In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  11. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9. Also, Lorraine Daston, “Baconian Facts, Academic Civility, and the Prehistory of Objectivity,” Annals of Scholarship 8, nos. 3–4 (1991): 337–64.

  12. Daston and Park, Wonders, 159.

  13. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 205.

  14. Ibid., 206.

  15. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Fontana, 1973), 60.

  16. “The fundamental level of ideology … is not of an illusion masking the real state of things, but that of an (unconscious) fantasy structuring our social reality itself.” Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 33. For helpful and concrete discussion, see Bill Maurer, “Uncanny Exchanges: The Possibilities and Failures of ‘Making Change’ with Alternative Monetary Forms,” Environment and Planning ‘D’: Society and Space, forthcoming.

  CHAPTER 2

  1. Mao Zedong, “Where Do Correct Ideas Come From?” in Selected Readings from the Works of Mao Tsetung (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1971), 502–4, 502. Mao’s use of the term “correct” may perhaps best be placed “under erasure”—that is, recognized here, to adapt Stuart Hall’s gloss on Derrida, as “an idea which cannot be thought in the old way, but without which certain key questions cannot be thought at all.” Stuart Hall, “Introduction: Who Needs Identity?” in Questions of Identity, ed. Stuart Hall and Paul Du Gay (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996), 1–17, 2.

  2. Alfred Russel Wallace, A Narrative of Travels on the Amazon and Rio Negro, with an Account of the Native Tribes, and Observations on the Climate, Geology, and Natural History of the Amazon Valley (London: Reeve, 1853). Page references are from the pocket reprint edition of 1911 published in London by Ward Lock.

  3. Darwin to Bates, December 3, 1861, in Robert M. Stecher, “The Darwin–Bates Letters: Correspondence Between Two Nineteenth-Century Travellers and Naturalists,” Annals of Science 25, no. 1 (1969): 1–47, and 25, no. 2 (1969): 95–125: [letter 14], 20. Under economic and career advancement pressures to travel again, Wallace finally made his name in Southeast Asia, returning to England to write his great The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan, and the Bird of Paradise. A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1869).

  4. All Wallace’s and Darwin’s biographers discuss the muted rivalry over the theory of natural selection. Wallace, it seems clear, was unwilling to force a confrontation over the issue. This is generally explained by reference to his unassuming personality. But it is also apparent that Wallace was a man cursed with the gift of plain speaking and was quite willing to court controversy where principles he considered important were at stake—as, for instance, in his highly public wager with John Hampden over the flatness of the earth in 1870 and his testimony as a defense witness at the celebrated London trial of the North American spirit medium Henry Slade in 1876. Neither of these episodes improved his stock with scientific luminaries like Joseph Hooker. With regard to natural selection, it seems likely that personal diffidence was bolstered by a realistic appraisal of his chances of emerging unscathed from a confrontation with Darwin and his powerful sponsors, as well as by an assessment of the damage that such a dispute would inflict on the difficult project of popularizing heretical ideas on evolution. Nevertheless, Wallace’s irregular views on spiritism and vaccination, his outspoken socialist politics, and his prickly inability to negotiate the social quagmire of scientific patronage all contributed to a chronic inability to land a scientific post. There is as yet no major biography of Wallace. For useful material, see Amabel Williams-Ellis, Darwin’s Moon: A Biography of Alfred Russel Wallace (London: Blackie, 1966); Harry Clements, Alfred Russel Wallace: Biologist and Social Reformer (London: Hutchinson, 1983); and Wilma George, Biologist Philosopher: A Study of the Life and Writings of Alfred Russel Wallace (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1964). Consistently interesting is Wallace’s detailed and readable My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions, 2 vols. (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1905).

  5. See Ralph Colp Jr., “‘I Will Gladly Do My Best.’ How Charles Darwin Obtained a Civil List Pension for Alfred Russel Wallace,” Isis 83 (1992): 3–26; Wallace, My Life, II, 394–95; and Stecher, “The Darwin-Bates Letters,” [letters 97–99], 123–24.

