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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.
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| 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. |
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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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A short ethnographic study of Igarapé Guariba, settled on a manipulated watercourse, forms chapters Three and Seven. Sandwiched between them are three histories. Chapter Four steps back four centuries and outside Amazonia proper to investigate Walter Ralegh's encounter with the Guianas. Raffles argues that Ralegh related well enough with alien natives but could not get his head around an alien nature. Ralegh's widely published account was self-defeating as a booster for colonization, for Ralegh could not help but betray his bewilderment. In Chapter Five, which penetrates the professional tensions and social aspirations of nineteenth-century naturalists, Henry Walter Bates scours the Amazon for evidence of evolution while clinging to the river proper for geographic security. And Chapter Six focuses on "Paul," a contemporary naturalist studying what remains of mahogany in southern Pará. Raffles essentially denies science a role in comprehending Amazonia's complexity, suggesting that the quantification of tropical nature overwhelms human endurance and ingenuity, falling victim to a determinism he condemns elsewhere. And he questions those, specifically Philip Fearnside, who claim to measure the region's carrying capacity. |
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Raffles' analysis shines when describing the entangled relationship between investigator and informant (e.g., Ralegh and natives, Bates and his collectors, "Paul" and his employees). The book deserves an audience beyond a narrow set of academics, but there are some quibbles. The prose, while always engaging, occasionally drifts into jargon. A score of photographs are poorly labeled, or not at all. A map "showing places mentioned in the book" does not place Igarapé Guariba, and a later map of the town has no scale, doing little to dispel the stated confusions of Amazonian geography. Truly unsatisfying is Raffles' unwillingness to generalize, even slightly, from his myriad observations. He apologizes (p. 32) for offering two simple classifications for manmade channels and only in a footnote dares add others, which appear to be of some import. The book is explicit in its refusal to order the world. |
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"Home" is the final appellation in the process of place making, and a few have made a home in Igarapé Guariba. But one informant insists that, like so many river towns, it too will dissolve into the elements—gutted; it has no future. Raffles is more sanguine, but his failure to investigate more immediate histories leaves a central question unanswered: Can Amazonians long call a single place home given their aspirations and nature's limits? |
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Reviewed by Shawn Miller, associate professor of history at Brigham Young University and author of Fruitless Trees: Portuguese Conservation and Brazil's Colonial Timber (Stanford University Press, 2000). He currently is working on an environmental history of a river basin in Brazil's drought-plagued Northeast. |
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