In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  There are a number of standard experiments Moacyr can put in place independently—biomass and productivity measures, for example. Otherwise, he works through the specific problem, trying to determine as precisely as possible what is wanted and thinking up an appropriate experimental design. If the researcher comes with clearly drawn diagrams, so much the better; Moacyr can just go ahead and prepare the plot or build the necessary structures.

  But from the first day the irony begins to unfold. The more successfully he teaches, the faster the visiting scientist learns to be independent. Within a couple of years, the project is established, the team is trained, the area mapped, the replicates in place, and everything has settled into a secure routine. Once indispensable, his skills are no longer needed. And his price, which has risen steadily over the years, is too high.

  There was no more of this work available for Moacyr, and he no longer put his faith in science. He seemed to have outgrown the expected relationship, chafing at the imposition of discipline and testing the limits of his mediating role, exploring his charisma. He suspected that experienced researchers preferred to work with other, more deferential assistants and that they were advising their junior colleagues to do the same.65

  When we met, Moacyr had left the FMP and Ana, and he had no money to get back to Redenção. Paul, who lists Moacyr as co-author on all Project publications, but who was exhausted by the struggle of wills, had no more work for him. Moacyr told me he had had enough of working with foreigners. He looked back on his fifteen years with the research community and bemoaned his failure to get the formal training that would allow him to demand a salary proportionate to his skills. If he only had a degree, if he was an Engenheiro Florestal…. Instead, he was adrift, kicking his heels and conjuring schemes to extract cash from the ever-more-distant forest. My visit only seemed to deepen his isolation. Had I seen the pineapple he’d planted in Ana’ssítio? he wondered. Was the cajú fruiting yet?

  BEYOND (A TOWN CALLED) REDEMPTION

  I knew they were pheasants, although since dreams usually transform things, they had long tails covered with iridescent eyelike spots similar to those of peacocks or rare birds of paradise…. In the brilliant sunshine they made the most splendid pile imaginable, and there were so many of them there was hardly room for the steersman and the rowers. Then we glided over calm waters and I was already making a mental list of the names of friends with whom I meant to share these treasures.

  —Goethe66

  As memories fade into the past, they often become dreamlike, anchored only by embodied, deeply embedded details. Dreams likewise gain the materiality of memory, blurring our sense of the real, haunting our days, and driving us on.

  Goethe’s iridescent vision is a yearning for a rarer, more dazzling, less mediated, more intimate, and fuller nature, simultaneously wild and tame, autonomous but domestic. Yet, it is also a modern fable: the peacock-pheasants in his splendid pile are dead, killed by “natives” for his pleasure. Such profoundly historicized environmental narratives—still colored with Romanticism—now travel that highly charged stretch of the oneiric that runs between Utopia and Apocalypse, a track along which dreams and nightmares meld and morph, feeding each other in co-dependency, afflicting politics with the exigency of crisis.67

  The scientific dreamlife of ecology eschews ambivalence for the security of teleology, a meditation in a sacred forest free from the gloom of moral ambiguity. Yet, no one who knows the first thing about the culture and practice of this field science even slightly believes such public fantasies—least of all, of course, those contemporary naturalists whose daily task is the management of natural-cultural excess. Conducted under the sign of methodological purity, however, ecology necessarily reproduces its own fictions. As a knowing aspect of a pragmatic realpolitik, this paradox is at least functional. But it should not obscure all those ways in which scientific practice remakes people and places, bringing them face to face in new and transformative ways.

  The FMP has created more than Ana’s bleeding heart. But by ignoring that experience and the dreams to which it points, traveling science condemns itself to bringing into being an Amazonia that is potent, deeply troubling, and already familiar: a site for salvage and the redemption of the modern.