  6. Wallace, Travels, 37.

  7. Henry Walter Bates, The Naturalist on the River Amazons: A Record of Adventures, Habits of Animals, Sketches of Brazilian and Indian Life, and Aspects of Nature under the Equator, during Eleven Years of Travel, unabridged ed. (London: John Murray, 1892), 58.

  8. Ignácio Baptista de Moura, De Belém a São João do Araguaia, Vale do Rio Tocantins (Belém: Fundação Cultural do Pará Tancredo Neves/Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1989 [1910]). As I discuss in Chapter 5, Bates and Wallace were also drawn to egalitarian politics. However, in Brazil, their radicalism was undercut by colonial allegiances.

  9. Eladio Lobato, Caminho de canoa pequena: História do município de Igarapé-Miri, 2nd ed. (Belém: Imprensa Oficial, 1985), 64–70. Moura, De Belém a São João do Araguaia, 41, also draws attention to the lack of wage labor in the Amazon as a contributory factor in this decline.

  10. Manoel Buarque, Tocantins e Araguaya (Belém: Imprensa Oficial do Estado do Pará, 1919).

  11. Ibid., 4. Negro, which I have translated as “nigger,” was also a standard synonym for “slave.”

  12. See S. D. Anderson, “Engenhos na várzea: uma analise do declinio de uma sistema de produção tradicional na Amazônia,” in Amazônia: A fronteira agrícola 20 anos depois, org. Philippe Lenna and Adelia Engracia de Oliveira (Belém: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi/ORSTOM, 1991), 114–26.

  13. Buarque, Tocantins e Araguaya, 4.

  14. I take this phrase from Líbero Luxardo, Marajó: Terra anfíbia (Belém: Grafisa, 1977).

  15. Márcio Souza, Mad Maria, trans. Thomas Colchie (New York: Avon Books, 1985); Henry M. Tomlinson, The Sea and the Jungle (London: Duckworth, 1912); Werner Herzog, Fitzcarraldo (1982); Les Blank, Burden of Dreams (1982).

  16. Buarque, Tocantins e Araguaya, 4.

  17. Lobato, Caminho de canoa pequena, 132–33.

  18. Leopold H. Myers, The Clio (London: Robin Clark, 1990), 93.

  19. Ibid., 133.

  20. Ibid., 126–27.

  21. Others went to the towns of Sant’Ana do Mutuacá (which became Vila Nova de Mazagão), Sant’Ana do Cajary, and the now-extinct Vila Vistosa de Madre de Deus, all in today’s Amapá. See João da Palma Muniz, “Limites municipais do estado do Pará,” Annaes da bibliotheca e archivo publico do Pará, tomo IX (Belém: Imprensa de Alfredo Augusto Silva, 1916), 383–515; Maria de Fátima P. da Silva, Assunto: Vila de Mazagão Velho, mimeograph (Macapá: Universidade Federal do Amapá, 1992); and Roberta Marx Delson, New Towns for Colonial Brazil (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1979).

  22. For a more detailed discussion of aviamento, see Chapter 7 below. For descriptions of aviamento during the rubber period, see, inter alia, Arthur Cézar Ferreira Reis, O seringal e o seringueiro, documentário da vida rural, no. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Agricultura, 1953); Roberto Santos, História Econômica da Amazônia (1800–1920) (São Paulo: T. A. Queiroz, 1980); Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983).

  23. Lobato, Caminho de canoa pequena, 127.

  24. Ibid., 133.

  25. Ibid., 126–27.

  26. D. G. McGrath, F. de Castro, C. Futemma, B. D. do Amaral, and J. Calabria, “Fisheries and the Evolution of Resource Management on the Lower Amazon Floodplain,” Human Ecology 21, no. 2 (1993): 167–95; Janete Gentil, “A juta na agricultura de várzea na área de Santarém-Médio Amazonas,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi: Série Antropologia 4, no. 2 (1988): 118–99.

