In Amazonia (7 page)

Vitor was tall, affable, and disarmingly good-looking in an outdoorsy way. Like me, he was waiting for the bus back to the city. He asked what I was doing in the Amazon, what my research was about, and then made that familiar metamorphosis from a chance acquaintance to what social scientists, like detectives, call an “informant,” tacitly acknowledging the moral ambiguity of the trade in information: “So they cut channels and the land changes. So what? Everyone does that. Those things are everywhere. It's hardly a big deal.”

Vitor worked at the reception desk of a fancy hotel in Manaus, but previously, it turned out, he had been an eco-tourist guide on the Rio Negro, far upstream from Alter do Chão. He was full of engaging anecdotes
about irascible foreigners stranded overnight on sandbanks and getting closer to tropical nature than they might have wanted. His stories reminded me that in the climax to
The Clio
, L. H. Myers had grounded the cruise ship just below Óbidos and kept his world-weary aristocrats and scheming
arrivistes
helplessly trapped as Latin American revolution swirled around and the forest inexorably engulfed them.
⁴⁷
And, later, thinking back, I remembered Manoel, working on a small boat that sat helpless at anchor for twelve hours in midstream on the Rio Arapiuns with a broken piston. Manoel, who had sought out Michael and myself on deck especially to say: “So I guess this is your Amazon adventure,
né?
”

Vitor's job had involved taking tourists out of Manaus in diesel-powered covered launches and transferring them to large canoes driven by outboard motors. From this more mobile but less sturdy transport, they could view wildlife and vegetation up close in the narrow igarapés off the Rio Negro. He had enjoyed this active life more than the hotel work to which he was confined when we met, and he was puzzled as to why I was wasting time researching something as commonplace as stream-making in the Amazon. “All the igarapés up there are manmade,” he explained with what I took to be hyperbole. “People dig them out to get to their fields or to make shortcuts, to cut out a bend in the river or something. They cut them right through the high forest. You know who did it by the name: Igarapé Maria, Igarapé Joaquim…. It's the name of the person who cut it.”

Vitor's comments were casual and imprecise, a weak form of data. But they signaled a structure of feeling and added to an accretive order of evidence, a situated, expanding facticity. It was the sense of anticlimax in Vitor's narrative, his easy affirmation of intimacy with the fluvial landscape—the assertion that
everybody
knows about this stuff—that gave his comments such power.

It is partly because of conversations like these that I have come to see labor in every Amazon stream. Now, when I look at the landscape, I imagine histories of creativity. When I travel along rivers, I picture the multiple agencies of human and non-human actors. When I hear talk of nature, the words have a specific resonance, a lived referentiality. But I also remember John Berger's warning, double-edged now: “Landscapes can be deceptive.”
⁴⁸

It is the impression of stasis that beguiles. They may look secure, but landscapes are always in motion, always in process. In Igarapé Guariba,
the energy of the non-human is so excessive that it forces recognition. The river will not allow you to ignore it. The land shifts of its own accord. The banks crumble, the fields flood, the orchards float off to the horizon. This is not saying anything new about Amazonia. On the contrary, discourse on the region has so strongly claimed the dominance of nature and the correlative subjection of people that statements of this type can be perilous. Because of this, they have to be situated in that other form of fluvial practice, the genealogical, deep in the evidentiary, the space where facts get made out of history, theory, and strategy.
⁴⁹

Deeply informed by Malthusian notions of natural limits and in dialogue with emergent Spencerian ideas of social progress through struggle, mid-nineteenth-century commentary on what was becoming “the tropics” often relied on a racialized variant of environmental determinism. As we will see in
Chapter 5
, Victorian travelers found the super-fecundity of Amazonian nature nurturing a population corrupted by the indolence of daily life in a land of such potential that the failure of productivity was doubly offensive. By the time of Julian Steward's massive
Handbook of South American Indians
(1946–50), this assessment had undergone a stark reversal—yet without displacing the encompassing episteme. Evolutionary models still underwrote social theory and continued to be tied to an environmental causality.
⁵⁰
The absence of progress was still deeply troubling. Nature and race were again the principal culprits. But the motor was now negative circumscription: it was the overwhelming poverty of the natural environment that determined social life. Human agency was again radically restricted in a region that, as Steward put it, “imposed many serious difficulties on all activities.”
⁵¹

