In Amazonia (35 page)

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

C
HAPTER
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).