  As Ralegh, Bates, and Paul could all attest, there is, though, a realm of affect and encounter which breaches the divide between the human and natural sciences. Paul, a level-headed romantic who thinks of himself as a natural historian, understands this well. In the margins of his scholarly production he is compiling his most satisfying work: a field guide to the trees of the FMP. It is an important contribution. In some ways the opposite of normal science, it limits its claims to what the trees make possible. If their range is restricted, so is the guide. Such handbooks are almost non-existent for the Amazon.68 Perhaps the task is just too daunting.

  Like Henry Bates in the final pages of The Naturalist, Paul is exploring the possibilities of his science from a place saturated with the instabilities of the field. Each of his trees comes to life with a situated identity and a sociality. He begins his description of farinha seca, Licania sp., a Chrysobalanaceae, by telling us about farinha, “coarse manioc flour that is the true staple of the Amazonian diet, eaten ‘seca’—dry—by the handful or heaped on top of rice and beans.” This tree, however, is certainly not edible, its name instead an ironic play on the word seca, which, when used in relation to a container of food or drink, means empty or finished. Like that of Vicente Chermont de Miranda, Paul’s dialogic natural historical glossary is a mark of familiarity with both trees and people, an intimacy: “If you swipe [the tree’s] lower stem with a machete a cloud of fine bark-dust bursts into the air, and with some imagination you might think of tossed farinha and feel hunger pangs a great distance from the nearest meal.”

  Taperebá, a tree that produces a much-prized regional fruit, presents a mystery the solution to which enrolls multiple actors: “Why is it that this species … is so vastly distributed across the neotropics? Taperebá is a tree that moves about the landscape easily—not only people savor its fruit—and is probably an opportunistic colonizer for which ‘ideal’ regeneration conditions are quite broadly defined.” Cupania scrobiculata, a Sapindaceae, had no local name. “We named this tree ourselves from its generic moniker, which is odd considering how common it is, especially in upper-slope sandy clays. Providing people neither goods nor services, cupania never needed a local name before.”

  There is a seed of possibility here. Despite all the asymmetries of continents, knowledges, disciplines, and locations, there is affinity emergent in misrecognition and forced accommodation. With the domain of environmental politics so circumscribed by emergency, where else but in the lived intimacies of such practices can the recuperation of the wide worlds of a bleeding heart begin?

  7

  FLUVIAL INTIMACIES

  Amapá, 1995–1996

  The Language of Water—Intimate Places—The White House, A Haunting—The Vila as Chronotope—Sônia and Miguelinho—A Perverse Irruption and a Lurid Moment—The Mote in the Association’s Eye—Life and Debt—Yes, It Still Looks Like Aviamento—The Cantina—Tainted with the History of Its Own Birth—Açaí Is Delicious!—Hard Times in Macapá—Fear of a Free Market—A Terrible Responsibility—The Fractures through Which She Sails—Tough, Dangerous Work—Recursive Performance of Public Surveillance—“Even Beasts Feel Love”—Eliana

  There is a moment early on in his strange and beautiful book, Water and Dreams, when Gaston Bachelard tells us that “the language of water” is not metaphorical. This seemingly obscure point is later developed in a discussion of the mimetic inadequacies of onomatopoeia, and it shows Bachelard reaching to convey the profound unity that ties people and water, indissolubly. His starting point is autobiographical. “I was born in a section of Champagne noted for its streams,” he confides:

  The most beautiful of retreats for me would be down in a valley, beside running water, in the scanty shade of th
e willows and water-willows. And when October came with its fogs on the river….

  I still take great pleasure in following a stream, in walking along the banks in the right direction, the way the water flows and leads life elsewhere.1

  As he writes, Bachelard is in the midst of his multivolume meditation on the elements, the “hormones of the imagination,” as he calls them. He has already caused quite a commotion with The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938), but there is something too personal about water: it confounds him, prevents him from achieving the rigor that would allow the invocation of the psychoanalytic. Instead, he describes his essay simply as a study in literary aesthetics.

