In Amazonia: A Natural History

Book Description

The Amazon is not what it seems. As Hugh Raffles shows us in this captivating and innovative book, the world's last great wilderness has been transformed again and again by human activity. In Amazonia brings to life an Amazon whose allure and reality lie as much, or more, in what people have made of it as in what nature has wrought. It casts new light on centuries of encounter while describing the dramatic remaking of a sweeping landscape by residents of one small community in the Brazilian Amazon. Combining richly textured ethnographic research and lively historical analysis, Raffles weaves a fascinating story that changes our understanding of this region and challenges us to rethink what we mean by "nature."

Raffles draws from a wide range of material to demonstrate--in contrast to the tendency to downplay human agency in the Amazon--that the region is an outcome of the intimately intertwined histories of humans and nonhumans. He moves between a detailed narrative that analyzes the production of scientific knowledge about Amazonia over the centuries and an absorbing account of the extraordinary transformations to the fluvial landscape carried out over the past forty years by the inhabitants of Igarapé Guariba, four hours downstream from the nearest city.

Engagingly written, theoretically inventive, and vividly illustrated, the book introduces a diverse range of characters--from sixteenth-century explorers and their native rivals to nineteenth-century naturalists and contemporary ecologists, logging company executives, and river-traders. A natural history of a different kind, In Amazonia shows how humans, animals, rivers, and forests all participate in the making of a region that remains today at the center of debates in environmental politics.

Customer Reviews:

A great read.......2004-06-24

This beautifully written book won the 2003 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, a big deal in US anthropology. When you read it you can see why, as it really succeeds in bringing this fascinating region to life. It is lyrically written, and often both funny and sad. It is very personal in its account of the author's experience in the Amazon and of the people that he knows there, and it is also very informative about the region's history and culture. A quote on the book rightly says that "it has a great deal to offer those knowing everything or nothing about the Amazon." I agree: Highly recommended!

Interesting but a tough read........2004-06-01

From the first chapter: "I am preoccupied by a range of questions in the politics of nature that draw me to explore the fullness and multiplicity of nature as a domain marked both by an active and irreducible materiality and by a similarly irreducible discusivity-a domain with complex agency. In addition, this is a book of intimacies, an account of the differential relationships of affective and often physical proximity between humans, and between humans and non-humans. Such 'tense and tender ties' are themselves the sites and occasions for the condensations I examine here. Indeed, they are the constitutive matter of these locations" (p. 8).

The author, Hugh Raffles, apparently has three main goals in this book. The first is to discuss the significance of man-made canals in the Brazilian Amazon. Many of these canals were cut and dug by hand, and they opened up areas for settlement and trade that otherwise wouldn't have been so open. What appeared to 19th century explorers and naturalists to be "nature" was actually nature modified by man well before the era of steam powered ships and digging machines. A second goal, related to the first, is to give a fairly detailed example of the history of a particular man-made canal area, Igarape Guariba, that illustrates the idea of "natural history" in the sense of the history of a local natural area that has been changed over time through complex interactions between humans and nature and between humans and other humans. Such details provide an intimacy of acquaintance with Amazonia that is missed in larger-scale histories. A third goal is to discuss historical changes in European views of the relationship between man and nature, and the issue of environmental determinism of culture.

The book was of interest to me since I have visited the upper Amazon in Peru, and paddled through man-made canals similar to those that Raffles describes. And I am generally interested in Amazonian nature and native cultures. As it turned out, I was not as enthusiastic about this book as I had hoped to be. On the plus side, Raffles' narrative description-based on interviews of natives-of the history of a particular Amazonian tributary and its canals, and the families that made them, was written clearly enough, and was interesting. His discussion of trading patterns and land use in Amazonia was also interesting. On the negative side, Raffles' theoretical discussions were often tedious and hard to understand. He uses lots of rare words and complex sentences. I am not unaccustomed to reading academic writing. In fact, I have done quite a bit of it myself. But if a graduate student had turned in this manuscript to me as a doctoral dissertation, I would have required many parts of it to be re-written in plain English before I would have approved it. If you are interested in Amazonia and you have a very large vocabulary and like to use it to decipher sentences that most people would not understand at all, then you might like this book. In my view, if I have to read a sentence more than twice to understand it, then the sentence was badly written. There were many such cases in this book. This book has a number of interesting ideas. It is too bad that one has to work so hard to get them.

