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

2. Fractal Subjectivities: An Amazonian-Inspired Critique of Globalization Theory

2.FractalSubjectivities AnAmazonian-InspiredCritiqueofGlobalizationTheory MichaelA.Uzendoski En los patios de las casas los delfines tocan sus guitarras y enamoran a las muchachas. Juan Carlos Galeano, “Leticia,” in Amazonia In the mind’s eye, a fractal is a way of seeing infinity. James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science Anna Tsing (2004), like many other current theorists, has been writing innovative things about globalization. Her recent book problematizes “scale” in a way that questions the local/global dichotomy through the trope of “friction.” Her work joins that of many others complicating anthropology’s traditional focus on the local by shifting more focus to processes of globalization. Globalization study owes much to the work of Arjun Appadurai, who has emphasized how global “flows” make local reproduction “fragile,” contradictory, displaced, and destabilized (1996:198). The stories considered here, however, defy reduction to the local, but they also make little sense when viewed from Appadurai’s 39 fractal subjectivities idea of “scapes” or Tsing’s metaphor of “friction.” What about people who view the local as global and vice versa, a perspective described by Mascia-Lees and Himpele, in which “ethnographic collocation . . . [can] occupy two (or more) places simultaneously” (2006:9)? As I will show, contemporary Amazonian storytellers conceptualize themselves as fully modern subjects, but they define their subjectivity through fractal relationships with animals, spirits, and nature—relationships that I argue define Amazonian sociality in the first and last instance (Kelley 2005). These relationships do not oppose locality and globality; they show that people are defined simultaneously by the local and the global, part and whole, and the one and the many. Indeed Amazonian realities complement and undermine capitalism ’s presumed homogenizing of things and thing-like relations, as well as contradict the supposed monopoly capitalism has on global processes. As Hutchins, Whitehead, and Chaves demonstrate in their chapters in this volume, Amazonian historicities wreak havoc on modernity ’s universalizing projects and “interrupt” the “totalizing thrusts” of capital (Chakrabarty 2002:101, cited in Hutchins, this volume). The fractal forms of Amazonia, as I hope to show, articulate the body as defined by alternative subjectivities that can engender alternative modernities, social movements that question capital (Chakrabarty 2002; Parameshwar Gaonkar 2001; Uzendoski 2005a; Whitten and Whitten 2008). I first look at a story told in 1997 by a mestizo person about a dolphin that impregnates her sister-in-law.1 This story is from the Leticia area of Colombia, and it was taped by the Amazonian poet Juan Carlos Galeano, who wishes that it be used here. I next consider another mestizo story from Iquitos, Peru, that was told to me during a fishing trip in the spring of 2006. This story involves an encounter with the boa negra (black boa snake) and a near-death experience. I next consider a native story told to me in Kichwa during 2006 in the Upper Napo region of Ecuador.2 This story is about the disappearance of a boy who becomes a governor in the spirit world. I also look at emer- 40 michael a. uzendoski gent genres of storytelling in Amazonia, specifically the poetry and folktales created by Juan Carlos Galeano (2000, 2005, in press) and “electronic” Kichwa music, called Runa Paju, from Amazonian Ecuador. These materials allow me to address how fractal relations of the body cross social and cultural boundaries, including my own relationship with Juan Carlos and the storytellers discussed here. I have chosen these three stories and materials because they are compelling accounts that reveal how fractal principles can be used to conceptualize an emergent subjectivity that has not been much discussed in relationship to globalization. Despite the diversity of materials I consider, the relations show an underlying conceptualization of subjectivity as embedded in the larger flows and material exchanges with animals, spirits, and nature—relationships that move through and transform the sociality and social logics of capitalism itself. Chaos Theory and Fractality in Social Anthropology and Amazonian Anthropology By “fractal” I refer to relations in which the whole and its parts are made similar, creating a relational world based on self-similarity (Jackson 2004:1l; Mosko and Damon 2005). Ruth Richards describes fractals as “forms . . . born from infinity; by definition, they can look similar on infinitely receding or expanding scales” (2001:72). Fractals are found not only in nature, but also in culture and in the patterns of globalization . Recently, for example, Appadurai has suggested that newer approaches to culture...