| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Amazonia: A Natural History. By Hugh Raffles. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. xiii + 302 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Paper $17.95.
In Amazonia: A Natural History, Hugh Raffles warns, is "less a history of nature than a way of writing the present as a condensation of multiple natures" (p. 7). This fascinating, unusual book, which began as something more conventional before it was "hijacked," tackles Amazonian ethnography, history, geography, linguistics, and epistemology. Place making and anthropomorphism are used to bind a region's distant past to its unsettled present.	1
After a short introduction, Chapter Two introduces manmade channels, the central objects of study, as new evidence for widespread anthropomorphism in the region. How new is hard to judge: Raffles insists the literature is "scattered" but fails to gather it in a footnote in a book otherwise heavily documented. There is also a selective glossary—Amazonians, apparently, have as many names for watercourse as the Inuit have for snow—appropriate here because place-names are the first steps in place making.	. . .

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