Steward divided South America into four “culture areas,” binding people and place through the reifications of material culture.
⁵²
This was a model underwritten by eighteenth-century theories of race and culture, particularly those of Kant and Herder, and funneled through Friedrich Ratzel's anthropogeography and its North American expression in the work of Ellen Churchill Semple.
⁵³
It relied on “cultural adaptation,” a key category that was to exert a long-term and baleful influence on subsequent anthropological work in the Amazon. Steward animated research on the region—much of it directly via his students at Columbia University and later at the University of Illinois. Northern South America became a favored location for the elaboration of “cultural ecology,” and the 1960s and 1970s saw the focusing of considerable
energy around a single problematic: What were the environmental limiting factors that produced such restricted cultural development and inchoate forms of social organization in the region?
⁵⁴

This narrow preoccupation with the constraints of given biophysical conditions provoked some exasperatingly protracted debates in the North American Amazonianist literature—most famously that concerned with the limitation on “social development” enforced by a supposed lack of protein available to native populations.
⁵⁵
It also led directly to the work of Betty Meggers, a research associate in South American archaeology at the Smithsonian, who elegantly glossed the adaptationist position that was to drive her own investigations for almost half a century: “The level to which a culture can develop,” she declared, “is dependent upon the agricultural potentiality of the environment it occupies.”
⁵⁶
Invoking Steward—but more suggestive of the later cultural materialism of Marvin Harris
⁵⁷
—Meggers allocated the tropical forest environment to the “Type 2 culture area … [a region] of limited agricultural potential,” suitable only for swidden agriculture, and, accordingly, restricting society to the “tribal level of organization.”
⁵⁸
Agricultural potential was reducible to soil fertility, itself understood as a fixed set of conditions. Not only was the environment dominant and determining, but its cultural effects were predictable.

Meggers offered a stripped-down version of cultural ecology. In her hands, Steward's evolutionism became resolutely unilinear and his willingness to countenance flexibility between natural constraint and sociocultural organization was largely discarded. In other respects, though, Meggers was faithful. With her husband Clifford Evans, a Smithsonian curator, she conducted extensive research in the Amazon estuary at habitation mound-sites of the Marajoara settlement phase.
⁵⁹
In her interpretation of these data she reiterated the diffusionist position of the
Handbook
. Without the ecological conditions for transformative technology to develop endogenously through intensification, she argued, evidence of more complex culture within the tropical forest zone could only be explained as intrusion from the Andean “hearth.”
⁶⁰
Indeed, any more “advanced” group—such as the people of the Marajoara phase—unfortunate enough to find themselves within such an impoverished environment were doomed to decline.
⁶¹

At the time Meggers was publishing her most widely read work, the monograph
Amazonia: Man and Nature in a Counterfeit Paradise
(1971), researchers were documenting pre-Columbian initiatives that included
monumental irrigation earthworks, raised fields, and long-distance trading networks, indigenous projects that looked considerably more like transformative labor than simple adaptation.
⁶²
Scholarship of this type and its successor work of the 1980s pointed to a decisive shift toward environmental possibilism, a looser, more agnostic form of causation. Indeed, by the 1980s a significant reconfiguration of Amazonianist cultural ecology was under way, most obviously in the highly influential work of William Balée, William Denevan, Darrell Posey, and Anna Roosevelt.
⁶³
Through paying close attention to biotic and geomorphological variation, dynamics, and plasticity, and to the associated ecological knowledges of local residents, these scholars began to imagine a radically distinct account of regional history. Roosevelt, for example, constructed a powerful and restitutive narrative of pre-colonial Amazonia around ethnohistorical readings of the early chronicles of European exploration and her own excavations of urban scale sites on the lower and middle Amazon, settlements that radically transgressed the presumed limits of the Stewardian tropical forest culture area.
⁶⁴

