In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  65. This is, as Sharon Simpson and Donald Moore have pointed out to me, an inversion of the liberal dreams of both the grassroots development worker and the applied anthropologist, dreams in which the outside expert withers away after conferring the technical skills that create local autonomy.

  66. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey [1786–1788], trans. W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (London: Penguin 1970), 112.

  67. For a potent recent example of these types of narratives at play, see Mike Davis’ Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998). For a broader discussion of the apocalyptic in contemporary culture, see Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 285–310.

  68. The principal exception is the late Alwyn H. Gentry’s A Field Guide to the Families and Genera of Woody Plants of Northwest South America (Colombia, Ecuador, Peru), With Supplementary Notes on Herbaceous Taxa (Washington, D.C.: Conservation International, 1993).

  CHAPTER 7

  1. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, trans. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Pegasus Foundation, 1983), 8; ellipses present in original.

  2. Ibid., 6; emphasis in original.

  3. Ibid., 15; emphasis in original.

  4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. Gertrude E. M. Anscombe (New York: Prentice Hall, 1999), §129.

  5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 117. See the incisive discussion by Marilyn Strathern, “Afterword: Relocations,” in Shifting Contexts: Transformations in Anthropological Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1995), 177–85.

  6. See Hugh Raffles, “Local Theory: Nature and the Making of an Amazonian Place,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3 (1999): 323–60; Liisa H. Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); and James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

  7. All kinds of earthly paradises and El Dorados fall into this category: see Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s seductive Dictionary of Imaginary Places (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999).

  8. On the plurality of the “now,” see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 243. And see note 67, Chapter 4 above.

  9. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (Summer 1991), 773–97; Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–35.

  10. Alphonso Lingis, Abuses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); idem, Dangerous Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). For a useful discussion of Lingis’ earlier work in relation to body politics, see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1994).

  11. Doreen Massey, Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 120. Also, idem, “Spatial Disruptions,” in The Eight Technologies of Otherness, ed. Sue Golding (London: Routledge, 1997), 217–25, and idem, “Travelling Thoughts,” in Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, ed. Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, and Angela McRobbie (London: Verso, 2000), 225–32. For important work in geography and anthropology that pays close attention to the co-production of difference and place, see Michael Keith and Steve Pile, eds., Place and the Politics of Identity (London: Routledge, 1993); Steve Pile and Michael Keith, eds., Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997); Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, eds., Senses of Place (Santa Fe: SAR Press, 1996); James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta, eds., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Steven Gregory, Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Black Liverpool, Black America and the Gendering of Diasporic Space,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (1998): 291–325; idem, “Enslaving History: Narratives on Local Whiteness in a Black Atlantic Port,” American Ethnologist 27, no. 2 (2000): 340–70; and Donald Moore, “Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands,” Cultural Anthropology 13, no. 3 (1998): 344–81.

  12. I am introducing “effective geographies” in order to draw out the spatial dimension of Foucault’s work on Nietzsche’s wirkliche Historie (effective history). Foucault’s intervention helps oppose the tendency to identify space with atemporal homogeneity and radically problematizes the question of (temporal and spatial) scale. At the same time, through his attention to the affective and the embodied, Foucault points us toward historical and spatial understandings of intimacy. For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, “history becomes ‘effective’ to the degree that it introduces discontinuity into our very being—as it divides our emotions, dramatizes our instincts, multiplies our body and sets it against itself. ‘Effective’ history deprives the self of the reassuring stability of life and nature, and it will not permit itself to be transported by a voiceless obstinacy toward a millennial ending. It will uproot its traditional foundations and relentlessly disrupt its pretended continuity.” He continues: “The world we know is not this ultimately simple configuration where events are reduced to accentuate their essential traits, their final meaning, or their initial and final value. On the contrary, it is a profusion of entangled events…. We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference.” 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, 154–55. My thanks to Donald Moore for securing this connection.

  13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 25.

  14. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 155.

  15. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

  16. Getúlio Vargas inaugurated the “March to the West” in 1940 and launched the SPVEA in 1953 during a later term. In 1966, SPVEA was reinvented as the Superintendência de Desenvolvimento da Amazônia (SUDAM) in an effort to cleanse the integration process of the most obvious signs of corruption. Although Vargas committed suicide before the highways had carved their way into the Amazon, as Browder and Godfrey put it, “he articulated a nationalist ideology that subsequently propelled the forces of popular and corporate expansion into the northern frontier” (John D. Browder and Brian J. Godfrey, Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon [New York: Columbia University Press, 1997], 64). Also, Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937–1988 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001). For a useful account of SPVEA and SUDAM, see Martin T. Katzman, “Paradoxes of Amazonian Development in a ‘Resource-Starved’ World,” Journal of Developing Areas 10 (1975): 445–60; also, Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), especially 46–94; and Sue Branford and Oriel Glock, The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in the Amazon (London: Zed Books, 1985).

