In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  But somehow this logic doesn’t mend the fractures through which Sônia sails. She has another system and offers another vision of life on the river. She works to demand, avoiding the symbolic contamination of the hated quota. In her discursive ordering of the trade, she is transporting fruit without constraint at the behest of the collectors. On the day before her voyage, she tours her clients’ houses and drops off sacks, stopping just long enough to negotiate quantity. How much can they give her? She’ll take all they’ve got. Then, at the hour of sailing, she might make more visits just in case someone has a little extra to sell. She sets her price by marginally but significantly trumping the Macedos. If they give R $12, she pays R $14. If they pay R $9, she gives R $11. Like them, she too discounts açaí against orders for household goods she fills on credit with her patrões in the stores that line the dock in Macapá. But whereas they scrupulously charge their clients the same retail price they pay in town, back in Igarapé Guariba, Sônia sells this merchandise at large mark-ups directly across the counter in her store in the tile-roofed house at the river’s mouth, reclaiming the profit she has lost in attracting custom, reviving the ghost of her husband’s grandfather.

  What really infuriates the Macedos and invigorates politics in Igarapé Guariba as a soap-opera feud between two powerful families is the way Sônia and Miguelinho trade açaí for shots of cane liquor at their bar the whole day long, until the cash-poor caboclo is too drunk to buy any more and has to be carried down to his canoe and floated off back to his family. For José Macedo, such corrupting practices and public humiliation exemplify the continuity between past escravidão and contemporary disunity, a holdover personified by these last of the parasitic Viegas.

  There are other disappointments and betrayals. For José, it is ingratitude and lack of vision that drive his neighbors to sell açaí marked for him to Sônia. Sometimes he arrives as scheduled at the house of an Association member to be told that the man did not harvest açaí that day. Yet later, in dismay, he learns that Sônia is traveling the same night with a full shipment that includes açaí from that very house. Arriving in Macapá half-empty, José shares the sacks out evenly among his disgruntled buyers, excusing the shortfall, promising it is not going to happen again, feeling the next year’s contracts sliding through his fingers.

  On the days before they head into Macapá, the Macedo brothers organize trips to an upstream area of forest that was divided into large family-owned lots following Viega’s departure. Small groups of invited men, the occasional woman, and a smattering of teenage boys arrive at Seu Benedito’s house with the first tide and tie their canoes to the back of the boat. They sit on the porch in the dark, smoking and talking softly, pouring coffee from Seu Benedito’s thermos, slapping at mosquitoes and long-legged muriçocas.

  It takes an hour to get upstream. When the boat moors, everyone separates into twos or threes and paddles out to an area of their own land where they expect to find ripe açaí. Collecting takes most of the day. Someone spots a tree laden with dark fruit. They climb the smooth trunk, feet gripping a twisted sack or palm-frond for purchase, cut the heavy bunch with their machete, and bring it carefully down, trying not to lose too much on the way. Back on the ground, one or two people strip the fruit from its woody stalks and fill sacks provided by the boat owners. It is rough, dangerous work, hard on hands and feet, made worse by the relentless insects.

  The emphasis is on speed and volume. On a good day—if it does not rain, if no one gets injured, if there are big bunches and short trees—two people might collect four sacks, each holding the fruit from seven or eight bunches. But to do that, collectors have to cut corners, boosting quantity by throwing in unripe, green fruit, tipping in the dust from the flattened sack on which the berries were stripped, ignoring stalk and leaves that find their way into the sack, not worrying if the seeds are wet.

  Back on the boat, the sacks are in the hold. While everyone else sits on the roof in the late afternoon sunshine, talking and finishing their work, José and one of his brothers spend the return trip below, emptying and refilling each sack, carefully checking the contents and sifting out a portion of the debris and impurities. Arriving that night at the crowded dock in Macapá, José delivers his cargo to Jacaré’s agent, who caps the transaction by emptying the sacks and transferring the fruit to new ones, again checking the contents for debris and impurities, continuing the ongoing, recursive performance of public surveillance.

  Sônia will leave Miguelinho for good one day. At least that is what Miguelinho’s sister Eliana tells me at four in the morning as we sit bundled up together on the waterline at the back of a battered launch, watching the foamy wake ripple out into the forest darkness. We are heading to Macapá loaded down with açaí, and Eliana is going back to start her day as a maid in the city.

  Sônia is “uma grande mulher,” a great women, says Eliana, and one day she’ll take the Immaculate Conception and the kids and start up on her own as a regatão, a trader sailing between the islands off Macapá. She might as well. She couldn’t work any harder: “She’s left many times even though she’s scared of him,” Eliana whispers hoarsely above the wake. “But, you know, the man wants to die. That’s why he drinks like that. He knows it’s killing him.” When I’m talking to Sônia, though, it is so much more confused: “Even beasts feel love,” she says, with an assertive mix of pride and despair.