  But in this he is altogether too modest. The book is unexpected and creative. And its most telling insight, that in water people find “a type of intimacy,” and that “already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of water,” translates across continents, contexts, and disciplines.2

  Bachelard has a wonderful way of explaining this. He argues that “the language of waters is a direct poetic reality; that rivers and streams provide the sound for mute country landscapes, and do it with a strange fidelity; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount; and that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.”3

  I love this idea of the speech of water. Its animism summons entirely different traditions of thought and instantly enlivens the narrow materialism of Euro-American academia, a tide to wash away parochial convention. Its enlivening of nature carries me back to Igarapé Guariba, to what people there call the rio-mar, the river-sea, and in which live all kinds of worlds, all types of beings, and all manner of intimacies.

  Bachelard’s method for unfolding these poetics is, appropriately, through poetics—a rich and idiosyncratic study of image and imagination. In this final chapter, I want to approach the same end in an entirely different way: through an account of rivers, trade, and the grounded prosaics of everyday political economy in Igarapé Guariba. Bachelard’s work is the invitation and inspiration. Yet where he holds water in view, up to the light, sharply examining its facets and ungraspable fluidities, I meet it seeping through at the margins, always there, always in motion, always in mind, and—as if to demonstrate Wittgenstein’s observation that “the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”4—nearly always invisible.

  INTIMATE PLACES

  It is by transgressing the conventions of human space that rivers reveal the poverty of scalar categories. They are, as Bruno Latour has written of railroad tracks, “local at all points,” while being definitively, unstoppably translocal.5 Well, not entirely unstoppable, of course, as dam-building and other engineering have shown only too plainly. But always immanently translocal—if not saturated with nostalgia for other geographies, then brimming with the promise and the possibility of Bachelard’s elsewhere.

  Not even locality is contained within spatial borders though. As people journey along these Amazon rivers, they take places with them in their embodied and imaginative practices.6 But, as everyone knows, locality also has its spatial correlate, and even imaginary places usually have a physical location, the anchor and first mark of placefulness.7 Lines of demarcation may be tenuous, permeable, and rapidly dismantled and reconstituted, but they nonetheless confer a kind of fixity. Places seem to need boundaries and to make sense in terms of insides and outsides, even if these are permanently in the being-made and even if we have trouble knowing exactly where they are at any given moment. And rivers? Rivers themselves are both guardians and betrayers of places. And, what’s more, despite often being themselves the borders that make places, they are places too, as mobile as can be. Nevertheless, it makes no sense for this Amazonian natural history to follow Bachelard in opposing water to landscape. We have been wading in terra anfíbia, an amphibious world of mobile porosities where land and water become each other, and where humans and non-humans are made and unmade by those same sediments that bring histories and natures flooding into the immediacy of the now.8

  Bachelard tunes out the dissonances of power and politics from his murmuring waters. He prefers an easy nostalgia, one that fills his present with the pleasurable romance of the pastoral. But the type of intimacy in which he lingers is more than mere proximity. It is also the mark of a lived relationship between humans and nature, an expression of biography—of the politics tied up in the lives of both people and landscapes. Different natures and histories produce a wide range of mediations of experience, varied and differential structures of feeling, and complex and constitutive intimacies.9 Such intimacies are sites where the politics of space are practiced: where places, regions, and localities get worked through, made, and grounded, literally.

  In a series of provocative essays, Alphonso Lingis takes us to intimacies quite unlike Bachelard’s comforting ruralities.10 Although similarly at the edge of the inexpressible and pushing against rationalist analyses and cultural logics, this is a dangerous space of desire, claustrophobic even when most at ease. Lingis is not party to the conservatism that ties place, rootedness, and the intimate, and instead strives for that fleeting communion in which intimacy burns in anonymous coupling. Despite their expression in the idiom of individual experience, these intimacies are always compromised by contexts and events, are never exterior to power. They emerge through a reflexive ethnography of encounter, and in this respect as well as in his refusal to romanticize locatedness, Lingis opens up intimacy as a broad and differentiated realm of affective sociality, a realm characterized by embodiment and relationality.

