Turtle-fishing and adventure with Alligator.
Scientific practice turns out to be a conjunctural negotiation of emergent and relational knowledges. Amazonians’ understandings of the forest mediated by their assessments of the institutional resources and priorities of the visitor enter into fluid dialogue with Bates’ own conflicted allegiance to natural historical systematics as mediated by all the complications stirred up in his Amazon experience. This needs underlining: at stake is the making of spatial categories, metropolitan natural science, differentiated subjects, and local materiality. Although Bates’ training was ever toward the abstraction of the general from the specific, these field interactions constantly pulled him back to locality, and again, we see the critical importance of particularity.
Not surprisingly, Bates understood his science as being of a different order of rationality from what is now often called indigenous knowledge. Although his collecting relied on local expertise and his future career rested on the ability of informants to trap large numbers of diverse organisms, he was confused by any sign of native familiarity with the science of physiological process.97 Yet, this knowledge hierarchy was difficult to sustain. The assignment of local people’s ingenuity in the manipulation of plant materials (by which he was enduringly fascinated) to a category prior to science was undermined by the high status of the instrumental imperial science of economic botany. Applied local knowledge formed an intellectual resource of which he was fully aware and a pool of commercial data to which he was directed by metropolitan demand.98 Yet it was methodologically treacherous.
All too often, and particularly when working with botanical specimens, Bates was forced to suspend the normal rules by which objects collected in their habitat are situated in taxonomic relationships. The standard procedure did not apply. Rather than reinventing a natural object as a cultural artifact, Bates started out with the discovery of a cultural object—a plant derivative, perhaps a medicine or a household implement—and then, through fieldwork, tried to track back to reconstruct its natural form. Only in this way could he break down the specimen into the definitive morphological elements through which it would reveal its secrets. This procedure greatly increased his dependency on local informants:
The difficulty is not in collecting together plenty of different kinds of balsams, resins, or medicinal roots and barks (really or so reported), the real difficulty is in identifying these separate objects with the tree which produces them, and acquiring a flowering specimen of it. This is much aggravated by the loose terminology of the Indians who give the same name to very different things.99
It is only after the plant had been reassembled that a species became available to taxonomy. And, only then, in the act of being successfully catalogued, did it become loosened from its relationship to local practice.
Bates knew his Spix and Martius. But even these venerated predecessors encountered only a tiny portion of the novelty of the Amazon valley.100 Hired informants and field assistants not only selected many of the species for inclusion in his collection, but also provided much of the data that enabled identification. Their descriptions of local ecologies and their namings of individual species—often in sets with implicit and persuasive typological affinities—structured a dialogic field of interleaving taxonomies.101 Reliant on local familiarity with the properties of individual species, the naturalist, restricted by classificatory lacunae, had little alternative but to begin work by recording vernacular names, traits, and meanings (assigned by local people according to both their own priorities and their strategic understandings of the scientist’s needs). One effect of this procedure is to illustrate the Linnaean-derived dependence of biological systematics on morphological distinction. Another is to highlight the spatial and conjunctural contingency of classification: if the plant is not significant to Amazonians there at that moment, it might well not appear in the record. Still another is to draw the natural historian into the logics of immanent properties and alternative taxonomies, ones that may or may not correspond to phenotypic characters held as significant elsewhere.
Local narratives of nature articulated with the Darwinian predisposition to Humboldtian holism, insinuating themselves into the space created by disputes over the methodology of biological systematics and the contested status of systematics in the project of scientific natural history. And these narratives underwrote the situated local knowledge of the traveling naturalist. Aside from economic botany, we see this in a less instrumental but perhaps more formative mode as Bates depends on forest people to indicate and explain weather changes, the intricacies of rivers and tides, the habits and ecology of particular animals and plants, and the histories of land use that enable him, for example, to distinguish between capoeira (regenerating agricultural fields) and long untouched areas of vegetation. Piece by piece, he incorporates native descriptions of forest structure, fluvial dynamics, and seasonality, translating these into a discursive patchwork in which technical language and racialized determinisms sit awkwardly with the collapsing of ethnographic distance that comes with his assimilation into the rhythm of daily activity. In a typical passage of this type in which he describes events in Ega, Bates reproduces local narratives that bring together seasonal activities, climate, faunal distribution, and fluctuating livelihoods, legitimating his account through the use of a native terminology that represents the authority of reported speech. Albeit through its rearticulation, it is native experience and explanation that authorize scientific discourse. Bates offers a bricolage of ethnology, physical geography, ecological zoology, and political economy, proposing a synthetic vision of Amazonian life at odds in both tone and focus with the systematist’s optic:
