In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  55. The generative text here was Daniel R. Gross, “Protein Capture and Cultural Development in the Amazon Basin,” American Anthropologist 77 (1975): 526–49. See also the now-infamous work of Napoleon Chagnon. For an overview of these debates, see Leslie E. Sponsel, “Amazon Ecology and Adaptation,” Annual Review of Anthropology 15 (1986): 67–97.

  56. Betty J. Meggers, “Environmental Limitations on the Development of Culture,” American Anthropologist 56 (1954): 801–24. Also, idem, “Environment and Culture in the Amazon Basin: An Appraisal of the Theory of Environmental Determinism,” in Angel Palerm, Eric R. Wolf, Waldo R. Wedel, Betty J. Meggers, Jacques M. May, and Lawrence Krader, Studies in Human Ecology (Washington, D.C.: Pan American Union, 1957), 71–89.

  57. Although Meggers’ limiting factor architecture anticipates Harris, an even more direct parallel is between Gross’ notions of regional protein deficiency and Harris’ speculations on Aztec cannibalism. See Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings: The Origins of Cultures (New York: Random House, 1977).

  58. Meggers, “Environmental Limitations,” 803.

  59. Betty J. Meggers and Clifford Evans, Archaeological Investigations at the Mouth of the Amazon, Bureau of American Ethnology, bulletin no. 167 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1957).

  60. The diffusionary model is a characteristic of her work, but see, as representative, Betty J. Meggers, Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise (Chicago: Aldine, 1971), 36–38, 146–48, 165–67; and, more recently, “Pre-Columbian Amazonia,” National Geographic Research & Exploration 10, no. 4 (1994): 398–421.

  61. For an effective critique of Meggers’ devolutionism, see Anna C. Roosevelt, Parmana: Prehistoric Maize and Manioc Subsistence Along the Amazon and Orinoco (New York: Academic Press, 1980), 1–56; and idem, Moundbuilders of the Amazon: Geophysical Archaeology on Marajó Island, Brazil (New York: Academic Press, 1991), 100–111.

  62. See, for example, William M. Denevan, The Aboriginal Cultural Geography of the Llanos de Mojos of Bolivia, Ibero-Americana 48 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); idem, “Aboriginal Drained-Field Cultivation in the Americas,” Science 169 (1970): 647–54; and also Denevan’s recent overview, Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes: Triumph Over the Soil (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); James J. Parsons and William M. Denevan, “Pre-Columbian Ridged Fields,” Scientific American 217, no. 1 (1967): 93–100; Donald Lathrap, “The Antiquity and Importance of Long-Distance Trade Relationships in the Moist Tropics of Pre-Columbian South America,” World Archaeology 5, no. 2 (1973): 170–86.

  63. A valuable recent collection edited by Balée is explicitly focused on the reconfiguration of these legacies. See particularly William Balée, “Introduction,” in Advances in Historical Ecology, ed. William Balée (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 1–10, and Neil L. Whitehead, “Ecological History and Historical Ecology: Diachronic Modeling Versus Historical Explanation,” in Balée, Advances in Historical Ecology, 30–41. Other key references are William Balée, “Indigenous Adaptation to Amazonian Palm Forests,” Principes 32, no. 2 (1988): 47–54; idem, “The Culture of Amazonian Forests,” in Posey and Balée, Resource Management in Amazonia, 1–21; idem, “Indigenous Transformation of Amazonian Forests: An Example from Maranhão, Brazil,” L’Homme 33, nos. 2–4 (1993): 231–54; idem, Footprints of the Forest: Ka’apor Ethnobotany—The Historical Ecology of Plant Utilization by an Amazonian People (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); William M. Denevan, “Ecological Heterogeneity and Horizontal Zonation of Agriculture in the Amazonian Floodplain,” in Frontier Expansion in Amazonia, ed. Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984), 311–36; William M. Denevan and Christine Padoch, eds., Swidden-Fallow Agroforestry in the Peruvian Amazon (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1987); Darrell A. Posey, “Indigenous Management of Tropical Forest Ecosystems: The Case of the Kayapó Indians of the Brazilian Amazon,” Agroforestry Systems 3 (1985): 139–58; Susanna B. Hecht and Darrell A. Posey, “Indigenous Soil Management in the Latin American Tropics: Some Implications for the Amazon Basin,” in Ethnobiology: Implications and Applications, ed. Darrell A. Posey and William L. Overal, Proceedings of the First International Congress of Ethnobiology, vol. 2 (Belém: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 1990), 73–86; Anna C. Roosevelt, “Chiefdoms in the Amazon and Orinoco,” in Chiefdoms in the Americas, ed. Robert D. Drennan and Carlos A. Uribe (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987), 153–84; idem, “Natural Resource Management in Amazonia Before the Conquest: Beyond Ethnographic Projection,” in Posey and Balée, Resource Management in Amazonia, 30–62; idem, “Lost Civilizations of the Lower Amazon,” Natural History 95, no. 2 (1989): 74–83; idem, “The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Chiefdoms,” L’Homme 33, nos. 2–4 (1993): 255–83; idem, “Ancient and Modern Hunter-Gatherers of Lowland South America,” in Balée, Advances in Historical Ecology, 190–212; idem, Parmana; and idem, Moundbuilders. Other recent and sophisticated contributions to this literature include Philippe Descola, In the Society of Nature: A Native Ecology of Amazonia, trans. Nora Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Laura Rival, “Domestication as a Historical and Symbolic Process: Wild Gardens and Cultivated Forests in the Ecuadorian Amazon,” in Balée, Advances in Historical Ecology, 232–50; and 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. For a prescient statement of the problematic, see Stephen Nugent, “Amazonia: Ecosystem and Social System,” Man N.S. 16 (1981): 62–74.