  However much people might chafe under the Macedos’ regime, Sônia and Miguelinho can offer a social life but little social network. Located on Association land but not situated in the community, their cantina may be an alluringly utopic space for local men tired of the austerity of life on this river, but it is an insecure enclave. José and his brothers can never compete at this level of desire, so they plot constantly to remove Sônia and Miguelinho from the land, to visit on them the fate of the grandfather. For these Macedos, the tile-roofed cantina is an ongoing transgression, an anti-modern sphere of unpredictability: men get drunk and talk too loud about quotas and prices, sometimes they go so far as to threaten their leaders with machetes, too often they squander their families’ money in binges of self-destruction.

  Despite Miguelinho’s perorations on his relatives’ wealth and influence, he and Sônia have only paltry patronage on which to draw. Indeed, Miguelinho’s bluster merely reinforces the Macedos’ ability to marshal progressive rhetoric and implicate these forsaken Viegas in an historic project of parasitic landlordism. To their well-connected professional family in Macapá, such poor relations are an embarrassment. That chilly dawn as we talked on the boat, Eliana really was in a hurry to get back to town and begin her day in the houses of the middle class.

  Just like her wealthy relatives whose bitterness now feeds itself in exile, Eliana loves Igarapé Guariba. “You can breathe there,” she tells me, “it’s not polluted like the city.” When she can, she comes out on a Saturday and stays with Sônia in what is left of the vila. She works on the boat, goes fishing, swims in the river, and helps out with the children. The rest of the time she is in the bar, entertaining her elderly boyfriend, José’s father, Seu Benedito Macedo.

  Benedito’s wife, Nazaré, died four years ago but, nonetheless, his sons disapprove of Eliana. For one thing, she is a Viega. But the old man doesn’t seem to care. When he gets word that Eliana has arrived, he finds his wide-brimmed hat, takes his shiny green canoe, and paddles downstream, past the school where his grandchildren learn by rote, past the boarded-up health post, past José’s shiny new satellite dish, past every one of his neighbors’ houses, smoothly paddling as if drawn by invisible strings to the spirited music that floats to meet him from the open door of the old white house.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1. The best general introduction to this period can be found in Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon (London: Penguin, 1989).

  2. Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, and Other Writings, trans
. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: New Left Books, 1979), 50; emphasis added. Benjamin continues with an apposite tropicalist metaphor, describing a text as a “road cut through the interior jungle forever closing behind it.” For a more formalist reading of landscape as text, see James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  3. For a review of this literature, see Hugh Raffles and Antoinette M.A.G. WinklerPrins, “Anthropogenic Fluvial Landscape Transformation in the Amazon Basin,” manuscript.

  4. See, for important discussions, Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Routledge, 1992); and Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). My use of the term early modern here and elsewhere in this book should not be taken as endorsement of a teleological periodization of a uniform European modernity. For effective polemical attention to this question, see Lorraine Daston, “The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe,” Configurations 6, no. 2 (1998): 149–72.

  5. “The true method of making things present is to represent them in our space (not to represent ourselves in their space)…. Thus represented, the things allow no mediating construction from out of ‘large contexts.’ The same method applies in essence, to the consideration of great things from the past—the cathedral at Chartres, the temple of Paestum—when, that is, a favorable prospect presents itself: the method of receiving the things into our space. We don’t displace our being into theirs; they step into our life.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 206.

  6. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), makes this point in terms of “the plurality that inheres in the ‘now,’ the lack of totality, the constant fragmentariness, that constitutes one’s present” (243). This argument can be considerably strengthened by the application of a more developed notion of space, one that pays attention to the plurality of spatial moments in the “now.” For important contributions along these lines, see the work of Doreen Massey, who has long argued that space can be understood as “a configuration of a multiplicity of histories all in the process of being made.” Doreen Massey, “Travelling Thoughts,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 225–32, 229. For a sustained project that unsettles and ties time and place through the contingency of memory and biography, see the luminous work of W. G. Sebald, particularly his novel Austerlitz (New York: Random House, 2001).

