In Amazonia (26 page)

I took this photo at Ana's
sítio
—her house and farm—a three-room, palm-thatched, adobe house off a red-dirt road in the south of Pará.

At the front gate, Ana has hung a sign, an announcement, an affirmation, and—although you need to know her a little to realize this—a challenge. In big, handwritten lettering, it reads:
SONHO MEU
(My Dream). Ana's sítio glows with the beauty of the cared-for, and the photo shows a field of healthy pineapple under a grove of shiny
babassu
palms that recede into the distance. But scanning right to left, the eye suddenly catches something in the foreground, something jarring that takes a moment to decipher: a bleeding heart, a rock, shoved hard into the sheared-off stump of a tree and drenched in red paint. The Bleeding Heart of Ana Almeida da Silva, beauty and pain in the dreamlife of ecology.

M
ATERIALITIES OF THE
O
BVIOUS

The southeast quadrant of the giant state of Pará lives on in infamy. Though the long days and nights of land-driven violence are largely
passed, the towns of the interior south of Belém still resonate in regional consciousness like names recited at a graveside.
¹
Mention to cosmopolitans in the capital that you are heading down to Redenção or to the logging citadel of Paragominas, and conversation at once shifts to anecdotes of intimidation and emigration.

On the long bus ride south through landscapes of dried-out, rolling pasture, I scan a provincial newspaper filled with lurid stories of the recent discovery of cocaine processing labs deep in the jungle, ironies of a chimeric modernization. This is the unfulfilled promise of transition from predatory extraction to productive capitalism, ambiguously signaled by the chaotic state capture of the informal mining sector, betrayed by the transnational economy of drugs and clandestine slave labor camps that swept in to fill the gap.
²
Drugs in the Amazon provide the occasion for a national moral panic, anxiety about U.S. regional ambition, and opportunities for state arbitrariness, militarization, and the late-night road blocks and baggage searches that repeatedly interrupt highway travel. In popular discourse, though, drugs just add surplus to the excess of
o sul do Pará
, the south of Pará, where the most familiar folk figure is the hired gun, the
pistoleiro
.

This is a world that lends itself too easily to invocations of the frontier. In the barely thirty years since Redenção was founded by
ranchers, loggers, and colonists, it has come to mark not only the boundary of forest and savanna, but a coterminous border of social difference.
³
Researchers and journalists have followed horse-riding cowboys tending herds of zebu cattle; they have watched mining camps spring up on no more than the whisper of a gold strike;
⁴
they have seen roads of uncertain destination head off into forbidding terrain; they have walked dusty streets in the shadow of prostitutes, gunmen, and painted Indians; they have recognized the law in a posse; and they have
known
they were in the Wild Wild West.

One hundred years later and a few thousand miles south, this is Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier stripped of manifest destiny.
⁵
For many of today's commentators, both within and outside Brazil, the naturalized trope of the Amazon frontier signifies a negative dialectic, the violation of noble savage and pristine nature by a degenerate, downwardly spiraling Civilization.
⁶
That the frontier—implying linear spatialities, discrete social systems, and the inevitability of incorporation—is a rather unhelpful metaphor with which to make sense of contemporary regional complexities is perhaps beside the point.
⁷
More important is its assumption of an irresistible historical trajectory: a tragic narrative of resolutely non-Messianic time that traces the inexorable corruption of Edenic nature and its indigenous stewards.
⁸

The absoluteness of the frontier metaphor also contains an appeal to a politics of protection, one liberal response to Turnerian triumphalism. Anthropologists of the region, still struggling with the legacies of Julian Steward and Claude Lévi-Strauss, have long been familiar with this type of premature nostalgia and its expression in the idiom of salvage.
⁹
Such notions may be out of fashion in a discipline that now favors processual and open-ended reworkings of the culture concept, but they have emerged reinvigorated in popular discourse preoccupied with the metanarratives of globalization. Natural scientists, for their part, have been largely untroubled by the naturalization of culture as endangered and the associated conflation of environmental and social agendas that continues to drive much green activism.
¹⁰
Instead, they have effectively participated in the figuring of the social upheaval in Amazonia since the 1960s as an environmental crisis, one that enables their casting as both archivists of a disappearing world and its defenders, successfully fomenting a public rhetoric that generates political urgency around their work. In contrast, anthropologists, floundering in the attempt to communicate
broadly a nuanced notion of culture, have been disabled by the sheer obviousness of the notions we seek to displace.
¹¹

The south of Pará is branded with the emphatic materiality of the obvious. For one thing, it is entirely too obvious that this is a frontier, and it is similarly obvious that there is urgent salvage work to be undertaken here. “You know,” a longtime resident informed me helpfully, “this
used
to be part of Amazonia.” And, for environmentalists, the area offers a chilling glimpse of the hellfire already licking at the edges of what is left of the region.

Watching the unexpectedly domesticated landscapes slide by the spattered window of the overnight bus, I felt the view haunted by specters of comparison: the neatly whitewashed ranch houses, the low exposed hills, the empowering aesthetic of prospect enabled by the clear-cut, all was immediately reminiscent of the colonial-era paintings of coffee estates hanging in the Museu de Belas Artes in Rio de Janeiro.
¹²
This is an aspirational landscape, a landscape that people I know in Amapá, way up on the other side of the Amazon River, would enthusiastically call
linda
and
limpa
and
bonitinha, né
? breathing deeply their relief from the claustrophobic indeterminacies of the forest gloom. Yet, this must also be an ugly landscape, a despoiled landscape of the not-there—a landscape produced through an overdetermining narrative that my fieldnotes confirm: massively cleared and charred, choked with thorny scrub and sprouting babassu palms, interrupted here and there by statuesque forest remnants, exuberant yellow-flowered
ipê
and full-crowned Brazil nut trees, pitiful memorials, living dead.
¹³

We know the obvious as a form of Gramscian common sense, discursive practice that reiteratively constitutes subjectivity.
¹⁴
If the traveling social scientist, trained to resist the allures of environmentalist dreamworlds, is disoriented by the specter of an absent forest long gone, how much more visceral must be this encounter for Amazonianist ecologists, heirs to that rich lineage of natural historical thinking that produces this region as the heritage site of planetary biodiversity?

