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Where the material and the symbolic intertwine: Making sense of the Amazon in the Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 March 2022

Joana Castro Pereira*
Affiliation:
Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal
Maria Fernanda Gebara
Affiliation:
Independent Scholar, London, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author. Email: mail@joanacastropereira.com

Abstract

Forests, and ways of relating to forests, are critical to the planet, yet largely neglected in IR. In this article, we engage with the debate on the Anthropocene and explore different forms of relationality to forests and Amazonian indigenous symbolism. Drawing mainly on political sociology, political ecology, and anthropology, we approach the Amazon basin as a site where nature, culture, resource extraction, and spirituality are enmeshed, and discuss material and symbolic meanings of the forest. The article starts by briefly reviewing discourses around the Anthropocene. It then looks at Amazonian countries with a specific focus on the classist foundations of socioecological exploitation that underpin anthropocentric attitudes and practices, and analyses the material way of perceiving the Amazon. It proceeds by addressing the diverse symbolism present in indigenous traditional knowledge; symbolism that may help in moving politics and society beyond the dominant attitudes that initiated the Anthropocene. Finally, the article offers possibilities for perceiving the forest differently and intertwining the Amazon's material and symbolic worlds.

Type
Special Issue Article
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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35 For example, the conflict between rice producing landowners who arrived in the Amazon through colonisation programmes promoted by the federal government and indigenous peoples over the creation of the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve in the second half of the 2000s. The former argued that the demarcation of indigenous lands was an obstacle to regional economic development. Rice producers’ conception of land was one of individual ownership, intensive agricultural use, and market-oriented production. This clashed with indigenous communities’ idea of communal land tenure, subsistence economy practices, and territorial self-governance. Despite the conflict, the reserve was eventually created, but with a number of conditions, including the right of the Brazilian state to freely exploit the land and its resources in accordance with national interest. See Zhouri, Andréa, ‘“Adverse forces” in the Brazilian Amazon: Developmentalism versus environmentalism and indigenous rights’, The Journal of Environment & Development, 19:3 (2010), pp. 252–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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49 Pereira and Viola, Climate Change and Biodiversity Governance in the Amazon.

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62 Because of the diverse ways of seeing the Amazon, it is difficult to build a perception of the region that can speak for the many narratives that are embedded in different social, economic, political, and cultural representations. In this article, our main aim is not to analyse each narrative and perception, but to provide insights into ways of relating to the forest that could promote more humble and reverential attitudes towards the Amazon and the other-than-human beings it hosts.

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90 Ibid.

91 Ibid., pp. 128–30.

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93 Inoue, ‘Worlding the study of global environmental politics in the Anthropocene’.

94 Ibid., p. 37.

95 Ibid.

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97 Graham Townsley, ‘Ideas of Order and Patterns of Change in Yaminahua Society’ (PhD dissertation, Cambridge University, Cambridge, UK, 1988).

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100 Ruth D. B. Lopes, ‘Lições da Cobra: Uma Leitura da Etnologia Pano’ (Master's dissertation, UFF, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 2010).

101 Ibid., p. 59.

102 Ibid., p. 56.

103 Miller, ‘Maize as Material Culture?’, p. 78.

104 Ibid.

105 Ibid., p. 78.

106 Ibid., p. 79.

107 Ibid.

108 Lagrou, ‘Copernicus in the Amazon’.

109 Lagrou, A Fluidez da Forma.

110 Calavia Sáez, O Nome e o Tempo Yaminawa, p. 479.

111 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem e Outras Ensaios de Antropologia (Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil: Cosac and Naify, 2002).

112 Philippe Descola, The Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle (London, UK: Flamingo, 1997).

113 Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert, The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

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115 Ibid.

116 Lopes, ‘Lições da Cobra’, p. 17.

117 Ibid.

118 Ibid.

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122 Whitney J. Autin, ‘Multiple dichotomies of the Anthropocene’, The Anthropocene Review, 3:3 (2016), pp. 218–30.

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124 Fernando Santos-Granero, ‘Introduction: Amerindian constructional views of the world’, in Fernando Santos-Granero (ed.), The Occult Life of Things: Native Amazonian Theories of Materiality and Personhood (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2009).

125 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘Cosmological deixis and Amer-Indian perspectivism’, The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 4:3 (1998), p. 469.

126 Miller, ‘Maize as Material Culture?’.

127 Marisol de la Cadena, ‘Runa: Human but not only’, Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 4:2 (2014), p. 255.

128 Tim Ingold, Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York, NY: Routledge, 2011).

129 de la Cadena, ‘Runa’.

130 Miller, ‘Maize as a Material Culture?’.

131 Ibid., p. 82.

132 Ibid.

133 Kohn, How Forests Think.

134 Ibid.

135 Thoreau, Walden, or, Life in the Woods.

136 Trownsell et al., ‘Recrafting International Relations through relationality’.

137 Ibid.

138 Nobre and Nobre, ‘The Amazonia third way’.

139 Ibid.

140 Paul Sillitoe, ‘Knowing the land: Soil and land resource evaluation and indigenous knowledge’, Soil Use and Management, 14 (1998), pp. 188–93.

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143 Nobre and Nobre, ‘The Amazonia third way’.

144 Ibid., p. 191.

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148 Evanildo da Silveira, ‘Plástico de açaí’, Revista Pesquisa FAPESP, 260 (2017), pp. 56–7.

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151 Maria Fernanda Gebara, ‘Why We Should Learn How to Listen to Other Than Human Beings’, Forestless, available at: {https://forestless.net/2020/07/19/why-we-should-learn-how-to-listen-to-other-than-human-beings/} accessed 2 October 2020.

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153 Michael Marder, ‘The time of plants’, in Michael Marder (ed.), Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 93–117.

154 Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2018).

155 Tom Phillips, ‘“We are on the eve of a genocide”: Brazil urged to save Amazon tribes from Covid-19’, The Guardian (3 May 2020), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/may/03/eve-of-genocide-brazil-urged-save-amazon-tribes-covid-19-sebastiao-salgado} accessed 2 October 2020.

156 Lily Ling, The Dao of World Politics: Towards a Post-Westphalian Worldist International Relations (London, UK: Routledge, 2014).

157 Inoue, ‘Worlding the study of global environmental politics in the Anthropocene’.

158 Ling, The Dao of World Politics, p. 21.

159 Kohn, How Forests Think, p. 6.

160 Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002); Terrence Deacon, The Symbolic Species: The Co-evolution of Language and the Brain (New York, NY: Norton, 1997); Jesper Hoff Mayer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2008).

161 Trownsell, ‘Recrafting International Relations through relationality’.

162 Ibid.

163 Escobar, Arturo, ‘Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the South’, Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana, 11:1 (2016), p. 13Google Scholar.

164 Portal Amazônia, ‘Lenda do Açaí’, available at: {https://portalamazonia.com/amazonia-az/letra-l/lenda-do-acai} accessed 2 October 2020.