  Where Bachelard points to the intimacies of proximity that tie human and non-human, Lingis helps me find intimacies in the dynamic and disruptive, in the asymmetrical politics through which place, economy, and history are made in Igarapé Guariba. And, in another way, so does Doreen Massey. In a critical formulation, Massey writes about places as meeting points of social relations, as the outcomes of difference and inequality that also produce difference and inequality. And she points to the things people—all of us—do to bring places to life and to make them as much as possible the way we want them: those things we do physically with hands and machines, and the things we do with our imagination and our talk. The things we do with affect and the things we do with labor.

  Social spatialities are simultaneously contingent yet located. Bringing together space and time, Massey describes places as “particular moments” in intersecting, spatialized social relations, some of which are “contained within the place; others [of which] stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too.”11 Such translocal places are relational, involved in the complex articulations of effective geographies, tying humans and non-humans across time and space.12 Such places are formed in the complicities of human and non-human agency—and such complicities are further entangled through the work of place-making.

  Places are never stable, and space is never empty. Both are always active, always being made, always in process and in practice. Place and space are always in that flow of becoming, caught—and it’s as if Deleuze and Guattari were thinking of Igarapé Guariba when they imagined the metaphor—in “a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks.”13 There is no point of stasis: people are in motion, the tide turns, the banks crumble. Shifting historical sedimentations form the unreliable ground on which lives are made.

  “The world,” Foucault writes, “is a profusion of entangled events.”14 Throughout this book I have resisted the impulse to purify these conjunctural assemblages and instead have written across and between the consequential analytical divides that partition local and global, past and present, materiality and meaning-making, affect and rationality, human and non-human.15 In this Amazonian natural history an analytics of entanglement has found its ground in the complex co-constitutions of intimacy. And here, back in Igarapé Guariba, those situated, differen
tiated practices of intimacy are fluvial: intimacies of lives that inhabit rivers and of rivers that inhabit lives.

  THE WHITE HOUSE

  My fieldwork in the Amazon estuary has always involved traveling with traders on the region’s rivers. In fact, those have often been my favorite moments, the times I’ve felt most at home. Huddled up on the roof of a small boat as it putters slowly between ports, a little shivery as the sun comes up on the unbroken brown plain of this river-sea, chatting with friends and new acquaintances, sharing crackers and sometimes hot sweet coffee—each of these journeys is a space outside, suspended in the freedom and tension of expectation and mobility. Traveling taught me to think of the trading networks that unfold along these Amazonian rivers as embodied practices, meaningful relationships assembled and followed by the people who depend on them, a way that Amazonians take a place out into the world beyond the mouth of a river.

  And it has often been at river mouths that the politics of rivers have played out here. Prior to the twentieth century, they formed defensible points of military strategy in the many struggles that wrenched at the region: those between native and European, those among the would-be colonial powers (English, Irish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French), and those that pitted slave and Indian against Liberal forces during and after the Cabanagem. Unsurprisingly, river mouths can still figure as strategic outposts, now as sites where patrões impose transport barriers and establish their own fiscalization, acting simultaneously as monopsonists with depots for the reception of farm and forest produce, and as monopolists with stores for the sale of household goods. Beyond the river mouth (or the impassable rapids or falls) often lies another country, a private domain.

  Igarapé Guariba was like that. Viega’s house standing at the mouth of the river, raised on a bluff with a view across the mouth-bay, white-painted, tile-roofed—the only tile-roofed building in this village of twenty-five houses just off the Amazon River on the floodplain of Amapá. Next to it stood a warehouse and attached to that a store. This was once the vila, the economic center, a river mouth complex of buildings where Old Man Viega’s fregueses, his clients—the people who worked the land along this river and in return owed the landlord their labor and their income, just about everybody, in fact—came to exchange their produce for merchandise.