F
AZENDINHA

Paul had driven the white Ford pickup in from Fazendinha and was waiting at the bus station as promised. Trained in the same graduate
school, we had known each other for years but crossed paths with less frequency as our interests diverged, and I had found my way through the social sciences and he had realized that the roomiest space for a modern-day naturalist was under the sign of ecology.

It was working in the Amazon that drew us together. This present reunion rehearsed another, several years earlier, when Paul, less of a novice in Pará than myself, had met my plane from New York at the airport in Belém and helped with my critical initial negotiation of that disarming city. Over long beers in a backstreet bar, he mapped for me the politics of the local conservation community, and we commiserated with each other in what I now know to be standard pandisciplinary rituals around fieldwork anxiety.

It turned out that Paul and I were inspired by similar, and perhaps peculiarly Amazonian, paradoxes. We had both stumbled across something we felt to be of tremendous importance, yet of which almost nothing was known in the scholarly worlds in which we moved. I had encountered the anthropogenic streams of Igarapé Guariba. Paul was becoming involved with bigleaf mahogany (
Swietenia macrophylla
), the most valuable tropical timber species in the world, the most rapidly disappearing, and, in relation to its considerable socioeconomic significance, a tree still poorly known in its habitat.
¹⁵
The life history of Amazonian mahogany, he told me, was almost unknown because, once located, trees were never left standing long enough to study. Soon after, in a moment of prescient symmetry, we found ourselves at the busy bus station, gesturing good-byes as he embarked on his first exploratory trip to the south.

As you might expect, mahogany of any significant size is hard to come by in the south of Pará these days. And, even though ranching and the massive state support given to corporate colonization is widely acknowledged to have provided the dynamic for much forest conversion in the 1970s and 1980s, relatively little attention has been paid to the tight political, economic, and personal connections that facilitated the synergistic collaboration of cattle and timber money.
¹⁶
Ranchers did not just slash and burn. They worked closely with loggers who sent in their spotters to locate mahogany—its distinctive crown clearly visible from low-flying planes. Indeed, while it was the construction of the road our buses took—the BR-316 from Belém to Brasília—that created the conditions for the radical transformation of the area's landscape and the rapid extraction of its most valuable trees, it was the aggressive coalition
of loggers and ranchers chasing state subsidies along advancing transport corridors that kept the swiftly multiplying local sawmills working day and night.
¹⁷
As Paul wrote after a visit to Pará in 1995:

The scale and rate of this process can only be appreciated from the air: little forest remains 50–100 km either side of any significant road, and enormous swathes of newly felled forests, commonly cut in geometrically regular shapes covering many thousands of hectares, await dry season burns and broadcast seeding for pasture formation. Undisturbed forest is rare—if it exists at all—east of the Kayapó and Cateté Indigenous Areas, and even on those reserves mahogany extraction in the late 1980s and early 1990s left a vast network of forest roads and skidtrails. The east-west corridor bisecting these two reserves, along the BR-279 from Xinguara to São Felix, has been essentially cleared of forest. Ranch and colonist expansion is currently directed north from Tucumã and São Felix, following logging roads that penetrate Indigenous Areas three to four hundred kilometers distant.

By 1995, there were only two potential locations of forest stands of mahogany remaining in south Pará.
¹⁸
One, as suggested here, was within the Kayapó Indigenous Area, where significant remnant mahogany populations had survived the extensive cutting that took place just prior to the 1992 federal moratorium on the logging of Indian territories (a gesture to the UNCED Conference in Rio).
¹⁹
The other was on land held privately by ranchers and timber merchants who were keeping their standing stock as a form of equity. However, with the growing militancy of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the landless workers' organization, this strategy was becoming more risky.
²⁰
Its most brutal possibilities were seen in April 1996 at Eldorado de Carajás, just a few hours north of Redenção, when nineteen
posseiros
(land occupiers) were massacred by military police (ten executed point-blank with bullets in the head or neck, others hacked with machetes). As a further discouragement to invasion—a pre-emptive move to lower the value of their land—many landowners, then as now, were hurrying to cash in their remaining mahogany, which, by the early 1990s could generate up to U.S. $700 per cubic meter.
²¹
By this time, however, IBAMA—the understaffed and often ineffectual Brazilian federal environmental agency—had begun requiring logging companies to set aside
a portion of their land for mahogany management and conservation. For a relatively minor inconvenience, the payoff could be substantial, with the IBAMA imprimatur leading directly to increased export quotas and relaxed federal scrutiny.

Driving north from Redenção, it takes about forty-five minutes to reach Fazendinha and its strip of whitewashed storefronts that break the potholed monotony of PA-150. Fazendinha is a company town built around a sawmill that stands apart, set above the low-grade worker housing stretching back on either side of the highway. This town was built by mahogany and owned by Fazendinha Madeiras S/A (FAMASA), a local timber company whose fortunes, like those of its diminishing number of employees, is on the wane now that
madeira de lei
, first-grade timber, and the cash it brings are harder to find.