In Amazonia (47 page)

57
. See Bormann and Likens,
Pattern and Process
, 164–212. On Odum, see Peter J. Taylor, “Technocratic Optimism, H. T. Odum, and the Partial Transformation of Ecological Metaphor After World War II,”
Journal of the History of Biology
21, no. 2 (1988): 213–44; and Peter J. Taylor and Ann S. Blum, “Ecosystems as Circuits: Diagrams and the Limits of Physical Analogies,”
Biology and Philosophy
6 (1991): 275–94. Zimmerer and Scoones are absolutely correct to lament the baleful impact of systems ecology on environmental anthropology and its cognate fields. Odum's influence persisted unacknowledged in the social sciences long after it was unpopular in ecology, to the extent that it provided theoretical architecture for the foundational texts of political ecology. See, for example, Piers Blaikie,
The Political Economy of Soil Degradation in Developing Countries
(London: Longman, 1987).

58
. For useful discussions of Hubbard Brook, see McIntosh,
Background of Ecology
, 204–8; and Hagen,
An Entangled Bank
, 181–88.

59
. This is well expressed by Laura Cameron in the context of non-equilibrium theories. See her “Histories of Disturbance,”
Radical History Review
74 (1999): 4–24.

60
. As an increasingly familiar variant, work in Amazonian restoration ecology (in which the landscape is by definition an already vitiated site of human activity) offers the region as a corrupted space of nature. See, as an early and important example, Daniel Nepstad, Christopher Uhl, and E.A.S. Serrão, “Recuperation of a Degraded Amazonian Landscape: Forest Recovery and Agricultural Restoration,”
Ambio
20, no. 6 (1991): 248–55.

61
. See Oliver T. Coomes, “Blackwater Rivers, Adaptation, and Environmental Heterogeneity in Amazonia,”
American Anthropologist
94, no. 3 (1992): 698–701; and João Murça Pires and Ghillean T. Prance, “The Vegetation Types of the Brazilian Amazon,” in
Key Environments: Amazonia
, ed. Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas E. Lovejoy (London: Pergamon, 1985), 126–31.

62
. Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society.” And see
Chapter 2
above.

63
. On governmentality, see Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in
The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality
, ed. Graham Burchill, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 87–104; Nikolas Rose,
Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). On environmental regulation, see Adams, “Rationalization and Conservation,” and, for notions of “environmentality,” Timothy Luke,
Ecocritique: Contesting the Politics of Nature, Economy, and Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Akhil Gupta,
Postcolonial Developments: Agriculture in the Making of Modern India
(Durham: Duke University
Press, 1998); and Arun Agrawal, “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.

64
. For an example of this type of work, see Daniel C. Nepstad, Claudio R. de Carvalho, Eric A. Davidson, Peter H. Jipp, Paul A. Lefebvre, Gustavo H. Negreiros, Elson D. da Silva, Thomas A. Stone, Susan E. Trumbore, and Simone Vieira, “The Role of Deep Roots in the Hydrological and Carbon Cycles of Amazonian Forests and Pastures,”
Nature
372, no. 6507 (1994): 666–69. For the definitive statement of the closed rain forest system, see Paul W. Richards,
The Tropical Rain Forest: An Ecological Study
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), who describes a “closed cycle of plant nutrients” (219). Richards places much of the emphasis in his highly influential account on the thick root mat characteristic of nutrient-poor ecosystems. The concentration of tree roots near or on top of the soil surface confers a competitive advantage in relation to decomposer litter organisms, as well as increasing surface area to volume ratio between root surface and soil. In its most developed form the Amazonian root mat is composed of a complex of interlaced humus and feeder roots forming a surface layer up to 45 centimeters thick and consisting of over 35 percent of total root biomass. See Carl F. Jordan, ed.,
An Amazonian Rain Forest: The Structure and Function of a Nutrient Stressed Ecosystem and the Impact of Slash-and-Burn Agriculture
(Paris: UNESCO, 1989); Carl F. Jordan and Gladys Escalante, “Root Productivity in an Amazonian Rain Forest,”
Ecology
61, no. 1 (1980): 14–18.

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).

C
HAPTER
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 Amazônia: 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).