  64. Rather than a thoroughgoing break with its logic, Roosevelt’s critique of Meggers has rested on a re-evaluation of the resource potential of the várzea; that is, on a finer-grained appreciation of the “carrying capacity” of particular sites. See Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 179–200; and Balée, “The Culture of Amazonian Forests.” Roosevelt’s key precursor was Donald Lathrap, see his The Upper Amazon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1970). For a description of large-scale settlement in the upland forest, see Michael J. Heckenberger, War and Peace in the Shadow of Empire: Sociopolitical Change in the Upper Xingu of Southeastern Amazonia, A.D. 1250–2000 (unpbd. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh, 1996).

  65. Roosevelt, “Resource Management in Amazonia.”

  66. A. C. Roosevelt, M. Lima da Costa, C. Lopes Machado, M. Michab, N. Mercier, H. Valladas, J. Feathers, W. Barnett, M. Imazio da Silveira, A. Henderson, J. Sliva, B. Chernoff, D. S. Reese, J. A. Holma, N. Toth, and K. Schick, “Paleoindian Cave Dwellers in the Amazon: The Peopling of the Americas,” Science 272 (1996): 373–84; and Richard E. Reanier, William P. Barse, Anna C. Roosevelt, Marconales Lima de Costa, Linda J. Brown, John E. Douglas, Matthew O’Donnell, Ellen Quinn, Judy Kemp, Christiane Lopes Machado, Maura Imazio da Silveira, James Feathers, and Andrew Henderson, “Dating a Paleoindian Site in the Amazon in Comparison with Clovis Culture,” Science 275 (1997): 1948–52. Roosevelt’s excavations also suggest that pottery-making began up to 2,000 years earlier in Amazonia than elsewhere in the hemisphere; see, A. C. Roosevelt, R. A. Housley, M. Imazio da Silveira, S. Maranca, and R. Johnson, “Eighth Millennium Pottery from a Prehistoric Shell Midden in the Brazilian Amazon,” Science 254 (1991): 1621–24. Other sites have produced evidence of early Amazon maize domestication: M. B. Bush, D. R. Piperno, and P. A. Colinvaux, “A 6,000 Year History of Amazonian Maize Cultivation,” Nature 340 (1989): 303–5.

  67. Posey, “Indigenous Management of Tropical Forest Ecosystems.” For other work on the material construction of microenvironments, see Hecht and Posey, “Indigenous Soil Management”; Dominique Irvine, “Succession Management and Resource Distribution in an Amazonian Rain Forest,” in Posey and Balée, Resource Management in Amazonia, 223–37; Chernela, “Managing Rivers of Hunger”; Christine Padoch and Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez, “Farming A
bove the Flood in the Várzea of Amapá,” in Várzea: Diversity, Development, and Conservation of Amazonia’s Whitewater Floodplains, ed. Christine Padoch, J. Márcio Ayres, Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez, and Anthony Henderson (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1999), 345–54; and Hugh Raffles, “Exploring the Anthropogenic Amazon: Estuarine Landscape Transformations in Amapá, Brazil,” in Padoch et al., Várzea, 355–70.