The fine season begins with a few days of brilliant weather—furious hot sun, with passing clouds. Idle men and women, tired of the dulness and confinement of the flood season, begin to report, on returning from their morning bath, the cessation of the flow: as aguas estão paradas, “the waters have stopped.” The muddy streets, in a few days, dry up; groups of young fellows are now seen seated on the shady sides of the cottages, making arrows and knitting fishing-nets with tucúm twine; others are busy patching up and caulking their canoes, large and small: in fact, preparations are made on all sides for the much-longed-for “verão” or summer, and the “migration” as it is called, of fish and turtle; that is, their descent from the inaccessible pools in the forest to the main river…. The fall continues to the middle of October, with the interruption of a partial rise called “repiquet,” of a few inches in the midst of very dry weather in September, caused by the swollen contribution of some large affluent higher up the river. The amount of subsidence also varies considerably, but it is never so great as to interrupt navigation by large vessels. The greater it is the more abundant is the season. Every one is prosperous when the waters are low; the shallow bays and pools being then crowded with the concentrated population of fish and turtle. All the people, men, women, and children, leave the villages, and spend the few weeks of glorious weather rambling over the vast undulating expanses of sand in the middle of the Solimoens, fishing, hunting, collecting eggs of turtles and plovers, and thoroughly enjoying themselves. The inhabitants pray always for a “vasante grande” or great ebb.102
It is in the “intersubjective space of ethnographic encounters”103 that we find explanations for the specific logic of practice. Bates, like so many fieldworkers before and since, masks his inhabiting of this intimate space—denying its potency by asserting his mastery within it. But its effects on him and his science are far-reaching. By the time he sits down to write the substantive penultimate chapter of The Naturalist, his vision is of a contextualized, ecological taxonomy that reflects the mediation of metropolitan scientific dispute by Amazonian encounter. And he is able to advance his claim to professional stature based not just on the power of numbers, as he has in the preface, but on a theoretically confident reading of his empirical achievement:
As may have been gathered from the remar
ks already made, the neighbourhood of Ega was a fine field for a Natural History collector. With the exception of what could be learned from the few specimens brought home, after transient visits, by Spix and Martius and the Count de Castelnau, whose acquisitions have been deposited in the public museums of Munich and Paris, very little was known in Europe of the animal tenants of the region; the collections that I had the opportunity of making and sending home attracted, therefore, considerable attention…. The discovery of new species, however, forms but a small item in the interest belonging to the study of the living creation. The structure, habits, instincts, and geographical distribution of some of the oldest-known forms supply inexhaustible materials for reflection. The few remarks I have to make on the animals of Ega will relate to the mammals, birds, and insects, and will sometimes apply to the productions of the whole Upper Amazons region.104
Bates’ was a self-consciously mobile science depending, as he put it, on “personal observation in different countries.” His travel, though, was always fraught with danger, no less intellectual than physical and moral, and turned out to be a persistent site of excess and corruption. The point here is not only the authorizing ethnological invocation of the “personal” in the presence of difference, to which I have already drawn attention. There is also weight to that modest word “observation,” with its claims to independence and its assumption of the prior configuration of nature and space, of an Amazons, like its butterflies, awaiting the defining taxonomic eye.
“BATES OF THE AMAZONS”
Back in England, Bates eventually found his niche as assistant secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. Perhaps his most important duty, and the one for which his obituary writers praised his accomplishments above all else, was sympathetically to advise prospective travelers and edit their communiqués for publication in one of the Society’s two periodicals.105
There is an unmistakable whiff of stiff-necked glamour hanging around the pages of the Proceedings and Journal of the RGS in this period, and, reading them now, we get a sense of the expansive energy, of the dynamism and planetary reach of this rapidly coalescing center that had inherited the Banksian mantle as “Britain’s quasi-official directorate of exploration.”106 Bates played a backroom role as a modernizer at the RGS, promoting Darwinism whenever possible and pushing for the institutionalization of geography as an academic discipline.107 Yet it was the aura of the Amazons he had done so much to create that guaranteed his fame, and his obituaries unanimously recalled this defining episode of his life and the proprietorial nickname by which he was affectionately known: “Bates of the Amazons.”
c. 1892
In an extensive obituary in The Fortnightly Review, the novelist Grant Allen recalled an evening at Edward Clodd’s North London home “when Bates broke his wonted reserve in a rare fit of communicativeness.” Allen describes the old man as speaking with “child-like simplicity” and compares his account to one of “religious martyrdom”:
Bates told us with hushed breath how on that expedition he had at times almost starved to death; how he had worked with slaves like a slave for his daily rations of coarse food; how he had faced perils more appalling than death; and how he had risked and sometimes lost, everything he possessed on earth with a devotion that brought tears to the eyes of grown men who heard him.
As they rose to leave, these men, who included the writer Samuel Butler and the Africanist explorer Paul du Chaillu, expressed the same regret: “Oh, if we had only had a phonograph to take that all down—accent, intonation, and everything—exactly as he spoke it!”108
It is a wonderful and complicated image. The London elect at a moment of ascendancy. Patronage, science, exploration, and literature gathered to hear tales of the great river. It is a site of region-making that we can now barely imagine: a point where materiality and discourse come together in the most ordinary of ways at a moment when discovery and empire are still the business of the day, and in a place where all that effort—the sweeping out of the workshop, the part-time studying, the endless debating of Malthus and Lyell, the years of note-taking and drawing, the perpetual translation, the preserving and packaging, the dread and the longing—dissolves in the landscape of accomplishment. It is a glimpse into a domesticity in which all those anxious practices that I have argued are so important to the making of Amazonia in this time of rediscovery are finally, collectively erased.
