In Amazonia (6 page)

I found guidance in Vicente Chermont de Miranda's
Glossário Paraense
, a slim dictionary of rural Amazonian usages that I spotted (in a moment of obsessive but serendipitous distraction) in a stall selling used books at a lively open-air party during the annual Festas Juninhas in Belém.
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Chermont de Miranda compiled his glossary in 1904, the same year W. H. Hudson's best-selling fable
Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest
went on sale in London. Hudson deploys the standard device of the enchanted faery glen to evoke the types of magical forest recesses created by the diggers of the varadores, and he employs it without restraint, conjuring a tropical idyll in the midst of the forest:

I spent several hours in this wild paradise, which was so much more delightful than the extensive gloomier forests I had so
often penetrated in Guayana: for here, if the trees did not attain to such majestic proportions, the variety of vegetable forms was even greater; as far as I went it was nowhere dark under the trees, and the number of lovely parasites everywhere illustrated the kindly influence of light and air. Even where the trees were largest the sunshine penetrated, subdued by the foliage to exquisite greenish-golden tints, filling the wide lower spaces with tender half-lights, and faint blue-and-grey shadows. Lying on my back and gazing up, I felt reluctant to rise and renew my ramble. For what a roof was that above my head!
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Chermont de Miranda's investments were expressed rather differently. I like to think of the contrast between his classificatory logic and Hudson's extravagant Romanticism not as one between a modern scientific sensibility and something now archaic, but rather as a measure of the awkward but not unhappy coexistence of disparate and contradictory ways of knowing Amazonian nature. Very often, for instance, and without having to look too hard, we find the pantheistic in the scientistic. But Chermont de Miranda's glossary is interesting in its own right. Surprisingly, despite immediate appearances, his book leads us to think about everyday life on these Amazonian rivers.

When he returned from his studies in Lisbon to sell his parents' loss-making sugar mill on the Rio Capim, not far from Igarapé-Miri in eastern Pará, Vicente Chermont de Miranda made a highly satisfactory marriage into the Dutch upper class, and entered Paraense society enviably situated, a scientist-politician, wanting neither money nor cultural capital. He would eventually complete a series of studies on the natural history of nearby Marajó Island, but his particular triumph was the
Glossário Paraense
. In it he provides comprehensive definitions for most of the watery terms I listed above, and he includes others:
arroio, repiquete, baixas
, and
perau
. As a luminary of the Liberal Party, Chermont de Miranda would have had little sympathy for his socialist contemporary Baptista de Moura, the engineer-poet who had passed through the canal at Igarapé-Miri less than ten years before. Somehow, though, in his writing, political elitism does not prevent him from combining pedantic hauteur with a less expected dialogic sensitivity, frequently clarifying terms by including examples of their usage in local speech. He is rigorous too. Here is his discussion of rego, which I earlier rashly translated as “creek”:

REGO
, n.m.—Gullies, fed by rain water, start as shallow streams; while they are snaking their way through the savanna [
campo
], exposed to the atmosphere, they dry up, becoming narrower and more shallow, and take the name
regos
. Where they are shaded by trees at the margins, they are known as
igarapés
. During the severe dry season the shallow streams and
regos
dry up, leaving only the
igarapés
in their upper reaches, receiving river water at full tide, becoming dry at low tide. On the savannas of Marajó, perennial water does not exist, as has been erroneously reported by Professor Orville Derby.
A Ilha de Marajó, by Professor Orville Derby, Boletim do Museu Goeldi, vol. II, p. 170
.
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Clearly, Chermont de Miranda can find plenty to say about streams. His definition of igarapé, which focuses mostly on questions of etymology, takes up a full page. And there is no doubt that his text was unique in its day, a labor of dedication and connection, still fascinating for those of us trying to come to grips with vocabulary that rarely find its way into standard Portuguese dictionaries.
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Moreover, the
Glossário Paraense
embodies an affection and regard for ribeirinho culture, a persistent current in urban Amazonia but one that is often, although not here, sentimentalized, and that is neither universal nor, necessarily, unambiguous.

