In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  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” (“mago 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.

  23. In a protracted if often surprisingly straightforward (at least in Amapá) process, title to terra requerida is available by demonstrating to INCRA that the area in question is currently unused or uninhabited. Terra requerida cannot normally be sold, as the definitive title remains with the state. It can, however, be inherited.

  24. For a graphic account of land violence in the south of Pará during this period, see Sue Branford and Oriel Glock, The Last Frontier: Fighting for Land in the Amazon (London: Zed Press, 1985). Also, Chapter 6 below.

  25. See Chapter 6 for a discussion of recent theoretical developments in ecology that have emphasized the stochastic dynamism of natural systems, foregrounding “disturbance regimes” in a break with notions of stability, climax, and the teleologies of measured succession.

  26. Of course, the symbolic value of some of these foods has only appreciated since bans on their trade and urban consumption were imposed by the federal state through the federal environmental agency, the Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis (IBAMA).

  27. Here I am using “glamour” as a gloss on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. See Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. John B. Thompson, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). In their account of the failure of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT/Workers’ Party) to capture the Brazilian presidency in the 1989 national elections, Emil Sader and Ken Silverstein suggest that Lula’s unwillingness to embody such cultural resources—his strategic self-presentation as a self-consciously working-class figure—lost him critical support among an urban and rural poor accustomed to clientalist political modes. Emil Sader and Ken Silverstein, Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers Party and Brazil (London: Verso, 1991). For a richer ethnographic discussion of the Brazilian political process in these terms, see Daniel T. Linger, “The Hegemony of Discontent,” American Ethnologist 20, no. 1 (1993): 3–25.

  28. This intimation of Amazonian impermanence echoes David Cleary’s important analysis of the instabilities of regional political economy—work that stands as a powerful critique of the conventional use of the frontier metaphor in the Amazonianist literature. David Cleary, “After the Frontier: Problems With Political Economy in the Modern Brazilian Amazon,” Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (1993): 331–50.

  29. There is a growing literature on the impact of transnational environmental discourse on Amazonian politics. Much of this focuses on the ambivalence of co-optation: the complications that ensue from the attempt—often highly sophisticated—of indigenous groups to (counter-) appropriate discursive space created by narratives of deforestation. For recent discussions, see Beth A. Conklin and Laura R. Graham, “The Shifting Middle-Ground: Amazonian Indians and Eco-Politics,” American Anthropologist 97, no. 4 (1995): 695–710; Beth A. Conklin, “Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism,” American Ethnologist 24, no. 4 (1997): 711–37; and Terence Turner, “Indigenous Rights, Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Conservation: Convergence or Divergence? The Case of the Brazilian Kayapó,” in Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment, ed. Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston, and Leo Marx (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999) 145–69. Discussions of these issues in relation to ribeirinho actors are much rarer. For an intervention that focuses on the perceived attempts of U.S. environmentalists to reconfigure Amazonian class politics in environmental terms, see Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, “Defenders of the Amazon,” The Nation, May 22, 1989, 695–702, September 18, 1989, 262, 291–92.

  30. Other words applied in this context are acabado (finished) and parado (stopped), definitive comments on local “development.”

  31. It is likely that an aggregate longitudinal analysis of ecological change in the area would support their claims—some of which are at least partly echoed by Macedo loyalists. There can be little doubt that the long-term hydrological effects of stream-cutting have resulted in a net loss of available cultivable area and other key resources both upstream and downstream in Igarapé Guariba. Yet the notion of access is key to local understandings of the changing landscape, and an analysis in aggregate terms overlooks intra-Guariba relations of power, assuming an idealized “community” in which resources and incomes are equitably partitioned. In contrast, the analysis presented here emphasizes the historical and power-laden processes of allocation through which present-day social relations are constituted and reconfigured (this type of argument has now been effectively staked out by political ecologists—see, for example, Nancy Lee Peluso, Rich Forests, Poor People: Resource Control and Resistance in Java [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992]).

  CHAPTER 4

  1. Pablo Ojer, S.J., La formación del Oriente Venezolano: I. Creación de las gobernaciones (Caracas: Universidade Católica Andres Bello, 1966), 109, grants first usage of “Guiana” to the conquistador Diego de Ordaz in 1531. John W. Shirley, “Sir Walter Raleigh’s Guiana Finances,” Huntington Library Quarterly 13 (1949): 55–69, 67, suggests that Ralegh is responsible for the word’s entry i
nto English.

