Book Review

This is a valuable addition to the abundant literature about nature and society in the Amazon region. Little, professor of anthropology at the University of Brasília (Brazil), has written a substantiated, fresh, and engaging text.	1
Little's approach is an original blend of environmental history and political ecology. He examines the distinct "territorialities" of many actors and their corresponding claims ("cosmographies") about the legitimacy of their interests in Amazonian resources (land, water, soil, fauna, flora, oil, ores, genes, etc.). The environmental "footholds" of the actors are examined historically, while their relative political clout is evaluated in "synchronic" terms covering the last three hundred years. Correspondingly, the geographical scale of analysis smoothly shifts from the bend of a river or an oil rig to national conservation policies, and then to the world markets for oil, wood pulp, or genes.	2
The book addresses the seemingly endless cycles of occupation to which Amazonian lands and waters have been submitted over the last centuries, "Amazonian frontiers in time and space" (p. 1). Little is sensitive to the unfinished nature of many efforts in the settlement of Amazonia, an aspect too many analysts miss. No matter how many people are involved, which actors are present, how powerful they are, for how many years they persist, or how much damage is done to the natural environment, these efforts neither "close the frontier" nor create anything similar to "settlement," in the Turnerian sense of the expressions. This a welcome perspective, as the bulk of the literature on Amazonian issues usually handles these ventures as if they reach some sort of "end" and thus contain a clear-cut lesson or moral—be it the prevalence of the local underdog heroes, or the triumph of extraneous and disruptive government agencies or private corporations.	. . .