  17. Small-scale operations still characterize the Amazonian industry. See the useful analysis of the structure of the logging trade in the eastern Amazon by Christopher Uhl, Paulo Barreto, Adalberto Veríssimo, Ana Cristina Barros, Paulo Amaral, Edson Vidal, and Carlos Souza Jr., “Uma abordagem integrada de pesquisa sobre o manejo dos recursos naturais na Amazônia,” in A expansão da atividade madeireira na Am
azônia: Impactos e perspectivas para o desenvolvimento do setor florestal no Pará, ed. Ana Cristina Barros and Adalberto Veríssimo (Belém: IMAZON, 1996), 143–64.

  18. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. On oral history as narrative, see the work of Alessandro Portelli, particularly, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (New York: SUNY Press, 1991).

  19. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 250. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

  20. Ibid.

  21. An honorific. On the implications of Coronelismo in Brazil, see Victor Nunes Leal, Coronelismo, enxada e voto: O município e o regime representativo no Brasil, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Alfa-Omega, 1975). For a contemporary Amazonian account that is highly germane to the current discussion, see Jacky Picard, “O clientalismo nas colônias agrícolas do sudeste do Pará,” in Amazônia e a crise da modernização, org. Maria Angela D’Ínção and Isolda Maciel da Silveira (Belém: Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, 1994), 279–99.

  22. See Harrison Pollak, Marli Mattos, and Christopher Uhl, “A Profile of Palm Heart Extraction in the Amazon Estuary,” Human Ecology 23, no. 3 (1995): 357–85, and Jeremy Strudwick, “Commercial Management for Palm Heart from Euterpe oleracea Mart. Palmae in the Amazon Estuary,” in New Directions in the Study of Plants and People: Research Contributions from the Institute of Economic Botany, ed. Ghillean T. Prance and Michael J. Balick (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1990), 241–48.

  23. Given its regional importance, there has been remarkably little written on aviamento directly. For descriptions—from which one can get a sense of a regional diversity of political-economic form—see, particularly Stephen Hugh-Jones’ exceptional “Yesterday’s Luxuries, Tomorrow’s Necessities: Business and Barter in Northwest Amazonia,” in Barter, Exchange and Value: An Anthropological Approach, ed. Caroline Humphrey and Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42–74; 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. Ann Arbor: UMI Microfilms, 1989); 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); Morio Ono and Nobue Miyazaki, “O aviamento na Amazônia: Estudo sócio-econômico sôbre a produção de juta,” Sociologia 20, nos. 3–4 (1958): 366–96, 530–63; João Pacheco de Oliveira Filho, “O caboclo e o brabo: Notas sobre duas modalidades de força-de-trabalho na expansão da fronteira Amazônica no século XIX,” Encontros com a civilização Brasileira 11 (1979): 101–40; Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850–1920 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983); Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Blanca Muratorio, The Life and Times of Grandfather Alonso: Culture and History in the Upper Amazon (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991).

  24. The “modernizing” narrative is central to arguments made by Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, for example. See their Contested Frontiers in Amazonia, in which they describe the waning of aviamento in southern Pará in the face of the rapid expansion of wage labor. While a useful corrective to general accounts of Amazonian economic organization that over-emphasize historical continuity, their case should not be generalized too readily. Heterogeneity of political-economic relations is a more reliable definitive character of regional realities. For a useful discussion of this point, see David Cleary, “After the Frontier: Problems With Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (1993): 331–49.

  25. This argument is made by several members of the Viega family and by McGrath, The Paraense Traders, 95–105. For an illuminating discussion of gift and commodity exchange, see Charles Piot, Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 62–66.

  26. Despite the endurance of the boom in açaí and the success of the fruit in penetrating potentially huge markets in the south of Brazil, there are at this point relatively few published social science studies. Most focus on management of the plant as a resource and technical possibilities for increasing income from its marketing. Among currently available discussions, see Mário Hiraoka, “Land Use Changes in the Amazon Estuary,” Global Environmental Change 5, no. 4 (1995): 323–36; Anthony B. Anderson and Mário Augusto G. Jardim, “Costs and Benefits of Floodplain Forest Management by Rural Inhabitants in the Amazon Estuary: A Case Study of Açaí Palm Production,” in Fragile Lands of Latin America: The Search for Sustainable Uses, ed. John O. Browder (Boulder: Westview, 1989), 114–29; Stephen Nugent, “The Limitations of ‘Environmental Management’: Forest Utilization in the Lower Amazon,” in Environment and Development in Latin America: The Politics of Sustainability, ed. David Goodman and Michael Redclift (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 141–54; N. Miret Muñiz, R. Vamos, M. Hiraoka, F. Montagnini, and R. O. Mendelsohn, “The Economic Value of Managing Açaí Palm (Euterpe oleracea Mart.) in the Floodplains of the Amazon Estuary, Pará, Brazil,” Forest Ecology and Management 87, nos. 1–3 (1996): 163–73; Batista B. G. Calzavara, “As possibilidades do açaizeiro no estuário Amazônico,” Boletim da Faculdade de Ciências Agrárias do Pará 5, 1972. NAEA/UFPa, MPEG, EMBRAPA, and SECTAM organized the important and timely conference Seminário açaí: Possibilidades e limites em processos de desenvolvimento sustentável no estuário Amazônico held at the Museu Goeldi, Belém, in October 1996.