  27. João Murça Pires and Ghillean T. Prance, “The Vegetation Types of the Brazilian Amazon,” in Key Environments: Amazonia, ed. Ghillean T. Pran
ce and Thomas E. Lovejoy (London: Pergamon, 1985), 109–45. These authors closely follow the earlier definitive typology of Prance, “Notes on the Typology of Amazonia III. The Terminology of Amazonian Forest Types Subject to Inundation,” Brittonia 31, no. 1 (1979): 26–38. For a discussion of the confusion surrounding floodplain classification, see Janet M. Chernela, “Managing Rivers of Hunger: The Tukano of Brazil,” in Resource Management in Amazonia: Indigenous and Folk Strategies, ed. Darrell A. Posey and William Balée (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1989), 238–48.

  28. Harald Sioli, “Tropical Rivers as Expressions of Their Terrestrial Environments,” in Tropical Ecological Systems: Trends in Terrestrial and Aquatic Research, ed. Frank B. Golley and Ernesto Medina (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975), 275–88.

  29. Harald Sioli, “The Amazon and Its Main Affluents: Hydrography, Morphology of the River Courses, and River Types,” in The Amazon: Limnology and Landscape Ecology of a Mighty Tropical River and Its Basin, ed. Harald Sioli (Dordrecht: Dr. W. Junk, 1984), 127–65; Wolfgang J. Junk and Karin Furch, “The Physical and Chemical Properties of Amazonian Waters,” in Prance and Lovejoy, Key Environments, 3–17.

  30. Junk and Furch, “Physical and Chemical Properties,” 15. Other authors have pointed out that lower fluvial productivity is not absolute and is subject to increase through management. See Chernela, “Managing Rivers of Hunger”; Oliver T. Coomes, “Blackwater Rivers, Adaptation, and Environmental Heterogeneity in Amazonia,” American Anthropologist 94, no. 3 (1992): 698–701.

  31. Curt Nimuendajú, “Os Tapajo,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi 10 (1949): 93–106.

  32. See Joseph M. McCann, “‘Extinct’ Cultures and Persistent Landscapes of the Lower Tapajos Region, Brazilian Amazonia,” paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers, New York, February 27–March 3, 2000. For comments on modern uses of terra preta, see Nigel J. H. Smith, “Anthrosols and Human Carrying Capacity in the Amazon,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 70 (1980): 553–66; William I. Woods and Joseph M. McCann, “The Anthropogenic Origin and Persistence of Amazonian Dark Earths,” Conference of Latin Americanist Geographers Yearbook 25 (1999): 7–14.

  33. Bates, Naturalist, 254.

  34. Sioli, “Tropical Rivers,” 278.

  35. Another common term is varação.

  36. Vicente Chermont de Miranda, Glossário Paraense ou coleção de vocábulos peculiares á Amazônia e especialmente á Ilha do Marajó (Belém: Universidade Federal do Pará, 1968).

  37. William Henry Hudson, Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest (New York: Random House, 1944), 33–34.

  38. Chermont de Miranda, Glossário Paraense, 74–75.

  39. Paulo Jacob’s Dicionário da língua popular da Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro: Liv. Ed. Cátedra, 1985) is a valuable recent work that covers similar ground.

  40. V. N. Vološinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and Irwin R. Titunik (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 79–80.

  41. Ibid., 80.

  42. See Arun Agrawal, “Dismantling the Divide Between Indigenous and Scientific Knowledge,” Development and Change 26, no. 3 (1995): 413–39.

  43. Varadouro is a word widely used for terrestrial trails in the western Amazon. See Susanna Hecht’s excellent translation of the great Brazilian essayist, Euclides da Cunha (from his collection Um paraíso perdido: Ensaios, estudos e pronunciamentos sobre a Amazônia, ed. Leandro Tocantins, 2nd ed. [Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 1994]). Da Cunha writes: “The varadouro, a legacy of the heroic Paulista, is today shared by the people in Amazonas, Bolivia, Peru. It is the path, the short cut which goes from one fluvial slope to the next. At first tortuous and short, suffocating, down in the forest thickness, the varadouro reflected the indecisive steps of an emerging vacillating society which abandoned the comforting laps of the rivers, and chose instead to walk for itself…. Taking to the trails, man in fact is not submissive. He is an insurgent against affectionate and treacherous nature which enriches and kills him” (in Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon [London: Penguin, 1989], 303–4).

