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INTRODUCTION Approaching Amazonian Frontiers This book chronicles, from the perspective of environmental anthro- pology, centuries of territorial disputes among a wide variety of social groups in Amazonia. Natural and social factors in Amazonia are so inex- orably intertwined that writing a social history of the region requires the recounting of some natural history, and vice versa. The growing fields of environmental history and political ecology will serve as guideposts for this study (see Little 1999). The notion of frontiers will be the organizing motif for the environmental history, whereas a political ecology ap- proach will be applied to territorial disputes. Before entering directly into the history of these disputes in chapter 1, some brief theoretical and methodological considerations are in order. Amazonian Frontiers in Time and Space Frontiers are commonly defined as sparsely populated geographical areas peripheral to political and economic centers of power that experience accelerated rates of demographic, agricultural, or technological change. In analyzing frontiers within a framework of environmental history, we must give special attention to the multiple ongoing interrelationships between humans and nature over time, as well as to the often conflictive relations among different human groups." In the literature on the fron- tier, the diverse relationships among geographical space, the forces of modernity, and the expansion of the nation-state are crucial. Frontiers have been characterized as “the first wave of modernity to break onto the shores of an uncharted heartland” (Watts 1992, 116). Amazonia, however, does not fit well into this mold. Modernity has broken onto its shores for centuries, and Amazonian peoples have re- sponded in so many ways that Amazonian social history is a fragmented quilt of time frames.? Frontier expansion in Amazonia is clearly tied to 2 AMAZONIA the forces of colonialism, imperialism, and mercantile capitalism; the arrival of new social groups from diverse parts of the planet over many centuries has generated a unique, long-term globalization process (Wolf 1982). While these processes have long been worldwide in scope, each region of the world “globalizes” according to the specific mix of forces that enter the region, the moment and rate at which they enter, and the way they are locally absorbed or resisted (Mintz 1998). Latin American writers have been keenly sensitive to the meanderings and weavings of historical time on this subcontinent and offer an excel- lent guide to deciphering the temporal dimension of Latin America. In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges evokes n “infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of divergent, convergent, and parallel times” (1962, 100), while Alejo Carpentier’s novel The Lost Steps (1967) likewise conjures up the plurality of times that exist side by side throughout Latin America. The social sciences are finally beginning to incorporate these insights into their analyses. Rowe and Schelling, in their study of the popular culture of Latin America, affirm that “old, new and hybrid forms coexist, thus in- validating those approaches which assume that there has been an evolu- tion in which the old is superseded by the new. Latin America is charac- terized by the co-existence of different histories” (1991, 18).3 The study of frontiers is often approached as a variant of Frederick Jackson Turner's famous thesis (1920). While Turner’s notion of the U.S. western frontier as a specific historical process that served as a founda- tion for nation building is important, Latin American frontiers, and es pecially Amazonian ones, offer so many historical, cultural, and geo- graphical particularities that they must be understood in their own right and not as yet another variation on the Turner theme. Long before the Amazonian biome was divided up among nation-states, social groups struggled to establish human territories in this vast rain forest in accor dance with their own ways of appropriating geographical space. When nation-building efforts did emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth cen- turles, Amazonia was assaulted by seven different nation-states, each with its own national policies and interests, oc a nota single “tidal” frontier as in the U.S. West surges or wave, Me EA spanning centuries and coming if (Hennessy 197s i a “ to “cyclical booms in different commodities srienie uate - 7 wave was based! in the new desires, knowledge y , gies, and forms of social organization brought by so- Introduction 3 cial actors into Amazonia and was marked by the resources they ex- tracted, the markets where they traded, and the biophysical effects they produced. These social groups interacted with groups already there, provoking changes in both, and continue to participate in ongoing his- torical changes at local, regional, national, and world levels, thereby generating a new frontier dynamic, Each social group establishes its own demographic and spatial mo- mentum, the force of which is greatly responsible for the degree of politi- cal power achieved and the magnitude of environmental effects pro- duced in the region. The notion of momentum implies floods and ebbs in flow, a phenomenon common on Amazonian frontiers (Sawyer 1984). On these frontiers social groups wax and wane: some groups simply dis- appear (e.g., indigenous societies pushed into extinction); other groups reach high peaks of power only to disappear as a social force later (e.g., the Jesuit missions, the rubber barons); still other groups experience vio- lent transformations yet retain elements of their core character (e.g., caboclo and maroon societies); finally, some groups are able to maintain a certain constancy over time (e.g., small, isolated indigenous societies). Thus, in Amazonia, frontiers have not only been opened and closed but reopened and reclosed again and again. The existence of frontiers in the region is not a one-time occurrence, a definitive arrival of modernity, but rather a perennial phenomenon spurred by the constant arrival of ever-new social groups seeking ever-new resources and their subsequent reterritorialization based upon differential ways of appropriating geo- graphical space. This phenomenon has been going on for centuries, and in recent decades it seems to be accelerating. Spatially, the arrival of new groups in Amazonia has occurred in a highly fragmented manner because of the vast size of this biome, the widely dispersed locations of its multiple resources, and the limited communication and transportation technologies used by many social groups. Frontiers have often been established in distinct watersheds of Amazonia where they have little direct contact with each other. Thus, I do not speak of the Amazon frontier (cf. Hemming 1978) but rather of regional Amazonian frontiers to signal the different locales and interrela- tions generated by each frontier site. While regional frontier interactions form partially structured systems, their volatile dynamic is constantly modifying, and sometimes destroying, these established systems, caus- ing regional boundaries to oscillate over time. Regional analysis offers an alternative way of dividing up geograph-

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