In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  One morning, we are all standing under the shimmering silver crown of a tall mahogany tree, swatting at deerflies as we wait for the measurements to be completed. Pointing to a nearby garra branca (a larger but less valuable species than mahogany), Paul muses out loud that you often find these trees growing close to mahogany. He doesn’t know why—maybe they like similar growing conditions? After a moment’s quiet, Luiz responds. It’s true: when the explorador, the spotter on a logging team, sees garra branca, he gets excited. He knows there’ll be mahogany nearby. Similarly, Luiz continues, confirming an upslope-downslope distribution pattern that Paul is keen to demonstrate, the explorador will look for mahogany by following a stream, but he knows he won’t find any until the channel narrows and he reaches the top of the watershed.

  Luiz has four years’ experience working with logging teams in this area, accompanying the spotters in their hunt for the R $3 paid for each tree found.50 Out in the forest at four in the morning, marking trees, bulldozing trails, dragging out the trunks with heavy equipment until ten at night all through the dry season. A non-stop, ear-splitting whorl of engines and chainsaws. Luiz learned a lot about natural history here in those four years with the loggers and he gained an ability to read the marks of prior political economy in the landscape, a sharp narrative eye that turns a slash in a tree trunk into the maldade, the malice, of the passing explorador. If the FMP folds, the chances are he will utilize his expertise again in the same line of work. This, of course, is an irony lost on no one. Others on the team have done their share of logging, and Jaime smiles wryly: “First I was cutting the forest, now I’m saving it.”

  Paul is respectful of the team’s forest knowledge, and, he tells me, his understanding of the landscape and floral ecology in this place has come about through “a joint learning and teaching venture with them.” Yet, he also tells me, these people are relatively new to this landscape. Although in the early days his dependency on them was thoroughgoing, now it is more a case of logistics and labor. They are colonists and immigrants in south Pará, fieldworkers whose situated botanical experience does not compare with that of the Dayaks with whom he worked years before in Southeast Asia. These Brazilians’ awareness of ecological relationships, he tells me, is uneven and limited. Jaime agrees, and when I ask him if he knows the forest well, he says he knows this part of it pretty well. Born and raised outside the nearby town of Conceição do Araguaia, he is not merely being self-effacing:51 he knows this forest well enough to understand the significance of location and the indeterminacies of ecological heterogeneity.

  Although heterogeneity presents challenges for a scientific method that arrogates the right to generalize heroically from the particular, spatial restriction in itself is not confounding to a research practice that operates on a principle of synecdoche. By necessity, the FMP will have something—however hedged by caveat—to say about the region. And it is therefore not parochialism that limits the scientific relevance of Luiz’s observations. This is a problem of translation and rhetoric. His is information but not data, and—although what counts as data is always dependent on the community and moment in which those data are being circulated—it is on such distinctions that methodological practice reproduces and justifies itself.

  Luiz and Paul were demonstrating something important about the way methodology arbitrates multiple knowledges. Out in the forest, method emerges as a complicated sorting procedure with a simple, but crucial, goal: the manufacturing of objects that can convince as data. It is a process through which the hierarchies of knowledge relevance are established and in which the descriptive is distinguished from the analytic, the anecdotal from the systematic, the mythic from the factual, the information from the data. As such, it is the inescapable ground on which the credibility of ecology as a science must be tested. Yet, equally, performed in this particular natural-cultural world where the main characteristics are instability and excess, methodological purity is the one test that a field science can only fail. What practice produces, rhetoric must be dedicated to erasing.

  However necessary the analogy, the forest is not very much like a laboratory. In fact, it is only through some very specific exclusions that it is able to function as a site for data generation at all. It goes without saying that the forest emerging in conventional natural scientific rhetoric is one in which the collaborations of humans and the obstinacies of non-humans that are so fundamental to the practice of field experimentation are absent. But, given that this is a forest designed to save the forest, there is a certain logic to these exclusions. The FMP that circulates as an intervention in debates on the future life of mahogany relies on the purity of nature for its work in the public language of policy discourse—as a scientific research site and in the form of data.52 Yet, this clinical identity through which arguments over the regulation and management of species are waged is, in practice, only a supplement to the affective meanings of mahogany. Once more pointing to both the ambivalence and the excess from which data are produced, it turns out that rather than effacing mahogany’s romance, the FMP relies on it, using this tree’s historical charisma to generate justification, funding, and attention from loggers and environmentalists alike.

  COMPLICITIES

  Paul’s research reflects long-standing disciplinary struggles to make sense of the natural world while not losing sight of the conservationist impulse to intervene in it. Committed to describing the functional interrelationships of a relatively coherent natural system, he is forced to devote considerable energy to managing the extravagant density of complicating presences. In Fazendinha, as we have already seen, some complications find their way back in.

