Cultural Forests of the Amazon: A Historical Ecology of People and Their Landscapes

Part I. Landscape Transformations

part I Landscape Transformations Overview The following three chapters contain background data on the emergence of anthropogenic forests in the Amazon region, before these and natural (or high) forests were subjected to the ravages of modern industrial agriculture, commercial log­ging, and conversion to bovine pasturelands. The origins of cultural influences on Amazonian forests have a deep past, far beyond the memory of the people who live there today. That does not mean all indigenous groups recognize the differences between forests that have a his­ tori­ cal legacy and those that do not, or seem notto.Whethertheydistinguishanthropogenicimpactsfromothersourcesofforest diversity, however, they know much more about these living landscapes than anyone else, in­ clud­ ing scientists and scholars of Amazonia. That knowledge they have can be demonstrated. Chapter 1 presents my own path of discovery into these landscapes and the indigenous societies that inhabit them, starting with the first indigenous people I came to know in the Amazon region, the Ka’apor, a Tupí-­ Guaraní–speaking group of the extreme east of the region. Although for my doctoral dissertation (Balée 1984)Ihadstudiedtheirethnohistory,socialorganization,andrituallife,andhad lived with them in the field for more than one year, I had not systematically investigated the forest types that surround their villages, gardens, streams, rivers, and swamps. I did undertake such work after graduate school, when I held a research fellowship at the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden , from 1984 to 1988. That was a fruitful time for fieldwork. It was then that I 2 Landscape Transformations undertook a careful examination of the species contents and distributions of different kinds of forests in the Ka’apor habitat and the influences, if any, that the Ka’apor and their ancestors had had on those arrangements. In 1984, I met Darrell Posey (1947–2001), who was then working on ethno­ ecologyoftheKayapóIndiansincentralBrazil.Inhisrelativelyshortlife,Poseybecame a pioneer in demonstrating the complexity, depth, and empiricism of indige­ nous knowledge of the environment and biota. He was finding evidence of Kayapó modification of well-­drained savanna country (called cerrado in Brazil) ­landscapes into patches of woodland called forest islands, or apêtê, in Kayapó (Posey 1984a, 1984b, 1985a, 2002; cf. Parker 1992). He took to the Kayapó colleagues from di­ versedisciplines,in­clud­inggeography(SusannaHecht),ethnopharmacology(Elaine Elizabethsky), botany (Anthony Anderson), plant genetics (Warwick Kerr), entomology (JoãoMariaFrancodeCamargo,WilliamOveral),andmanyothers.Posey was a charismatic in­di­vidual and sought protection of indigenous intellectual propertyrights .Hewasalsoapioneeringscholarofethnobiology,particularlyethnoentomology : one of his major findings is that the Kayapó discriminate more species of bees and wasps than West­ ern zoology, and the Kayapó were right. Posey’s contributions are neatly summarized in a fine selection of his papers, edited by Kristina Plenderleith, and published posthumously (Posey 2002). In the mid-­ 1980s, Posey’s and his many colleagues’ influential findings—if later a bit controversial (especially Parker 1992)—regarding the Kayapó had an effect on my own thinking about where the tropical forests of the Ka’apor Indians, as well as other Amazonian groups not living in savannas, had come from, and also where they were going. I found certain Ka’apor forests to be similar in species composition to the Kayapó’s forest islands (Chapter 7), but different in the time frame by which they unfolded and in the exact mechanisms involved in their formation. I now believe the forest islands to have been the results of primary landscape transformation , and Ka’apor cultural forests derive from sec­ ondary landscape transformation . Primary landscape transformation is the complete or near-complete change in species composition in an environment effected by certain kinds of human activities ; sec­ ondary landscape transformation is a partial change in the same. We will return to these concepts in the final two chapters of this volume. Chapter 1 renders the background of my initial foray into the question of cultural forests, which the Ka’apor, in their language, call taper. The fieldwork described in that chapter was part of an intellectual, peripatetic journey into forests that harbored inscriptions, stories, and memories in the living vegetation itself. It is an account of field research on questions that today are widely in the pub­ lic eye but that were then rather heretical in certain venues, particularly those of conservation biology and systems ecology. As I mentioned before, historian David Sweet (1974) once referred to Amazonia as a “rich realm of nature.” I gradually became convinced it is rich in nature, yet also rich in culture. Moreover, the idea...