milieu from which [the patrão] came and in which he lived. In contact with only men, subject to the anguish that comes from isolation in the forest, he is hardly going to be the drawing-room type, with refined gestures and perfect manners…. He has to be dynamic, crude, perhaps tyrannical. Any weakness, any indecision could spell disaster. He needs to exercise power without the least hesitation.

  … When we are trying to understand him, we need to remember that he generally has little education, and has not spent time in refined environments…. He is a friend to his companheiros. He stands shoulder to shoulder with them in difficult times. He feels their problems, problems he himself experienced when he too was a simple worker. Brave in the times of most uncertainty, he knows how to face the natural and social world [o meio geográfico e social].11

  This is the expressive ambivalence of the “simple man,” the pessoa simples, the salt of the earth. It is a masculine idiom with strong regional roots, through which many successful traders I met in Macapá define themselves, at least in commercial contexts. Used by middle-class urbanites in relation to the ribeirinho, it has a sentimental flavor implying an artless honesty coupled with lack of education. Used by ribeirinhos to describe city-folk, it is a categorical compliment, though with the potential for the ironic deflation of those who imagine they can rise above their class without compromise. Used by self-fashioning urban merchants to construct their own identities, it enables the simultaneous assertion of authenticity and rurality against the fact of urban prosperity, affirms their ability to communicate with the ribeirinho man to man, and announces their willingness to engage faithfully in the personalist obligations of aviamento economics.

  Viega’s surviving family emphasize his roots in poverty, and the selfless devotion and love for place, the carinho, that tender affection through which he built up Igarapé Guariba and, with it, the lives of his fregueses. In these accounts, the index of devotion is the obstacles overcome, and the greatest of these was Amazonian nature. Dona Rita, Raimundo’s wife, told me that when she first went to Guariba, “there wasn’t even a stream there. It was just forest and dense grassland.” Lene, her daughter, picked up the theme:

  When papai bought that land it was mata virgem, virgin forest. It was really wild, dense forest, so dense that a person couldn’t penetrate it. There was an area of thorny scrub that would just cut you up all over…. All the boats had to stop at the entrance [to the stream] because they couldn’t get in. It was closed, so narrow that there was no way for a large boat to get down—only those tiny little canoes that you can take right into the forest, bending down and dragging them. That’s what it used to be like.

  We already know something about how Raimundo Viega and his fregueses remade the nature of Igarapé Guariba. In the process, the patrão built a store, a school, and a chapel out of the commodified resources taken from the forest and rivers. And he blessed his vila, the commercial complex at the river’s mouth, with electric light. Incrementally, steadily, Igarapé Guariba seemed to be finding its way onto the maps of modernity. Yet the apparent success of the Old Man’s project only masked the contradictions that were finally to drive him out. The social contract collapsed. The Macedo family—ribeirinhos, emblematic pessoas simples who had come from Afuá to work with their patrão on his new property—changed the rules. Viega’s community came crashing down, and the meaning of place and nature in Igarapé Guariba was revealed as bitterly contested and disturbingly ambiguous.

  PLACE-MAKING, NATURE-MAKING

  So how did this place come into existence? I have to say that it was all about work, the work of place-making and, inseparably, the work of nature-making. Some of this has to do with belonging, with finding ways to become local and with getting caught up in the elaboration of what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling.12 Much of this is the work of discursive practice, in this case, of the stories people tell over and over again that reinforce personal connections to this particular local.

  There is, for example, the one about a huge snake, an anaconda, that was killed in 1993 during the demarcation of land controlled by the newly formed Residents’ Association. It was long enough for the large group of men hacking a trail through the swampy grassland with the land reform agency official to stand in a line and fix the moment—posing for a photograph, one behind the other, with this monster held up, stretched above their heads in dramatic gesture, using a moment of assertion over landscape to draw the boundaries of difference that excluded unwelcome nature and uninvited land grabbers.

  With José Macedo as president and Antônio, his brother, as secretary, the Association was an explicit institutional consolidation of a de facto political leadership. Backed by the Rural Workers’ Union of Amapá, it emerged as residents temporarily cohered to challenge the right of Raimundo Viega’s heirs to cut heart-of-palm on what both parties considered their land.13 The implications of legal victory and the act of boundary-drawing that followed were not entirely satisfactory to all the people living in Igarapé Guariba. Accustomed to hunting and fishing freely over a large area, residents were now under court order to restrict their activities to the demarcated area or else be reclassified as invaders and poachers. The anaconda, the most hostile, the least transformable to economy of the landscape’s animal occupants, became an appropriately ambivalent metaphor for a victory that created a new set of concerns and initiated a new series of external definitions of “community.”14

  Ten years previously, a bitter saga of confused land dealings, contested indemnification, and the threat of physical violence had led everyone to abandon their homes and gardens on the north bank of the river and relocate to the south side, ferrying over what they could in canoes and motor-launches. Viega had recently died, and his children, squabbling over their inheritance, went back on a commitment residents claim he had made: within months of their father’s death his heirs had sold the land on which his fregueses were living, leaving these caboclos no choice but to move.

  People sometimes dramatized this history by showing me the structural beams of their new houses, decay-resistant wood they brought with them from Afuá forty years earlier and which won’t grow in swampy Igarapé Guariba but which provides imaginative and emotional continuity within a narrative of dislocation. These knotted beams have come to express the persistence of
place, even as they embody the trials of eviction and forced mobility. In this story, so different from Octávio’s, locality resides in people rather than in economy or geography. And it is rooted in shared experience.

  Although shared, it’s no surprise that this story of departure from what people always call “the other side” has no unified consensual narrative: it is always crosscut by a language of betrayal and opportunism, and it continues to conjure bitterness in its telling. People talk diplomatically about their falta de orientação, their lack of political sophistication at the time. But it’s hard not to hear this as coded critique of those who broke ranks first and set sail across the river. These memories are profoundly diagnostic of local division, and whatever shared-ness there is in the experience seems to have settled in as a shared shame, continually fueled by the proximity of the formally inaccessible opposite bank, where their fruit trees have long since been cut down and their gardens gone to seed, just there, across the river.

  That shame can be tied up in local subjectivity is hardly surprising for a class of people who are popularly known in Amazonia by the pejorative term “caboclo.”15 Caboclo is often wielded with assertive irony in Igarapé Guariba, but the pervasive awkwardness in this narrative of eviction allows no such play. Instead, these memories become a stick with which to beat the present community leaders, people then active in union politics but nonetheless ineffective, and whose families, some imply, were the main beneficiaries of the indemnification. In this way, through their circulation and repetition, people use such stories to intervene in the often acrimonious politics surrounding the Association, and to advance arguments for the pursuit of one out of several potential futures. The conflictual and ongoing work of place-making is here expressed through the idiom of shared pasts.