  2. Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); James A. Williamson, English Colonies in Guiana and on the Amazon, 1604–1668 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923); and David B. Quinn, Raleigh and the British Empire (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1947), 163ff. For a particularly fine graphic representation, see P. du Val D’Abbeville’s 1654 map of the coastline from Trinidad to Pará entitled “La Gvaiane ov Coste Sauuage, autrement El Dorado, et Pais des Amazones,” reproduced as Map B in Robert Harcourt, A Relation of a Voyage to Guiana, ed. Sir C. Alexander Harris (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 60. London: Hakluyt Society, 1926 [1613]).

  3. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1977), Book IV, Canto xi, stanzas 22, 21. I follow Robert Schomburgk and most contemporary scholars in my spelling of Ralegh.

  4. Joyce Lorimer, English and Irish Settlement on the River Amazon, 1550–1646 (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 171. London: Hakluyt Society, 1989) is the indispensable source. Also Williamson, English Colonies; Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement, 294–300; and Vincent T. Harlow, “Introduction,” in Colonising Expeditions to the West Indies and Guiana, 1623–1667, ed. Vincent T. Harlow (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 56. London: Hakluyt Society, 1925), xiii–xcv. Key texts on which I have drawn that focus on other national histories include Cornelis Ch. Goslinga, The Dutch in the Caribbean and on the Wild Coast, 1580–1680 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1971); Walter Norman Breymann, The Opening of the Amazon 1540–1640 (unpbd. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, University of Illinois, 1950); and Ojer, La formación.

  5. Sir Walter Ralegh, “The Apology,” in Last Voyages—Cavendish, Hudson, Ralegh: The Original Narratives, ed. Philip Edwards (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 226–48, 240.

  6. See Neil L. Whitehead, “Introduction,” in Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 69. Henceforth, Whitehead, Discoverie. Although Whitehead argues that the Pakaraima mountains formed a “frontier”—a cultural as well as a physical watershed—his data suggest the extent to which this boundary was porous, uneven, and contingent, both spatially and temporally. Much of the ethnohistorical recuperation of the early modern indigenous polity to which I refer here is due to Whitehead’s detailed scholarship. In addition to the extensive introductory essays to his recent edition of The Discoverie, see Neil L. Whitehead, “Tribes Make States and States Make Tribes: Warfare and the Creation of Colonial Tribe and State in Northeastern South America,” in War in the Tribal Zone: Expanding States and Indigenous Warfare, ed. R. Brian Ferguson and Neil L. Whitehead (Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, 1992), 127–50; idem, “Ethnic Transformation and Historical Discontinuity in Native Amazonia and Guayana, 1500–1900,” L’Homme 33, nos. 2–4 (1993): 289–309; and idem, “The Ancient Amerindian Polities of the Amazon, the Orinoco, and the Atlantic Coast: A Preliminary Analysis of Their Passing,” in Amazonian Indians from Prehistory to the Present: Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Anna C. Roosevelt (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), 33–54. Also of importance are Simone Dreyfus, “Historical and Political Anthropological Inter-Connections: The Multilinguistic Indigenous Polity of the Carib Islands and Mainland Coast from the 16th to the 18th Century,” Antropológica 59–62 (1983–84): 39–55; idem, “Os empreendimentos coloniais e os espaços políticos indígenas no interior da Guiana ocidental (entre o Orenoco e o Corentino) de 1613–1796,” in Amazônia: Etnologia e história indígena, org. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro e Manuela Carneiro da Cunha (São Paulo: NHII-USP/FAPESP, 1993), 19–41; Arie Boomert, “Gifts of the Amazons: Greenstone Pendants and Beads as Items of Ceremonial Exchange,” Antropológica 67 (1987): 33–54; and Nelly Arvello-Jiménez and Horacio Biord, “The Impact of Conquest on Contemporary Indigenous Peoples of the Guiana Shield: The System of Orinoco Regional Interdependence,” in Roosevelt, Amazonian Indians, 55–78.

  7. Whitehead, “Introduction,” 106, and Map II, 61.

  8. See Thomas Hariot to Robert Cecil, July 11, 1596, in Edward Edwards, The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1868), 420, on Ralegh’s chart of Guiana which “was don but by intelligence from the Indians.” Also, Paul Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989).