  As well as struggling against the everyday corruptions of the human and the intractability of the non-human, Paul and his IMAZON colleagues are attentive to the profoundly anthropogenic character of their research sites in south Pará. In other words, although they milk the duality in their political sacralizing of the forest, they also appreciate the shifting artificiality of the nature-culture divide. I remain skeptical about the hunt for natural processes in which they are ultimately involved, with its peeling away of the accreted layers of culture in a search for the essential. Yet Paul and I call a truce somewhere in the region of a critical realist approach to the non-human. Similarly caught in webs of affect and uncertainty, I concede a limited, strategic version of his claim for those things—relatively autonomous in their biophysicality—that he calls nature.

  Something else that occupies our conversation is the apparent convergence over recent decades between theoretical developments in ecology and the social sciences. The rise of non-equilibrium ecology, influenced by chaos theory and emphasizing landscape heterogeneity and the contingency of disturbance, seems to map readily onto parallel moves in the human sciences to resist totalizing narratives by valorizing the heterogeneous and the paradoxical.53 Paul traces his own deconstructive lineage through the Yale School of Forestry, where his training brought him into conversation with David M. Smith, a key figure in the elaboration of a natural historical approach to silviculture, and with Herbert Bormann, whose partnership with Gene Likens produced the seminal Hubbard Brook Ecosystem Study of the 1960s and 1970s.54

  As might be expected from distinguished faculty in a school founded by Aldo Leopold, both of these scholars promoted the role of basic research in the context of a managerial approach to nature. Both also drew on a U.S. tradition of the working forester with an intimate knowledge of trees as both individuals and species, and both developed practices self-consciously sensitive to immanent patterns in natural systems.55 In its allegiance to ideas of succession and homeostasis, the Hubbard Brook project was more conservative than the research that geographers and anthropologists now champion as pointing to the obsolescence of the ecological models utilized by social scientists.56 Yet Bormann and Likens did depart from the abstractly technicist orthodoxy of systems analysis promoted by H. T. Odum, emphasizing instead forest history (that included human history), ecolo
gical complexity, disturbance, and temporal and spatial patchiness. They envisioned their New England watershed as an unevenly processual “shifting mosaic.”57 In addition, they recast the emerging research archetype of long-term, large-scale “big science” by stressing multidisciplinarity, hands-on empirical labor, and non-hierarchical working relations.58

  The transposition of this research model from temperate to tropical systems raised significant theoretical and logistical dilemmas. Tropical forests have far longer growing seasons, considerably greater diversity in plant and animal populations, more intricately co-evolved reproductive biologies, and population structures of a different order of complexity from their temperate analogs. Even basic mechanical techniques, such as those for calculating the age of trees, were found to be ineffective.

  Equally challenging were the frequently opaque institutional and personnel arrangements that emerged in the process of undertaking what could be highly capitalized research projects around obscure agendas in the developing world. In Fazendinha, for example, Paul finds himself not simply the employer of his crew, but their patrão, a regionally conventional figure binding the Project together through intimate and reciprocal patronage relationships. The assumed transparency of cash-based exchange thickens into the sticky soup of mutual but differential duties, obligations, and rights. Over the years, the pool of FMP workers has narrowed to the members of one extended family, so that Paul now confers with Ana about the potential impacts of seasonal layoffs on particular relatives and the best way to ensure that her brother-in-law uses his salary to benefit his wife and children. It means, for example, that Paul is pulled into the logic of some highly particular Amazonian social relations, advancing salary on credit to his most senior workers with paternalist provisos that specific monies be used for specific domestic purchases, such as a chainsaw, a plot of land, or construction materials. In this way, Paul finds himself responsible for a large number of connected people who are not his direct employees, and decisions about the Project’s future and its labor capacity become significantly freighted.

  There are, then, closely related methodological and social conundra here. At first sight, forest ecologists might appear to be involved in an endeavor that, however oriented to heterogeneity, is ultimately and inevitably a restrictive procedure of simplification. However, when we consider ecological practice in a more inclusive sense—to encompass the writing of research papers, the demarcation and construction of field sites, the employment of assistants, the coordination of collaborators, the elaboration of patron-client networks, the circulation of technologies, the consultation in local political process, and so on—it becomes clear that such traveling projects are highly productive of all kinds of new and altered social and discursive relations.