Roosevelt has argued strongly against “ethnographic projection,” the reading of historical Amazonian social relations from the modern context.
⁶⁵
Instead, she has reinserted the demographic collapse that accompanied colonial encounter, presenting data to support the eyewitness descriptions of dense settlements lining the rivers in the sixteenth century. Similarly, she and her collaborators have established a far deeper temporal frame than had previously been allowed, their dating of 11,000-year-old rock paintings and other material from a cave near Monte Alegre suggesting an entirely new sequence for the occupation of the Americas as a whole and challenging the Clovis hypothesis with evidence of a parallel and distinctive human presence in Amazonia by the late Pleistocene.
⁶⁶

Other scholars have emphasized the ability of contemporary and historical Amazonian populations actively to produce new environments at a variety of scales. Posey's careful documentation of the Kayapó forest islands—species-rich “gardens” that the Kayapó assemble by foraging over a vast territory—was groundbreaking in this regard.
⁶⁷
And, through attention to species composition and density, as well as to the presence of terra preta, Balée has argued convincingly for the “biocultural” origins of at least 12 percent of the region's contemporary landscape and for the continuing significance of such sites to forest and savanna populations.
⁶⁸

Long before these studies, cultural ecologists, including Meggers and Evans, had encountered similar manipulations. Even in the
Handbook
, Alfred Métraux had documented interfluvial anthropogenic channels connecting Mojo villages in the Bolivian Amazon.
⁶⁹
Yet, these scholars provided little interpretative space for the analysis of their finds. Such phenomena were either downplayed, ignored, or, where too significant to disregard, attributed to Andean or Mesoamerican diffusion. The explicit emphasis in the work of Balée and others on the dynamic co-production of people and landscape thus represents a significant shift away from the hegemony of determinism and offers the basis for an overdue rethinking of the orthodoxy of adaptation. It presumes a strong notion of human agency, yet continues to emphasize the materiality of the biophysical, the agency of the non-human. It foregrounds history, while moving us toward the practices of intimacy that produce and sustain everyday life, those differentiated and contingent socialities that Laura Rival—writing out of this emergent literature—has glossed as the “social relationships” that bind “human groups and living organisms.”
⁷⁰
It is, as Mao insisted, all about social practice: practices of meaning, production, representation, and politics. The practices of landscape-makers and the practices of researchers.

A
MAPÁ

The stories proliferate. Nowadays, so far from Alter do Chão, I know of these channels throughout the Amazon, and friends make me into an archive, sending messages about varadores, canais, and atalhos they have followed from Maranhão all the way to Acre.

Once alive to the textures of fluvial intervention the signs are everywhere. In Amapá, I find them at every turn. One time, on the Rio Pedreira, the deep, dark river from which Indians hauled stone to build the fort at Macapá in the mid-eighteenth century, I stopped at a ranch house that sits at the mouth of an igarapé on a grassy plain of cattle pasture and spoke to a guarded woman who took me by surprise, assuming that I wanted a channel like hers. “You couldn't do it these days,” she confided, arms folded across her chest. “You could never afford to pay what these peasants want.” But why had she and her husband invested so much in digging out this broad stream that now
links up with the next river, 2 miles away? “Because we wanted an igarapé and there wasn't one.” And then, speaking as one who knew her catfish: “Now we can catch
filhote
.”

Time and again, these managed waters percolate in chance conversation, as on that tense day I ferried poor crazy Lene with her three crosses of malaria to the clinic at Santo Antonio, pale, unnaturally still, and, we feared, near death in the bottom of the boat. As I squatted outside in the shadeless sun, the elderly bar owner from across the clearing offered me lunch and talked in a soothing monologue about his capital plan for the business and its centerpiece, a
viveiro
, a fish-trap for raising fish and river-turtles, 15 yards wide and 150 yards long, dug out mechanically in an extended “L” parallel to the river. Or again: discussing buffalo over dinner one evening with a friend whose father owned a ranch on Ilha Caviana, I heard for the first time that years before he had worked with his brothers to dig a mile-long channel to drain winter pasture: “It rots the animals' hooves to stand too long in the flood,” he explained between mouthfuls of barbecue.
⁷¹