  7. Amazonia seems to be a particularly unreliable region. In one register, a deeply irresistible mythos, it stands as the most palpable of geographical entities. Yet just try to draw a map! The biologist’s Hylæa refuses to correspond to the hydrologist’s basin (a popular but difficult unit in a world of such prodigiously mobile floodplains). And neither is coterminous with the regions mapped by politicians: neither that of the burgeoning pan-regional indigenous movement nor the one codified in the 1978 Amazon Cooperation Treaty—a pact that crosses watersheds to tie together eight nations, including Guyana and Suriname but not French Guyana. Considering these incongruencies from Amapá is particularly appropriate. Universally considered part of the regional hydrological unit, Amapá is “riddled by river systems draining into either the Amazon or the Atlantic and therefore simultaneously part and not part of the Amazon basin”; see David Cleary, “Towards an Environmental History of the Amazon: From Prehistory to the Nineteenth Century,” Latin American Research Review 36, no. 2 (2001): 65–96, 66. Also Alcida Rita Ramos, “The Indigenous Movement in Brazil: A Quarter Century of Ups and Downs,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1997): 50–53. Such variety and simultaneity point to the instrumentalism of cartography, each region embodying both functional logic and political project. They also indicate that regions are made in the face of alternative possibilities for conceiving of space and territory. On places as “particular moments,” see Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 120. For important accounts of Amazonian region-making that emphasize representational practice, see Neide Gondim, A invenção da Amazônia (São Paulo: Marco Zero, 1994); Pedro Maligo, Land of Metaphorical Desires: The Representation of Amazonia in Brazilian Literature (New York: Peter Lang, 1998); and Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).

  8. Ann Stoler, in a sustained project concerned with the discursive practices of various colonialisms, has examined intimacy as a realm of biopolitics and government, analyzing how “intimate matters and narratives about them figured in defining the racial coordinates and social discriminations of empire.” Ann Laura Stoler, “Tense and Tender Ties: Intimacies of Empire in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies,” Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (2001): 829–65, 830; see also idem, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); idem, Race and the Eduction of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); idem, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Lauren Berlant and the authors of the papers collected in an important Special Issue of Critical Inquiry have helpfully explored intimacies in terms of the ways “attachments make worlds and world-changing fantasies” (Lauren Berlant, ed., “Special Issue: Intimacy,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 [Winter 1998]: 288). Also effective, as I discuss in Chapter 7, are the interventions of Alphonso Lingis: see Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) and Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a productive intervention that interrogates “intimacy” by situating multiple valences of affect in critical relation to kinship, see Elizabeth A. Povinelli, “Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,” Public Culture, forthcoming.

  9. Two additional conceptions of “natural history” that have influenced this study in quite different ways should be mentioned. The first refuses the cultural and the social, adopting a radically reductionist (although affect-laden) molecular conception of nature. See Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992). For a second, more complex conception that proposes “natural history” (Naturgeschichte) as a critical methodology through which to explode the “prehistoric” ontology of modernity, see Benjamin, The Arcades Project, and the detailed exegesis by Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989), 55–80, 160–61. My own project might well be seen as a “natural history of the present” (a formulation I owe to Donald Moore), drawing as it does on a genealogical method of historical analysis—albeit one that emphasizes traces and simultaneities as readily as rupture. See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 139–64. My project has gained greatly from and remains complementary to the now established bodies of research in environmental history and historical ecology. However, I am less concerned with these particular notions of nature (environment, ecology), and instead aim to resist a priori definitions or restrictions of domain. Rather, I emphasize the dynamic spatial and temporal co-constitution of natural-cultural materiality in terms that remain grounded and specified but that are also as full and relational as possible.

  10. These sparks were first fired for me by the peculiar symmetry between Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern,
trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993) and Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park’s Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). Also, memorably, by a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, a catalytic afternoon for which I have to thank my perceptive friends Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff. For recent, helpful accounts of a post-“settlement” nature, see, inter alia, Donna J. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium. FemaleMan© Meets OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); David Demerritt, “The Nature of Metaphors in Cultural Geography and Environmental History,” Progress in Human Geography 18, no. 2 (1994): 163–85; Bruce Braun and Noel Castree, eds., Remaking Reality: Nature at the Millennium (New York: Routledge, 1998); Philippe Descola and Gísli Pálsson, eds., Nature and Society: Anthropological Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1996); and Donald Moore, Anand Pandian, and Jake Kosek, eds., Race, Nature, and the Politics of Difference (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming). On early modern natural history, see, within a growing literature, Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Understanding of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Karen Reeds, “Renaissance Humanism and Botany,” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 519–42; Allen J. Grieco, “The Social Politics of Pre-Linnean Botanical Classification,” I Tatti Studies: Essays in the Renaissance 4 (1991): 131–49; Daston, “The Nature of Nature”; Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983); and Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967). On collecting in this period, see Findlen, “Possessing Nature;” Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Polity, 1990); Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (New York: Clarendon Press, 1985); Horst Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, trans. Allison Brown (Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1995); and Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2001).