In Amazonia (38 page)

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.

C
HAPTER
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 Williams,
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.

16
. Such a term seems to embody processual imaginaries: a past in which the closely vegetated area was once open water and a future in which it becomes the expansive “lake.” I owe this insight to Daniel Zarin, who first pointed out the history instantiated in the term “lago.”

17
. For accounts of similar genderings of landscape spaces through a division of labor into that based around the home and that based on expeditionary travel, see Louise Fortmann, “Gendered Knowledge: Rights and Space in Two Zimbabwe Villages,” in
Feminist Political Ecology: Global Issues and Local Experiences
, ed. Dianne Rocheleau, Barbara Thomas-Slayter, and Esther Wangari (New York: Routledge, 1996), 211–23; and Stacy Leigh Pigg, “Constructing Social Categories Through Place: Social Representations and Development in Nepal,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
34, no. 3 (1992): 491–513.

18
. Raymond Williams,
The Country and the City
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 120.

19
. These images are directly comparable. Seasonal variation has been eliminated by using images from the same months of different years (October/November). Diurnal tidal variation has been controlled for by the reading of exposed mudflats as water (Daniel Zarin, personal communication). For a comprehensive analysis of images from this area, see Valeria F. G. Pereira,
Spatial and Temporal Analysis of Floodplain Ecosystems—Amapá, Brazil—Using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Remote Sensing
(unpbd. M.Sc. thesis, Department of Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire, 1998).

20
. “O centro” translates literally as “the center,” but Paulo Jacob pins down its meaning in the present context: “The heart of the forest. A place remote from settlement” (“Âmago da mata. Lugar afastado da povoação”). There
is room here for revelatory interpretative analysis of comparative notions of “centrality.” Paulo Jacob,
Dicionário da língua popular da Amazônia
(Rio de Janeiro: Liv. Ed. Cátedra, 1985), 43.

21
. “I think it was a curiosity to see what was there [“curiosidade de ver”],” Lene told me. “In those days, you didn't have airplanes. He thought that the way to see farther would be to open a stream and go have a look.” Dona Rita joined in: “Yes, it really was curiosity, without studying or anything … real curiosity.”

22
. On the role of traveling leaders in constituting rural communities, see Anna L. Tsing,
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 72–76. On the Comunidades de Base and church politics during this period, see Scott Mainwaring,
The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916–1985
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), and, for an interesting sociological case study from the Amazon, see Thomas C. Bruneau, “Brazil: The Catholic Church and Basic Christian Communities,” in
Religion and Political Conflict in Latin America
, ed. Daniel H. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 106–23.