  27. See Christine Padoch and Miguel Pinedo-Vásquez, “Farming Above 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; Hiraoka, “Land Use Changes in the Amazon Estuary”; Mário Augusto G. Jardim and John S. Rumbold, “Effects of Adubation and Thinning on Açaí Palm (Euterpe oleracea Mart.): Fruit Yield from a Natural Population,” Boletim do Museu Paraense Emílio Goeldi, Série Botânica 10, no. 2 (1994): 283–93.

  28. There is, inevitably, an entire series of class-based codes associated with açaí: when and how often it is eaten, at what point in the meal, with what utensils, with which additives. This becomes complex when we consider the questions of subject formation tied up in this urban appropriation of a distinctive aspect of rural life.

  29. For accounts of Amazonian urbanization, see Bertha K. Becker, “Fronteira e urbanização repensadas,” Revista Brasileira de Geografia 47, nos. 3–4 (1985): 357–71; Browder and Godfrey, Rainforest Cities.

  30. A sack is measured out of four latas—rectangular, catering-size margarine tins.

  31. In Macapá, the zona franca free-trade zone is popularly known as the zona fraca, the weak/pathetic zone, because of its failure to emulate the (temporary) success of the Manaus model. In Belém, the pull of the zona franca is replaced by the push of extreme land conflict and violence in the south of Pará and Maranhão.

  32. For a fascinating discussion of the urban marketing of a very similar forest product that considers additional questions—for example, the fruit’s significance in ancillary trades such as icecream manufacture—see Christine Padoch’s “Aguaje (Mauritia flexuosa L.f.) in the economy of Iquitos, Peru,” in The Palm—Tree of Life: Biology, Utilization and Conservation, ed. Michael J. Balick (New York: New York Botanical Garden, 1988), 214–24.

  33. In times of shortfall in either Belém or Macapá, well-capitalized buyers like Jacaré make short-term profits by shipping fruit across the bay. They make a deal for a boat, pay someone to travel, pack the açaí in ice, and earn as much as R $120 per sack for the first few loads of açaí to arrive—although prices drop quickly as others enter the market.

  34.
For valuable discussions of the politics of “talk,” see Linda Alcoff and Laura Gray, “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (1993): 260–90; and Kathleen Stewart, A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an “Other” America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).

  35. Other, less economically important, produce is generally sold at a 30 percent markup (e.g., limes, graviola, oranges, bananas, maxixe, and watermelon).

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Adams, William M. “Rationalization and Conservation: Ecology and the Management of Nature in the United Kingdom.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers N.S. 22 (1997): 277–91.

  Adonias, Isa. A cartografia da região Amazônica: Catálogo descritivo (1500–1961). 2 vols. Rio de Janeiro: INPA, 1963.

  Adorno, Rolena. “The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History.” The William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (1992): 210–28.

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

  ———. “State Formation in Community Spaces? Decentralization of Control Over Forests in the Kumaon Himalaya, India.” Journal of Asian Studies 60, no. 1 (2001): 9–40.

  Alcoff, Linda, and Laura Gray. “Survivor Discourse: Transgression or Recuperation?” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (1993): 260–90.

  Allen, David Elliston. The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.

  Allen, Grant. “Bates of the Amazons.” Fortnightly Review 58 (1892): 798–809.

  Amadas, Philip, and Arthur Barlow. “The First Voyage Made to the Coasts of America, with Two Barks, Where in Were Captaines M. Philip Amadas, and M. Arthur Barlowe, who Discovered Part of the Countrey now called Virginia, Anno 1584. Written by One of the Said Captaines, and Sent to Sir Walter Ralegh, Knight, At Whose Charge and direction the Said Voyage was Set Forth.” In Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, Voiages and Discoveries of the English Nation, ed. David B. Quinn and Raleigh A. Skelton, vol. 3, 728–33. Hakluyt Society Extra Series No. 39. London: Hakluyt Society, 1965 [1589].