In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  66. Francis Galton, “Reminiscences of Mr. H. W. Bates,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 14 (1892): 256. Moon, Henry Walter Bates, 63, suggests that Darwin was also a key player in this appointment, for which the only other candidate was Wallace.

  67. See William D. Paden, “Arthur O’Shaughnessy in the British Museum; Or, The Case of the Misplaced Fusees and the Reluctant Zoologist,” Victorian Studies 8 (1964): 7–30.

  68. See Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), for a discussion of the double function of the supplement as something that completes at the same time as it betrays inadequacy.

  69. Stevens, Zoologist 8 (1849): 2663–64.

  70. For example, in a note attached to one shipment to Stevens, Bates writes: “You can send me the names &c. of the species; say whether rare, the price of each specimen, and if I should send more.” Bates to Stevens, Santarém, January 8, 1852, Zoologist 10 (1852): 3449–50.

  71. E.g., Ritvo, “At the Edge of the Garden,” 371–75.

  72. On spatial practice, see Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991); and Donald Moore, “Subaltern Struggles and the Politics of Place: Remapping Resistance in Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands,” Cultural Anthropology 13 (1998): 344–75.

  73. Bates to Stevens, Santarém, January 8, 1852, Zoologist 10 (1852): 3450; emphasis in original.

  74. And by depending on Stevens’ efficiency: “I now see by the books sent, how little is known of Diurnes, &c. Besides the notes sent, I find I can add a great deal of information from memory; thus you see it is important that I should find my collection complete, with all the Nos. attached, when I return,” Bates to Stevens, Santarém, June 4, 1852, Zoologist 11 (1853): 3728.

  75. Cf. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, following Foucault.

  76. Bates, “Preface,” in Naturalist, viii. Mary Poovey has tracked the ambiguity of the statistical fact in the mid-nineteenth century: its deracinated facticity and its contradictory status as evidence, necessarily theorized. Bates’ practice can be read usefully in relation to this tension. An inductionist with an activist commitment to theory, he relies on the evidentiary fact, yet also finds himself and his Amazons caught up in the deductive logic and representational aesthetics of number. One way to understand this tension more specifically is in light of the long-term struggle between natural history (as aggregation of the deracinated particular) and natural philosophy (as systematic knowledge)—and as an indication of the persistence of the former. Poovey, The Modern Fact, especially 9, 315–17, and Chapter 4 above. My thanks to Bill Maurer for encouraging this line of inquiry.

  77. Clodd, “Memoir,” lxxxiv.

  78. Ibid., ix; emphasis in original.

  79. Which is not to ignore the domestic vernacular sources. See, for example, Gillian Feeley-Harnik, “‘Pigeons, If You Please’: An Avian Perspective on Darwin and The Origin of Species,” paper presented to the 99th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, San Francisco, Calif., November 15–19, 2000.

  80. Bates to Brown, Pará, June 17, 1848, Zoologist 8 (1849): 2838.

  81. Homi Bhabha has argued that we should look for the effects of colonial power in “the production of hybridization rather than the noisy command of colonialist authority or the silent repression of native traditions.” Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112; emphasis removed. Hybridization, a process of subjectivation and appropriation within a complexly overdetermined field of power, does not imply the joining of stable, unitary, or equivalent objects, nor the absence of domination. In this sense, Bhabha’s insight undergirds my understanding of Bates’ representational practice as a site in which non-Europeans participated in the metropolitan regionalization of the Amazon and intervened in the emergent logics of metropolitan science. However, this is not to privilege hybridity in the process of encounter, nor to displace attention from mimesis and the work of a clutch of simultaneous traveling practices, including dialogue, performance, parody, and articulation.

  82. Perhaps it is this preoccupying difficulty which forces Bates to confront Amazonian politics and devote extensive passages to discussions of the Cabanagem and other issues of regional history. However, we should also acknowledge his self-consciously wide-ranging intellectual interests. Bates’ encompassing strategy of investigation could be contrasted with the narrowly commercial and dehistoricizing narratives of his contemporaries traveling in Argentina. Kristine L. Jones, “Nineteenth Century British Travel Accounts of Argentina,” Ethnohistory 33 (1986): 195–211.

