Editing Eden: A Reconsideration of Identity, Politics, and Place in Amazonia

Introduction

Introduction FrankHutchinsandPatrickC.Wilson Editing Eden traditionally has been the job of utopian visionaries, and modesty dictates that we qualify our title at the outset. The Eden around which this book is built, the great basin of Amazonia, certainly has drawn many toward excess—an excess of superlatives, an excess of embellishment, and an excess of drama. Travel writing becomes an exercise in histrionics, ethnography gets tangled in exotica, and would-be saviors of every stripe struggle to salvage the last species, the lost souls, and the pristine places. Thus the Amazon, which is as much as anything a canvas of ever-morphing imagery. We—editors, authors, anthropologists—are not attempting here to tear apart the canvas or the painters. We are instead reacting ethnographically to new insights and more nuanced ways of thinking about the Amazon and its inhabitants and the complexity of evolving exchanges with others who do not call this place their home. Both the AmericanHeritageDictionary and Roget’sThesaurus connect editing with deleting or rewriting, but they also state that “to edit” can mean “to adapt.” The tone of the following chapters is closer to the latter concept, where we’ve drawn on substantive scholarship about xii frank hutchins and patrick c. wilson Amazonia to analyze contemporary issues in the region, with special attention to Colombia, Brazil, and Ecuador. Cultural, linguistic, and archaeological anthropology has produced and disassembled many Amazons. An area theorized to be absent of “civilization” (Meggers 1996) now appears to have been home to a number of complexly organized, and sometimes relatively large, cultural groups (Balée and Erickson 2006; Heckenberger 2004; Roosevelt 1997). Native people whose interests seemed barely distinguishable from the evolutionary path of the natural world that surrounded them are now understood as agents with variable objectives that are not always congruent with those of would-be allies. This book in many ways advances projects that reconsider the images, texts, and discourses on which “the Amazon” has been built. The “natives” written into these accounts are subsequently pluralized, contextualized , and humanized. Before turning the page on the Amazon of legend, it is worth revisiting moments in history that suggest that “editing” is a fruitful endeavor. The words of Alain Gheerbrant are a good starting point, as he describes the eruption of superlatives that seemed to occur as Europeans experienced the Amazon. “Everything about this land was alien and defied conventional logic,” he wrote about these early encounters with Amazonia. “The first Europeans to set foot in Amazonia let their imaginations run away with them and claimed to actually see and hear everything they had hitherto only imagined. . . . Seldom have reality and fantasy complemented each other so well” (1992:47). The rainforest that Alexander von Humboldt called Hyleia coaxed even men of the cloth to the extremes of imagination. Friar Gaspar de Carvajal, chronicling the Amazon River trip of Francisco de Orellana in 1541–42, wrote of the famous single-breasted Amazon warrior women and a mysterious tribe of white men (Heaton 1934). Padre Cristóbal de Acuña, who accompanied Pedro Texeira on a trip from Quito to Pará in 1639, resorted to a “mixture of fiction and direct observation” (Newton Freitas’s introduction to Acuña 1942) in his description of xiii introduc tion vast riches, hairy fish that nursed their mothers, and elk the size of a year-old mule. Where Orellana and his men “reached a state of privation so great [they] were eating nothing but leather, belts and soles of shoes, cooked with certain herbs” (Heaton 1934:172), Acuña and his crew found an abundance of food so extensive that it could be attributed only to the “Paternal Providence of the Lord, who with just five loaves and a few fish fed 5,000 men” (Acuña 1942:43). Explorers and scientists who followed similar routes through the Amazon produced stories with equally contrasting accounts of the wonders and nightmares that awaited in the jungle. Charles-Marie La Condamine, an eighteenth-century scientist whom Anthony Smith (1990:163) counts among “a new breed of men . . . forever ready to measure, to sketch, to take note, to examine,” arrived in South America as part of French efforts to settle the question of the shape of the earth. After losing much of his party to disease, murder, marriage, and insanity, La Condamine eventually headed home through the Amazon. His reflections on indigenous life in the rainforest describe a...