  One obvious way in which such productivity occurs is as ecologists write places in the act of narrating nature.59 By describing a stripped-down, geographically situated space in which the social is excised from a world of nature, natural scientists working in Amazonia have brought places into existence as the imagined sites of functional natural processes.60 Moreover, through the conventional scaling-up of the specificities of the site, such places, in turn, have come to represent larger landscapes, and, not infrequently, the entire region. In relation to the work of cultural ecologists—those anthropologists working in the tradition of Julian Steward—the significance of such representations of Amazonia, in which the consequential ecological distinction has been between várzea (fertile floodplain) and terra firme (nutrient-poor upland forest), cannot be overstated. In contrast, a non-equilibrium focus on patchiness has helped bolster pre-existing fine-grained analyses of ecological heterogeneity.61 In the social sciences, however, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro points out, such shifts can lead, without contradiction, merely to a more differentiated ecological determinism.62

  In the south of Pará, the field site itself is already explicitly humanized through histories of logging and fire. Distinctions between nature and culture on the ground are therefore less secure, the contamination of data is more profound, and the narration is of a damaged landscape, a suitable case for salvage. Paul argues in response that he is working in a “management unit,” not a forest. I understand this as a zone of regulation, a revisioning of nature that effectively converges with the policy nexus through which environmental politics becomes a key location of transregional governmentality.63

  Such ecological narratives are central to understanding how it is that Amazonia continues to be so strongly associated with particular natures. But socio-spatial relations are made in ways additional to writing. Unexpected combinations arise through the coming together of human and non-human histories and practice in the effort to create and maintain the FMP. In fact, too much is made here for one narration: conjunctural political alliances, new lives for the Wood of Woods, houses and chainsaws for Luiz and Jaime, a bleeding heart for Ana Almeida, a place on a map, a reconfigured locality. New experiences, possibilities, and dilemmas for us all.

  MOACYR

  Ana, who never seemed afraid of anything, told me she was scared to death when she took this job in the forest. Like any Amazonian I ever met, she didn’t want to be stuck out in the woods, a sitting target for who-knows-what wild beasts of the imagination. She didn’t much want to leave her three young children home in the colônia all week with her mother. She didn’t want to be the only woman out here with a work crew of men. She also wasn’t crazy about cooking and cleaning or about hanging around the whole day with no company but the radio and no means of transport out of here except a bicycle.

  But her sister walked out after the first week for a job in town, so the position came open and Ana needed the money. And, after a short while she realized this life had its pleasures. When we first met and I couldn’t help admiring the perfection of hersítio and the orderliness of the camp, she told me without hesitation that all of it—the Project, her house, her garden—was due to Moacyr.

  As Paul is the first to say, Moacyr built the FMP, working through the long rainy seasons under terrible conditions, setting up experiments, improvising technologies from plastic tubing and wooden stakes, molding a team, drawing on his fifteen years’ experience as a field assistant for visiting U.S. and Brazilian scientists. And it is Moacyr who continues to haunt the FMP, his name spoken twenty times a day as we pass the trees he marked, read the maps he drew, follow the trails he cut, or shower with the comically ingenious gravity-piped water system he invented. Moacyr. I had been hearing about him for years: a phenomenon, a research assistant who designed experiments and managed projects, who understood the logic of science, who could motivate a work crew like no one else, whose storytelling could enthrall a room, whose physical endurance knew no bounds.

  One night, I stayed at Ana’ssítio. We had finished eating and were sitting outside in the warm darkness. The children were asleep and we talked quietly, the oil lamp throwing shadows across her garden, glinting on the red of her bleeding heart. Ana fetched an album and slowly thumbed through her photos of the two of them together, laughing at her outfits and his gravitas. Moacyr was strong and wiry, older, more contained. Ana looked happy and excited, full of expectation.

  I took another long bus journey, this time to Paragominas. Moacyr and I met that first evening, found a café nearby, and sat drinking Cokes. Ana had warned me about his charm, and she was right. He told me how his life had been tied to the history of this small town, somewhere that, along with Redenção and a few other centers, had been the very eye of the storm that swept through eastern Amazonia in the 1980s. Back then, when the sul do Pará was still reeling from the opening of the BR-316, Moacyr would go into the forest to cut timber by hand and bring back logs to the sawmills for which Paragominas was becoming famous. It was during those years that he came to know timber, establishing that familiarity the scientists were now trying to recover.

  The next morning, Moacyr found a couple of bikes and we rode up the dusty red hill and out of town in the full
sun to Fazenda Maria. Some critical research had been carried out at this site in the early 1990s, demonstrating (against the entrenched orthodoxy of shallow roots and a tightly closed nutrient system) that Amazonian trees and pasture grasses can have deep tap roots reaching down to the water table.64 The site is mostly a relic now and the camp lies abandoned, mildewed photos pinned behind plastic sheeting: clowning researchers, arms entwined. The shafts that made this place famous are still here and still studded with electronic monitoring equipment, the exposed roots visible in the darkening depths where giant toads now sit, trapped and helpless.

  Moacyr and I were meeting at a difficult moment in his life, and the account he gave me of his career reflected that. When researchers first arrive, he said, they have little idea of what it means to work in the Amazon. Their language skills are often poor, their ability to walk in the forest doubtful, they know the soils and plants only from books, they don’t understand how to negotiate social relations. Such experts rely on people like himself to leaven their teoria with prática: to interpret their initially garbled Portuguese, to guide them through the materiality of the forest, to translate their tidy blueprints into functional experiments, to mediate their relations with the work crew, to steer a course through the opacity of Amazonian difference.