  83. Bates to Stevens, Aveyros, August 1, 1852, Zoologist 11 (1853): 3801–2.

  84. Bates to Stevens, Santarém, October 18, 1852, Zoologist 11 (1853): 3841.

  85. E.g., Alfred Russel Wallace, Travels, 237: “The temptation of being left alone for nearly a day, with a garafão of caxaça, was too strong for them. Of course I passed all over in silence, appearing to be perfectly ignorant of what had taken place, as, had I done otherwise, they would probably both have left me, after having received the greater part of their payment beforehand, and I should have been unable to proceed on my voyage.”

  86. Bates to Stevens, June 3, 1851, Zoologist 10 (1852): 3321; emphasis in original.

  87. Or so Spruce tells it. He certainly does seem to have provoked considerable hostility, including that of an elderly and rather Shakespearean nurse who—he reports—would shout at her near-to-death patient, that is, at Spruce: “Die, you English dog, that we might have a merry watch-night with your dollars!” Richard Spruce, Notes of a Botanist on the Amazon and Andes. Being Records of Travel on the Amazon and Its Tributaries, the Trombetas, Rio Negro, Uaupés, Casiquiari, Pacimoni, Huallaga, and Pastasa; as also to the Cataract of the Orinoco, along the Eastern Side of the Andes of Peru and Ecuador, and the Shore of the Pacific, During the Years 1849–1864, ed. A. R. Wallace (London: Macmillan, 1908), vol. 1, 487–93, 465.

  88. Thanks to David Cleary for clarifying this point. In the period from the disintegration of the Directorate in 1798 until the 1830s, conditions for populations of the Amazon interior were notable for their autarkic lack of regulation. See Cleary, “‘Lost Altogether’”; Pinheiro, “Do Mocambeiro a Cabano”; Pasquale di Paolo, Cabanagem: A revolução popular da Amazônia (Belém: CEJUP 1986).

  89. It “looks very like compulsion,” writes Edwards of forced labor, “but it is little more than jury duty” (A Voyage Up the River Amazon, 81).

  90. For one example, see Bates to Stevens, Pará, April 30, 1851, Zoologist 9 (1851): 3230. For the inhibiting effects of a quilombo of escaped slaves, see Bates, Naturalist, 202. Also David Sweet, “Native Resistance in Eighteenth Century Amazonia: The ‘Abominable Muras’ in War and Peace,” Radical History Review 53 (1992): 49–80.

  91. It is only fair to draw attention to Bates’ (rather pedagogical) humor, which could no doubt enliven an excursion. On one occasion, for example, he lined up himself and his companions holding hands, and, by repeatedly touching an electric eel with the tip of his hunting-knife, sent shocks passing through the five of them—to the general amusement of all (Bates, Naturalist, 324).

  92. Bates to Stevens, Pará, June 3, 1851, Zoologist 9 (1852): 3321.

  93. And raise issues that are now very familiar to anthropologists. See, as foundational, James Clifford’s question: “Who is actually the author of fieldnotes?” James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 45.

  94. See, in addition, Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origin of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73–90. Lisbet Koerner describes connections between Linnaeus and “indigenous knowledge” that were even more direct—forged by the taxonomist’s own philosophical commitment to a hybrid “new science” to be formed through his “cross-cultural
mediation between high and folk/tribal knowledges.” These arose through Linnaeus’ own traveling science as well as via his emphatic instructions to his students to prioritize the study of local practices (“Carl Linnaeus in His Time and Place,” in Jardine et al., Cultures of Natural History, 145–62, 152, 158–59).

  95. Albert Howard, Crop-Production in India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924); Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism,” Isis 84 (1993): 91–102.