  68. Balée, “The Culture of Amazonian Forests”; idem, “Indigenous Adaptation”; and see my account above of colonist use of ancient terra preta sites. Also, William M. Denevan, “The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 369–85. An important recent collection on this theme is Unknown Amazon: Culture in Nature in Ancient Brazil, ed. Colin McEwan, Christiana Barreto, and Edwardo Neves (London: British Museum, 2001).

  69. Alfred Métraux, “Tribes of Eastern Bolivia and the Madeira Headwaters,” in Steward, Handbook, vol. 3: The Tropical Forest Tribes, 381–454, 416. Métraux was preceded by the Swedish anthropologist Erland Nordenskiöld, who worked in the Bolivian Amazon from 1904 to 1914. Nordenskiöld documented a large number of indigenous earthworks in this area, including canals. See Erland Nordenskiöld, “Die anpassung der Indianer an die verhältnisse in den überschwemmungsgebieten in Südamerika,” Ymer 36, no. 2 (1916): 138–55, in which Nordenskiöld cites correspondence from his German colleague Teodor Koch-Grünberg suggesting that the lower reaches of the famous Casiquiare Canal linking the Amazon (via the Rio Negro) and Orinoco river systems may have been opened by Arawak labor (153–55). My thanks to William Denevan for this reference and the invaluable translation.

  70. Rival, “Domestication,” 245.

  71. For an image of a similar channel taken in 1983 at Teso dos Bichos on Marajó, see Roosevelt, Moundbuilders, photograph C, 24. See also, the description of an important canal opened by government mechanical diggers at Anajás on Marajó in Luxardo, Marajó, 65–67.

  72. Isa Adonias, A cartografia da região Amazônica: Catálogo descritivo (1500–1961), vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: INPA, 1963), 347. On damming on Marajó and the widespread use of barrages, see Helen C. Palmatary, “The Pottery of Marajó Island, Brazil,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society N.S. 39, no. 3 (1949): 260–470, 265–66.

  73. See the work of Keith Basso, for example, Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language Among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996); and Julie Cruikshank, “Getting the Words Right: Perspectives on Naming and Places in Athapaskan Oral History,” Arctic Anthropology 27, no. 1 (1990): 52–65.

  74. Smaller-scale canals cut for timber extraction similar to some of those in Igarapé Guariba have been noted elsewhere in the estuary. See Domingo S. Macedo and Anthony B. Anderson, “Early Ecological Changes Associated with Logging in an Amazon Floodplain,” Biotropica 25, no. 2 (1993): 151–63; and Anthony B. Anderson, Igor Mousasticoshvily Jr., and Domingo S. Macedo, “Logging of Virola surinamensis in the Amazon Floodplain: Impacts and Alternatives,” in Padoch et al., Várzea, 119–34. For the grandest fluvial engineering scheme of all—a continuous waterway linking the Caribbean to the Rio de la Plata via the Orinoco and the Amazon—see Hilgard O’Reilly Sternberg’s fascinating “Proposals for a South American Waterway,” in Proceedings of the 48th International Congress of Americanists, ed. Magnus Mörner and Mona Rosendahl (Stockholm: Stockholm University/Institute of Latin American Studies, 1995), 99–125. My thanks to Antoinette WinklerPrins for this reference.

  CHAPTER 3

  1. “Now let us, by a flight of the imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past—an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the later one.” Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1962), 18.

  2. Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place (New York: Penguin, 1988).

  3. Making of it, in fact, the same kind of carceral local that Arjun Appadurai finds in much ethnography. See his “Introduction: Place and Voice in Anthropological Theory,” Cultural Anthropology 3, no. 1 (1988): 16–20.

  4. “The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool.” Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Cited in Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 8.

  5. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 158. For an elaboration of this point, see Chapter 5, n. 36 below.