Chermont de Miranda sent me to Igarapé Guariba with an anticipatory sense of the complexity of native cognitive categories. However, in my attempts to fix these categories, to tie words to definitions and definitions to concrete examples, I rapidly found myself at sea on this expanding river. The terms existed in popular usage, and I had no trouble identifying a declamatory context, much as had Chermont de Miranda himself. But there was nothing fixed about that context, and words refused to be tied down. It was not only that different people used the same word with different meanings; it was more that these supposedly highly specific terms seemed largely interchangeable.

“Mupéua” is a case in point. This was a word that became important to me, partly because it was unusual (Chermont de Miranda does not list it), but more because, for some people, it signified the work of humans. A friend, a middle-school teacher, who was transcribing interview tapes for me in Macapá, knit her brow when she heard this strange word and sought out her boyfriend's father, a man who had
spent most of his life living and working on rural Marajó. The definition he gave her was exact and, at the same time, intriguing: “A small, shallow river, a streamlet (riacho), opened by manual labor in upland forest” (“aberto pelo mão do homen em terra firme”). Yet, this clarification threw no new light on the portion of the tape that had confused her, a conversation between two elderly men in Igarapé Guariba:

Seu Benedito
: When we arrived here, what was it like … it was narrow.

João Preto
: It was a mupéua.

Seu Benedito
: There was a …

João Preto
: It was a mupéua.

A few days later I asked Seu Benedito what a mupéua was. “Just a rego,” he said, without much interest, “a little furo.”

I turned to the classics. Valentin Vološinov's
Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
, a revolutionary revision of linguistic theory written in the 1920s, is marked by both precision and creativity. VoloÅ¡inov (most likely the great Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin writing under a politically expedient pseudonym) reconfigures Saussure's linguistics by considering what happens to the structural formalities of language when it is thrown around in the rough-and-tumble of social speech. For VoloÅ¡inov, “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact,” he tells us, “there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts for its usage.” While also possessing an intrinsic unity, a word has what he calls “polysemanticity.”
⁴⁰
Resolving this paradox is a task for which Saussure, with his stiff and unconvincing models of social interaction, is ill-equipped. Vološinov's solution is characteristically elegant:

Actually, any real utterance, in one way or another or to one degree or another, makes a statement of agreement with or a negation of something. Contexts do not stand side by side in a row, as if unaware of one another, but are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conflict.
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Vološinov gives us a theory of language-in-motion, a theory in which the very act of plucking a word from its relational moment in time and space to extract a general definition is both utopian and
wrongheaded. Which is not to say that the
Glossário
is useless, only that the definitions won't work unless some serious thought is given to the context in which the words are being used and to the relationship of the speakers to each other and to their broader surroundings.

A rego and an igarapé, an igarapé and a furo, a riacho and a canal. At times these become equivalent pairs. At others, their distinct meanings are contextually apparent, and, like a glossary, we can allocate and codify them as if they represented the substance of an indigenous knowledge.
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But such definitions will be shattered in speech, as when a long-suffering interlocutor finally lost patience: “Look, this is the Amazon. You know, we're very easygoing about this kind of thing; we're very flexible. Sometimes it's a furo, sometimes it's an atalho. That's the way it is.”

Chermont de Miranda does not include varador in his glossary. But he does have an entry for the closely related
varadouro
.
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This he defines as a shortcut across the várzea—ironically enough, in his text, both a “canal” and an “atalho.” Indeed, atalho, which can be any kind of shortcut, by water, road, boat, or foot, is a word that people in the Arapiuns often use when pressed to redefine varador. Varador is related to the feminine noun,
vara
, signifying the long pole used to propel canoes through muddy or swampy passages, or to guide river launches in or out of moorings. “Vara” also leads to the transitive verb
varar
, which means to travel through or into, either with or without the aid of a vara, but which, in my understanding, connotes a certain degree of difficulty, the way in English you might say “we made it home.” However, while varar accurately expresses the function of the Arapiuns varadores as places through which a person travels, it glosses their heterogeneity.