  96. Pratt Imperial Eyes, 143; Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Essai sur la géographie des plantes; Accompagné d’un tableau physique des régions équinoxiales (London: Society for the Bibliography of Natural History, 1959 [1807]); John V. Murra, The Economic Organization of the Inca State (Greenwich, Conn.: JAI Press, 1979).

  97. See, for example, his near-astonished reaction on being told a chrysalis would soon become a butterfly (Bates, Naturalist, 371–72).

  98. As were Wallace and Spruce. As a paradigmatic example of the convergence of systematics and utilitarian ethnology in economic botany, see Alfred Russel Wallace, Palm-Trees of the Amazon and Their Uses (London: John van Voorst, 1853).

  99. Bate to Stevens, Santarém, March 27, 1854, Zoologist 13 (1855): 4550.

  100. As Bates’ comment below indicates, northern Europeans were most familiar with two Amazonian collecting expeditions at the time, both of which were large-scale, state-sponsored affairs. The first was that of the Bavarians Spix and Martius, who collected in the Amazon in 1819–20 and who had spent ten days at Ega in November–December 1819. The other, just preceding the visit of Bates and Wallace in 1848, was that of Comte Francis de Castelnau, a correspondent of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Castelnau traveled through Brazil and the Andes in 1843–47, before being appointed French consul to Brazil in 1848.

  101. See Grove, Green Imperialism, 88–90. This is by no means to imply a homogeneity of Amazonian ideas of nature and local knowledges.

  102. Bates, Naturalist, 288. I have suppressed a paragraph break.

  103. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism’s Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 7.

  104. Bates, Naturalist, 331.

  105. See the comments by Clements Markham and Francis Galton in Grant Duff, “Obituary,” 255, 256. In this methodological vein, Bates contributed to the Society’s important “Hints to Travellers” series with “Hints on the Collection of Objects of Natural History,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society 16 (1871): 67–78.

  106. Stafford, Scientist of Empire, 22.

  107. John Dickenson, “The Naturalist on the River Amazons and a Wider World: Reflections on the Centenary of Henry Walter Bates,” The Geographical Journal 158 (1992): 207–14.

  108. All preceding quotations in this section are from Allen, “Bates of the Amazons,” 802–3.

  109. Bates, [The Amazon Expeditions], vol. 1, 192.

  CHAPTER 6

  1. There are several compelling accounts of the chaotic occupation of this area and its extreme effects. Particularly gripping—possibly because it is written with a journalistic eye from the midst of the storm—is Sue Branford and Oriel Glock’s The Last Frontier: Fighting Over Land in the Amazon (London: Zed Books, 1985). See also Padre Ricardo Resende, Posseiros e padres do Araguaia: A justiça do lobo (Pétropolis, RJ: Vozes, 1986). Thanks to Michael Reynolds for this reference. Adrian Cowell’s film Killing for Land (1990) graphically documents some of the events of the late 1980s in the general locale in which this chapter is set.

  2. On the events at Serra Pelada to which I refer here, see Susanna B. Hecht and Alexander Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers and Defenders of the Amazon (London: Penguin, 1989); and Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). For a broader and more textured analysis of the general trajectory from “informal” to state-captured mining, see David Cleary, Anatomy of the Amazon Gold Rush (London: Macmillan, 1990).

  3. Michael J. Reynolds, “When Good Intentions Go Up in Smoke: Environmental Politics in the Brazilian Amazon,” paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, Chicago, August 5, 2000.

  4. Indeed, such camps are popularly known as fofocas, a colloquial Brazilian Portuguese word for gossip.

  5. For an excellent summary of the enduring debates over Turner’s “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), see David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 98–118.

  6. Although it almost goes without saying that in Brazilian popular and elite discourse the Amazon frontier is interpellated in a radically different set of narratives—most potently, in a history of nation-building and national security that celebrates the adventures of the pioneering bandeirantes (lit. flag-bearers). Juscelino Kubitschek, the president who initiated post–World War II opening of the region, made the connection explicitly in a 1960 election slogan: “Juscelino: O grande bandeirante do século” (“Juscelino: the century’s great bandeirante”).

