In Amazonia: A Natural History - Softcover

Raffles, Hugh

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691048851 ISBN 13: 9780691048857

Verlag: Princeton University Press, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature." Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city. Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Hugh Raffles is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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"Without question this is the best book about the Amazon I have read in many years. It is a major contribution to the literature (in every sense) of the region, to the history and sociology of science, and to anthropology in general. Solid, beautifully written, beautifully judged and paced, it has a great deal to offer those knowing everything or nothing about the Amazon."--David Cleary, Amazon Program Manager, The Nature Conservancy, author of Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush

"Thoroughly researched and very riveting, In Amazonia is a lovely blend of personal experience and historical commentary about the making of place both in physical and ideological terms. Very rich theoretically, its lively and witty prose is mercifully leached of post-modern, post-colonial jargon, making it both accessible and clear. Not only will this book leap to the forefront of Amazonian analyses but it will certainly take its pride of place in studies of tropical development, ideologies of nature, and the history of ideas about the environment and tropical representation."--Susanna Hecht, University of California, Los Angeles

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In Amazonia

A Natural History

By Hugh Raffles

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2002 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-04885-7

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, xi, 
CHAPTER 1. In Amazonia, 1, 
CHAPTER 2. Dissolution of the Elements The Floodplain, 11,000 BP–2002, 12, 
CHAPTER 3. In the Flow of Becoming Igarapé Guariba, 1941–1996, 44, 
CHAPTER 4. A Countrey Never Sackt Guiana, 1587–1631, 75, 
CHAPTER 5. The Uses of Butterflies Bates of the Amazons, 1848–1859, 114, 
CHAPTER 6. The Dreamlife of Ecology South Pará, 1999, 150, 
CHAPTER 7. Fluvial Intimacies Amapá, 1995–1996, 180, 
NOTES, 207, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 265, 
CREDITS, 297, 
INDEX, 299, 

CHAPTER 1

IN AMAZONIA

Dreams of Avarice—My Heart Goes Bump!—Landscape as Text ... and as Biography—Igarapé Guariba—Another Discovery—Environmental Determinisms and Narrative Acrobatics—Spaces of Nature—A Natural History—Collecting and Reflecting—Traces of Trauma—Sawdust Memories

Let's begin in 1976. It was late summer that year when a crew from the Companhia de Pesquisas e Recursos Minerais, the geological survey of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines, shot this infrared aerial photograph of the Rio Guariba, by then almost a river. They didn't find what they were looking for, at least not here, although there was plenty of gold and magnesium close by. But their image is worth treasuring anyway. Its tactility holds this book in place—exactly where it should be.

It was a famously hot summer in London. I was working in a gray stone warehouse in the East End docks, loading and unloading delivery trucks and stacking crates of beer and wine in tall towers on wooden pallets. That building is still standing, but like most of the warehouses down there it's been transformed: gutted, scrubbed, and converted into luxury condominiums. Back then, every Thursday, all the workers—transients like myself and those hoping for the long haul—formed a snaking line up a narrow, deeply shadowed stairwell to a battered doorway on the top-floor landing. Every week, as the person ahead exited, I would knock on the closing door, enter the cramped office, and say my name to the company accountant seated behind a desk piled high with tumbling stacks of papers. And every Thursday, with the same motions and with the same half-smile, the accountant would calculate my wages, shuffle the money into a new brown envelope, and, as if to himself, repeat the same unsettling phrase: "Beyond the dreams of avarice...."

That same summer, an ocean away, in a world of which I still knew nothing, the Brazilian dictatorship was chasing avaricious dreams of its own. Late in 1976, as I grappled with an irony beyond my sensibility, the generals were forcing convulsive inroads into their northern provinces, brushing aside Indian, peasant, and guerrilla resistance, creating fortunes, chaos, and despair. It was an aggressive territorialization, one that would radically change the dynamics and logic of regional politics and produce an unforeseen geopolitical re-siting that the military and their civilian successors have ever since struggled to disavow, a now-familiar ecological Amazonia subject to planetary discourses of common governance.

Meanwhile, between the contours of the military maps, people were making new worlds of their own. The survey image does not lie. Though we cannot see it yet, that river is growing, and in growing it transforms the lives that transform it. And the water that flowed past as I piled boxes by the Thames at Wapping Stairs where Jeffreys the Hanging Judge once attempted flight disguised as a sailor, that lapping water on which Ralegh was finally captured, his pockets stuffed with talismans of Guiana, and on which young Bates and Wallace, heading to Kew in 1848, talked of tropical travels soon to come, that murky water is the same rushing tide that washes in and out, a monstrous pump, sweeping the land out to sea and remaking this place I have called Igarapé Guariba.

I arrived in Igarapé Guariba in 1994 looking for oral histories. I was in the northern Brazilian state of Amapá and was captured by the landscape, its blatant physicality and its enduring imaginaries. It was especially thrilling to be in an airplane here on a cloudless flight and to be held by that iconic view of dense and boundless forest veined by sharply golden rivers, by a long-anticipated panorama that was already part of my experience well before I saw it for myself.

On the ground, of course, although the consciousness of vista never really dissolves, it all looks different—a matter of ethnography and the practice of history, and a rationale for this book. There is a passage in Walter Benjamin's One-Way Street about this, written in an age when commercial air travel was still exotic, a meditation on embodied experience, on the perspectival dislocations of new technologies and the traditions of Judaic scholarship. Benjamin, alive to the materialities of practice and to the liveliness of objects, compares the difference between passing over and walking through a landscape to the difference between reading a text and copying it. But it is the first term of his analogy that catches my attention:

The power of a country road is different when one is walking along it from when one is flying over it by airplane.... The airplane passenger sees only how the road pushes through the landscape, how it unfolds according to the same laws as the terrain surrounding it. Only he who walks the road on foot learns of the power it commands, and, of how, from the very scenery that for the flier is only the unfurled plain, it calls forth distances, belvederes, clearings, prospects at each of its turns like a commander deploying soldiers at a front.

Benjamin draws his European landscape with a mind's eye trained on the darkening horizon that presages his own suicide. His country road leads inexorably to 1940 and his death at the Franco-Spanish border. And the mood of detachment affected by his passenger is also of a time and place. When the clouds part unexpectedly to reveal a glimpse of the deep green forests of Pará receding to a haze, my heart goes bump—just like that!—and a visual lexicon I hardly knew I possessed takes over. Laid out below is the Amazon as seen in a thousand picture spreads, an entity already grasped whole, a planetary patrimony, about which I have no sense of what I bring and what I find.

In Igarapé Guariba, I asked people about where they lived—the rivers, trees, and mudflats, the fishes, birds, and mammals—searching for signs of the potent environmental Amazon of contemporary imagination. In answer, as conversation turned to the past, their memories called up another place situated right here in this same geographical location but unmistakably different, another place entirely; a place distinct not only in its sociality but also in its physical characteristics. Slowly, through the months of talking, a biographical landscape, at once material and fantastic, one born from the politics of history and molded out of everyday life, began to take shape.

When the four founding families of Igarapé Guariba sailed across the endless expanse of the Amazon delta in the late 1950s, passing between islands and hugging the shore, they found only a stream running out of the forest to meet their boats and announce their new...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Princeton University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0691048851
• ISBN 13: 9780691048857
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Cellestria; mail@cellestria.de; ; Tulpenweg 3; Melle; 49324; Deutschland