  44. For an example of a socio-ecological model of this type, see Philip M. Fearnside, Human Carrying Capacity of the Brazilian Rainforest (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986).

  45. These Arapiuns varadores are all access routes or shortcuts. At least two other types of anthropogenic channel have been identified near Santarém: (i) pools and backwaters made in upland streams by damming with trees and other debris, and used for soaking bitter manioc, washing clothes, bathing, or fishing (Joe McCann, personal communication, September 1996); (ii) channels known as carvados, cut to allow sediment-laden floodwaters slowly to fill in backswamps for agricultural land, pasture, or football pitches (Antoinette M.A.G. WinklerPrins, “Land-Use Decision Making Using Local Soil Knowledge on the Lower Amazon Floodplain,” Geographical Review 87, no. 1 [1997]: 105–8).

  46. Letter from Santarém to Samuel Stevens, August 18, 1853, “Proceedings of Natural-History Collectors in Foreign Countries,” Zoologist 12 (1854): 4320.

  47. Leopold H. Myers, The Clio (London: Robin Clark, 1990). There actually was a Clio caught up in the carnage of the Cabanagem civil war. It was carrying arms for the president of Pará, Bernardo Lobo de Souza, but was captured by rebels and its crew killed. Oddly, this is not the story Myers tells, even though his novel is set during a generic revolution. See John Hemming, Amazon Frontier: The Defeat of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1987), 232.

  48. John Berger and Jean Mohr, A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor (London: Writers and Readers Cooperative Press, 1969), 13. For foundational work on landscape as ideology and text, see Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973); John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin/BBC, 1972); Stephen Daniels, “Marxism, Culture, and the Duplicity of Landscape,” in New Models in Geography: The Political-Economy Perspective, ed. Richard Peet and Nigel Thrift, vol. 1 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 196–220; Denis E. Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Denis E. Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels, eds., The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); James S. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Trevor J. Barnes and James S. Duncan, eds., Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape (London: Routledge, 1992).

  49. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

  50. Julian H. Steward, ed., Handbook of South American Indians, 6 vols., Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin no. 143 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946–50). With regard to evolutionary theorizing, the key figure is Steward’s associate Leslie White. See, for example, Leslie A. White, “Energy and the Evolution of Culture,” American Anthropologist 45, no. 3 (1943): 335–56; and Leslie A. White and Beth Dillingham, The Concept of Culture (Minneapolis: Burgess, 1973). Note also the association between cultural-ecological evolutionary models of social development and the rise of modernization theory in the 1960s. See Walter W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).

  51. Julian H. Steward and Louis C. Faron, Native Peoples of South America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 291. On Steward, see Robert F. Murphy, “The Anthropological Theories of Julian Steward,” in Julian H. Steward, Evolution and Ecology: Essays on Social Transformation, ed. Jane C. Steward and Robert F. Murphy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977); and Robert A. Manners, “Julian Haynes Steward 1902–1972,” American Anthropologist 75, no. 3 (1973): 886–903.

  52. See the insightful discussion by Peter Hulme,
Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (New York: Routledge, 1986), 50–61.

  53. See David N. Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993). Also, John H. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); Mark Bassin, “Friedrich Ratzel’s Travels in the United States: A Study in the Genesis of his Anthropogeography,” History of Geography Newsletter 4 (1984): 11–22; idem, “Imperialism and the Nation-State in Friedrich Ratzel’s Political Geography,” Progress in Human Geography 11, no. 3 (1987): 473–95.

  54. This preoccupation continued through the 1980s. See, for example, Raymond B. Hames and William T. Vickers, eds., Adaptive Responses of Native Amazonians (New York: Academic Press, 1983).