  9. On expeditionary “metalepsis,” see D. Graham Burnett, Masters of All They Surveyed: Exploration, Geography, and a British El Dorado (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 37–66; Rolena Adorno, “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; and Stephen Greenblatt, “Foreword,” in Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery, trans. David Fausett (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), vii–xv. This discursive practice was often constitutive of the spatial practice of routed exploration. Its citationality can also usefully be considered in the terms elaborated by Judith Butler, following Austin and Derrida, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

  10. This familiar story has been the focus of a vast historiography. See, inter alia, Richard H. Tawney, Business and Politics under James I: Lionel Cranfield as Merchant and Minister (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958); Theodore K. Rabb, Enterprise and Empire: Merchant and Gentry Investment in the Expansion of England, 1575–1630 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Eva G. R. Taylor, Tudor Geography, 1485–1583 (London: Methuen, 1930); idem, Late Tudor and Early Stuart Geography, 1583–1650 (New York: Octagon, 1968); Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997); and Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement.

  11. Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, with a Relation of the Great and Golden City of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado) And the provinces of Emeria, Arromaia, Amapaia and other Countries, with their rivers, adioyning. Performed in the Year 1595 by Sir W. Ralegh, Knight, Captaine of her Maiesties Guard, Lo. Warden of the Stanneries, and her Highnesse Lieutenant generall of the Countie of Cornewall, ed. Robert H. Schomburgk (Hakluyt Society First Series No. 3. London: Hakluyt Society, 1848), 228. Henceforth, Schomburgk, Discoverie.

  12. Vincent T. Harlow, “Introduction,” in Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large and Bewtiful Empire of Guiana, ed. V. T. Harlow (London: The Argonaut Press, 1928), xv–cvi, xcvii.

  13. Ojer, La formación, 541.

  14. On British Guiana, see Burnett, Masters, 25–27, and, on the Raleigh Club, a precursor to the Royal Geographic Society, see David R. Stoddart, “The RGS and the ‘New Geography’: Changing Aims and Roles in Nineteenth-Century Science,” Geographical Journal 146, no. 3 (1980): 191–202.

  15. The Discoverie has been an important text for literary scholars, particularly for “new historicists.” I have drawn heavily on this work in this chapter, but understand my project as generating readings driven by anthropological rather than literary preoccupations. Among the recent literary discussions of Ralegh’s text that I have found most helpful are Mary B. Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Louis Montrose, “The Work of Gender in the Discourse of Discovery,” Representations 33 (1991): 1–41; and Mary C. Fuller, “Ralegh’s Fugitive Gold: Reference and Deferral in The Discoverie of Guiana,” Representations 33 (1991): 42–64. Neil L. Whitehead’s valuable explorations of The Discoverie represent a third way in which Ralegh’s rich text can be mined: ethnohistorically. See Neil L. Whitehead, “The Historical Anthropology of Text: The Interpretat
ion of Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana,” Current Anthropology 36, no. 1 (1995): 53–74, and, further elaborated, Whitehead, “Introduction.”

  16. Kenneth R. Andrews, Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War 1585–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964); idem, ed., English Privateering Voyages to the West Indies, 1588–1595 (Hakluyt Society Second Series No. 111. London: Hakluyt Society, 1956); Joyce Lorimer, “The English Contraband Tobacco Trade in Trinidad and Guiana 1590–1617,” in The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America 1480–1650, ed. Kenneth R. Andrews, Nicholas P. Canny, and Paul E. H. Hair (Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 1978), 124–50.

  17. Richard Hakluyt, A Particular Discourse Concerning the Greate Necessitie and Manifolde Commodyties That Are Like to Growe to this Realme of Englande by the Westerne Discoueries Lately Attempted, Written in the Yere 1584 by Richard Hakluyt of Oxforde Known as Discourse of Western Planting, ed. David B. Quinn and Alison M. Quinn (Hakluyt Society Extra Series No. 45. London: Hakluyt Society, 1993), 51. The Quinns, ibid., 161, take the “River of Saint Augustine” to be the Amazon.

  18. For descriptions of the Ralegh circle, see Hill, Intellectual Origins, 125–30, and Shannon Miller, Invested With Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).

  19. Lorimer, “Contraband Tobacco,” 126; idem, “The Location of Ralegh’s Guiana Gold Mine,” Terrae Incognitae 14 (1982): 77–95.

  20. For the drama, see Robert Lacey, Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1973), 369–82; and Edmund Gosse, Raleigh (New York: D. Appleton, 1886), 202ff. For a text of Ralegh’s final speech, see Vincent T. Harlow, ed., Ralegh’s Last Voyage (London: The Argonaut Press, 1932), 305–11. For a smart survey of Ralegh’s shifting reputation, see Robert Lawson-Peebles, “The Many Faces of Sir Walter Ralegh,” History Today 48, no. 3 (1998): 17–24.