Or are they?
This too is a colonial situation. Like those Amazonian trails Bates knew so well, it is a space of encounter and creation, defined in this instance by an unmarked imperial habitus. These men are also there, in place, at this historic moment in which a region is made in storytelling, made real through the authenticity and authority of experience.
And the Amazon that Bates conjures! The stories that he tells! We can only guess at their specificities, but we know their contours: limitless nature, incredible hardship, broken health, intimate comradeship, an impossible freedom. But, even in this circle of communion, the anxieties return; the politics of class and the identifications of race slip back in. What is it to which these men of substance are compelled to draw attention in the midst of all this enchantment? It is Bates’ accent, his intonation, his provincial origins, his childlike lack of cosmopolitanism despite his heroic travels. It is, though Allen does not say it in so many words, the illiterate wife and the many children who never make it into the professional classes. It is a terrible anticlimax, but it confirms the rationality of anxiety.
Several of the notebooks Bates kept while on the Amazon are now in the manuscript collection of the Entomology Library of the British Museum of Natural History in South Kensington. They are simple exercise books filled with delicate watercolors of butterflies and beetles, miniatures of such clarity that they seem hardly faded despite the distance traveled. In a careful, precise hand, Bates has catalogued his collecting and with it those pervasive instabilities—“some mistake here…. I think I have ticketed the wrong specimen, the insect is not Pleuracanthus.”109
6
THE DREAMLIFE OF ECOLOGY
South Pará, 1999
The Bleeding Heart of Ana Almeida da Silva—Materialities of the Obvious—An Old Friend—The Synergies of Extraction and the Economy of Terror—“A Template Awaiting Application”—Faustian Politics—A Tree That Travels (and Transforms)—Affinities and Contingencies—The Monarch of Mahogany—The Political and Juridical Economies of Taxonomy—A Species of Elegance and Charisma—Rhythms and Moods of the Research Habitus—Imprecision Is Not the Point—Managing the Extravagant Density of Complicating Presences—Remarkable Productivity of Scientific Practice—Moacyr Who Haunts the FMP—To Try to Mend a Bleeding Heart
I took this photo at Ana’s sítio—her house and farm—a three-room, palm-thatched, adobe house off a red-dirt road in the south of Pará.
At the front gate, Ana has hung a sign, an announcement, an affirmation, and—although you need to know her a little to realize this—a challenge. In big, handwritten lettering, it reads: SONHO MEU (My Dream). Ana’s sítio glows with the beauty of the cared-for, and the photo shows a field of healthy pineapple under a grove of shiny babassu palms that recede into the distance. But scanning right to left, the eye suddenly catches something in the foreground, something jarring that takes a moment to decipher: a bleeding heart, a rock, shoved hard into the sheared-off stump of a tree and drenched in red paint. The Bleeding Heart of Ana Almeida da Silva, beauty and pain in the dreamlife of ecology.
MATERIALITIES OF THE OBVIOUS
The southeast quadrant of the giant state of Pará lives on in infamy. Though the long days and nights of land-driven violence are largely passed, the towns of the interior south of Belém still resonate in regional consciousness like names recited at a graveside.1 Mention to cosmopolitans in the capital that you are heading down to Redenção or to the logging citadel of Paragominas, and conversation at once shifts to anecdotes of intimidation and emigration.
On the long bus ride so
uth through landscapes of dried-out, rolling pasture, I scan a provincial newspaper filled with lurid stories of the recent discovery of cocaine processing labs deep in the jungle, ironies of a chimeric modernization. This is the unfulfilled promise of transition from predatory extraction to productive capitalism, ambiguously signaled by the chaotic state capture of the informal mining sector, betrayed by the transnational economy of drugs and clandestine slave labor camps that swept in to fill the gap.2 Drugs in the Amazon provide the occasion for a national moral panic, anxiety about U.S. regional ambition, and opportunities for state arbitrariness, militarization, and the late-night road blocks and baggage searches that repeatedly interrupt highway travel. In popular discourse, though, drugs just add surplus to the excess of o sul do Pará, the south of Pará, where the most familiar folk figure is the hired gun, the pistoleiro.
This is a world that lends itself too easily to invocations of the frontier. In the barely thirty years since Redenção was founded by ranchers, loggers, and colonists, it has come to mark not only the boundary of forest and savanna, but a coterminous border of social difference.3 Researchers and journalists have followed horse-riding cowboys tending herds of zebu cattle; they have watched mining camps spring up on no more than the whisper of a gold strike;4 they have seen roads of uncertain destination head off into forbidding terrain; they have walked dusty streets in the shadow of prostitutes, gunmen, and painted Indians; they have recognized the law in a posse; and they have known they were in the Wild Wild West.
In Amazonia Page 18