  7. For thoroughgoing critiques of the deployment of the frontier metaphor in relation to Amazonia, see Stephen G. Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, Unequal Exchange and the Failure of the Modern State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); and 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.

  8. On the characteristic structure of the environmental declension narrative, see William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History and Narrative,” Journal of American History, 78, no. 4 (1992): 1347–76.

  9. For an excellent mapping of the divergent lineages in Amazonianist anthropology, see Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Images of Nature and Society in Amazonian Ethnology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 25 (1996): 179–200.

  10. For a useful discussion, see J. Peter Brosius, “Endangered Forest, Endangered People: Environmentalist Representations of Indigenous Knowledge,” Human Ecology 25, no. 1 (1997): 47–69. Also interesting for its attention to a moment of contradiction is Patricia Pierce Erikson’s “A-Whaling We Will Go: Encounters of Knowledge and Memory at the Makah Cultural Research Center,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 4 (1999): 556–83.

  11. Which have, quite logically, become the objects of critique. On indigenous strategic essentialisms, see, for example, Beth A. Conklin, “Body Paint, Feathers, and VCRs: Aesthetics and Authenticity in Amazonian Activism,” American Ethnologist 24, no. 4 (1997): 711–37.

  12. Here I am wondering how Benedict Anderson’s suggestive idea might look from a traveling metropolitan standpoint. See The Specter of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998).

  13. The phrase in this context is from Daniel H. Janzen, “The Future of Tropical Ecology,” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 17 (1986): 305–24. Many thanks to Jimmy Grogan for this citation.

  14. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993); Saba Mahmood, “Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections on the Egyptian Islamic Revival,” Cultural Anthropology 16, no. 2 (2001): 202–36; and, for a critical intervention on the question of “experience,” Joan W. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, no. 4 (1991): 773–97. And note also Steven Gregory’s critical supplement: “What makes the hegemonic process effective is less its ‘taken for grantedness’ … than its capacity as an ensemble of political relations and practices to command the social processes through which meanings are publicly articulated, communicated, and invested with contextual authority and social legitimacy” (Black Corona: Race and the Politics of Place in an Urban Community [Princeton: Princeto
n University Press, 1998], 246).

  15. For the prior studies, see R. E. Gullison, S. N. Panfil, J. J. Strouse, and S. P. Hubbell, “Ecology and Management of Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla King) in the Chimanes Forest, Beni, Bolivia,” Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society 122 (1996): 9–34; and Laura K. Snook, Stand Dynamics of Mahogany (Swietenia macrophylla King) and Associated Species After Fire and Hurricane in the Tropical Forests of the Yucatán Peninsula (unpbd. doctoral dissertation, Yale School of Forestry, 1993).

  16. On this, see the pioneering work of Susanna Hecht, particularly “Deforestation in the Amazon Basin: Magnitude, Dynamics, and Soil Resource Effects,” Studies in Third World Societies 13 (1981): 61–110; and idem, “Environment, Development and Politics: Capital Accumulation and the Livestock Sector in Eastern Amazonia,” World Development 13, no. 6 (1985): 663–84.

  17. Useful accounts here are Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, eds., Frontier Expansion in Amazonia (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1984); idem, Contested Frontiers; John O. Browder, “Lumber Production and Economic Development in the Brazilian Amazon: Regional Trends and a Case Study,” Journal of World Forest Resource Management 4 (1989): 1–19; and Hecht, “Environment, Development, and Politics.”

  18. There are also a number of regional plantation projects, of varying sophistication, commitment, and success.

  19. On the Kayapó’s complicated relationship to timber money, see Reynolds, “Good Intentions”; 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. Also of importance for its attention to social history is William H. Fisher, “Native Amazonians and the Making of the Amazon Wilderness: From Discourse of Riches and Sloth to Underdevelopment,” in Creating the Countryside: The Politics of Rural and Environmental Discourse, ed. E. Melanie DuPuis and Peter Vandergeest (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 166–203.