  6. For an exploration of this theme, see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).

  7. An important account of Amazon river traders is José Alípio Goulart, O regatão: Mascate fluvial da Amazônia (Rio de Janeiro: Conquista, 1967). Also see David Gibbs McGrath, The Paraense Traders: Small-scale, Long-distance Trade in the Brazilian Amazon (unpbd. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Geography, University of Wisconsin, 1989); Arthur Cézar Ferreira Reis, O seringal e o seringueiro, documentário da vida rural, no. 5 (Rio de Janeiro: Ministério da Agricultura, 1953), 124–26; John C. Yungjohann, White Gold, The Diary of a Rubber Cutter in the Amazon, 1906–1916, ed. Ghillean T. Prance (Oracle: Synergetic Press, 1989); and Raymundo Moraes, Na planície Amazônica, 7th ed. (São Paulo: Editora Itatiaia, 1987), 71–75. Moraes writes with venom toward both Jewish and Islamic traders (who “spread like rats,” 72). This rhetoric reflects widespread xenophobia in the Amazon during the early twentieth century that manifested in periodic explosive violence directed against Jewish regatões and Jewish-owned aviamento houses. This interdigitation of race and political economy points to major gaps in Amazonianist scholarship. For brief comments, see Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 50–51, 306 n. 4. Compelling and detailed accounts of Jews who succeeded in establishing themselves as significant commercial figures can be found in Samuel Benchimol’s generously illustrated and important Manáos-do-Amazonas: Memória empresarial, vol. 1 (Manaus: Universidade do Amazonas, 1994).

  8. For a detailed account of such transaction in Igarapé Guariba and for citations on aviamento, see Chapter 7.

  9. A regional resonance here is with the pioneer bandeirantes (lit., flag-bearers) of the seventeenth century, who led brutalizing expeditions of primitive accumulation into the forest in what is now widely celebrated as a key moment in Brazilian nation-making. Both in the account of his friend Gomes and in the memories of his close family, Viega emerges as a modern (in its fullest sense) pioneer-explorer, a contemporary bandeirante. There is an ambivalence to the foundational Brazilian mythologies that is, of course, absent from these tellings in which authority is expressed in the language of collaborative paternalism. For a useful introduction to the bandeirante, see John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (London: Macmillan, 1978), 238–82. As will be seen, the trope of wilderness on which Gomes is drawing recurs frequently in accounts of Igarapé Guariba. For definitive, although quite distinct, historical treatments in relation to European settler frontier discourse, see Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989) and William Cronon, “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996), 69–90. For Amazonia, see Candace Slater, “Amazonia as Edenic Narrative,” in Cronon, Uncommon Ground, 114–31.

  10. Reis, O seringal, 113.

  11. Ibid., 114.

  12. Raymond Wi
lliams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35. Also, Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 198–202. Structures of feeling are best thought of as multiple, overlapping, processual, and located. As I am suggesting, localization of this type has contradictory political implications. See Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). For critiques of the unmarked parochialism of Williams’ work in relation to race and colonialism, see Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 49–50; Benita Parry, “Review: In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures by Aijaz Ahmad,” History Workshop Journal 36 (1993): 232–42. For broader assessments, see Dennis L. Dworkin and Leslie G. Roman, eds., Views Beyond the Border Country: Raymond Williams and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  13. See Chapter 7 for a fuller description of this episode.

  14. The anaconda (sucuriju) grows to fabulous proportions in stories of the unpredictable and highly mobile Cobra Grande (Great Snake). For discussions, see Candace Slater, Dance of the Dolphin: Transformation and Disenchantment in the Amazonian Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); João de Jesus Paes Loureiro, Cultura Amazônica: Um poética do imaginário (Belém: CEJUP, 1995); Nigel J. H. Smith, Man, Fishes, and the Amazon (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); and Roberto M. Rodrigues, A fauna da Amazônia (Belém: CEJUP, 1992).

  15. For important recent discussion of the regional implications of the term “caboclo,” see Stephen Nugent, Amazonian Caboclo Society: An Essay in Invisibility (Oxford: Berg, 1996); idem, “The Coordinates of Identity in Amazonia: At Play in the Fields of Culture,” Critique of Anthropology 17, no. 1 (1997): 33–51; and Mark Harris, “‘What It Means to Be Caboclo’: Some Critical Notes on the Construction of Amazonian Caboclo Society as an Anthropological Object,” Critique of Anthropology 18, no. 1 (1998): 83–95.