The same elderly man who directed us to the varador on the Rio Aruá described a large number of such passages along the length of that river. Several dry up in summer when the water level in the river drops, forcing people to take the long route. In these months, however, there is less river traffic anyway, as people use the estradas of the terra firme to move between their houses and fields.

A couple of hours downstream from here, near a small Protestant community on the Rio Arapiuns called Monte Sião (Mount Zion), there is a broad zone of what Pires and Prance call igapó, flooded blackwater forest that grows up from the muddy depths. Here, an energetic woman we met described interventions at the mouth of a swampy stream called
Igarapé Nazário. It made a useful route to a terra preta colony, she explained, and was kept open by chopping with machetes as you guided your canoe through the grasses, vines, and sprouting aquatic plants, easing past the branches and fallen trunks that rose, spectral, piercing the dark, reflective surface of the river.

Many of the dry season walking and oxcart trails in the Arapiuns basin double as canoe routes in winter, and there are some that have a brittle feel underfoot where the water has retreated, leaving a ghostly scum on the leaves. Other channels are small natural openings that local people work at until they become viable waterways. One example, the Varador Comprido (Long Varador), a channel wide and deep enough to pass through in a sizable boat, has stretches of a vicious, knife-like sedge called
tiririca
that closes over and has to be repeatedly cut back by teams of men and boys.

People showed me channels in the Arapiuns that they had manipulated to facilitate transport and open up areas for fishing and perhaps hunting. Although modest on an individual scale, the streams as a whole appeared to make a significant contribution to people's capacity to get by in this relatively resource-poor environment. Such practices, and, in this case, the associated use of terra preta, undermine the attempts of scholars to produce causative models in which it is nature, even if in the last instance, that determines culture and political economy. This might seem rather obvious, but I offer it in response to those ecologically derived frameworks that use such concepts as “carrying capacity” to characterize the relationship between people and their landscapes and which seem often to lead into non-specific and authoritarian arguments about population limits and control, arguments that have been profoundly influential in recent debates on globalization and international development.
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All of the anthropogenic channels in the Arapiuns were called varadores, but not all varadores had been manipulated. In this sense, the term “varador” was analogous to canal, atalho, and mupéua, words that may signify anthropogenesis but that by their ambivalence also work to hide the human dimensions of the fluvial landscape. For convenience, and as an appreciative gesture to Vicente Chermont de Miranda, etymologist and dialogician, I divide the Arapiuns channels into two broad categories according to geomorphological context and type of intervention:
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1. Passages dug with hoes, scythes, and machetes that shorten routes
along upland streams and rivers. These are often high-water routes only and may not exist in summer when travelers would have to follow the meander.

2. Routes cut through above-ground igapó vegetation that shorten travel distance for watercraft of various types and that allow people to enter an area to fish or to reach a house or settlement. These may be seasonal routes through the floodplain that serve as dry trails in summer and canoe paths in winter. They are maintained by people with machetes as they pass through.

T
HE
R
IO
N
EGRO

Sitting on the edge of the sandy sidewalk in Alter do Chão one perfect evening in June 1996, waiting for the bus to Santarém and suffused with that warm sense of well-being that comes so easily from a day spent on the beach and in the water, I started talking to Vitor. In 1853, Henry Walter Bates, fighting losing battles against bats, cockroaches, fire ants, and spiders, called Alter do Chão “one of the most wretched, starved, ruinous villages that could be found on the earth.”
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But in 1995,
Veja
, the leading weekly Brazilian news magazine, featured this tiny town, an hour by road from Santarém, as a hideaway of outstanding beauty, bathed by the crystal waters of the mighty Tapajós, an essential destination despite the long flight from Rio or São Paulo. In summer, when the tides drop to expose a chain of sparkling white sandbars, jeweled stepping-stones to the green hill with its spectacular views over the confluence of the Tapajós, Amazon, and Arapiuns rivers, it's easy to share the travel writer's enthusiasm.