If you want to read a really interesting book about the Amazon as it was 150 years ago, I highly recommend A Naturalist on the River Amazons, by Henry Walter Bates. Bates was an English naturalist who spent 11 years exploring and collecting plant and insect and animal samples on the Amazon in the mid-1800s. His book is interesting for his interactions with the local people--both the natives and the Portuguese colonialists--as well as for its discussion and drawings of tropical nature. Bates' book is a major historical document of the Amazon, and it is quite interesting and well-written. After you have read Bates, you might want to read Raffles' Chapter 5 on Bates, titled "The Uses of Butterflies." Raffles discusses the historical context and significance of Bates and his work, which will add to your appreciation of Bates' book. However, be warned, to get through Raffles' chapter on Bates you will have to get through passages like this one:

"Scientific practice turns out to be a conjunctural negotiation of emergent and relational knowledges. Amazonians' understandings of the forest mediated by their assessments of the institutional resources and priorities of the visitor enter into fluid dialogue with Bates' own conflicted allegiance to natural historical systematics as mediated by all the complications stirred up in his Amazon experience" (p. 142).

I recommend this book for college professors and graduate students who specialize in the history of Amazonia.

Natural history for the 21st century.......2004-01-06

Amazonia is arguably the heartland of modern Western environmentalism-the region where many fundamental ecological insights were first proposed and honed, the site of some of the most violent and wrenching contemporary conflicts over natural resource exploitation and conservation, and the beloved core of a planetary nature conceived all too often as a battered and sputtering "spaceship Earth." In Amazonia casts a fresh and provocative light on this vital and contested terrain.

Nature in this account is not a primeval zone either threatened or threatening, but rather a dynamic and heterogeneous web of places and relations, saturated with the affinities and intimacies, the memories and yearnings, of everyday life. Tracking back and forth between multiple sites and scales, In Amazonia takes up a series of human engagements through which the very nature of the Amazon has been elaborated-exploratory expeditions, natural history collections, ecological experimentations, and embodied practices of occupation and development.

Raffles writes both with and against the literary traditions of Western naturalism, suggestively presenting the Amazon itself as an assemblage or collection of living objects. The result is a novel and enlightening mode of "natural history," one that places at center stage both the accidents and the affects that have made modern Amazonia.

Ultimately it is the quality of Raffles' writing that makes this volume such a captivating and enlightening read. With great skill and delicacy, Raffles spins out a narrative that turns at every turn on contingency-on the myriad and unpredictable accidents of biography, politics and philosophy that lend to places their significance and texture.

It is in such workings that nature itself finds a measure of agency, ecological chains of consequence turning fields to swamps, dropping houses and fruit trees into river beds, forcing fish to move from one place to another. Raffles is candid about the contingencies that led him through the path of his own writing, from the seductions of his characters to the personal traumas that directed him to the question of Amazonian passions in the first place.

As an heir to the vexing legacies of Western environmentalism myself, I found that In Amazonia struck many an unanticipated chord. How many of us have shared Amazonian dreams unknowing?

This is an amazing book!.......2004-01-04

This is an amazing book - at once engaging, entertaining and challenging. I can understand why it won two awards for ethnographic writing at the AAA. It is a testament to the possibility of combining beautifully written prose, interesting stories and sophisticated theoretical insights under the same cover, making it a great read for those with a general interest in Natural History, the environment and Amazonia, as well as for the most theoretically-minded academics interested in a sophisticated exploration of the complex relationships between nature, culture and power. Indeed, I used this book in a graduate seminar that I taught at Stanford and my students selected it as the best of 12 ethnographies they read during the course. The book has also been thoroughly enjoyed by non-academics, including my sister, who is a physician. In short In Amazonia is a tremendously worthwhile read.

Beautiful writing; compelling anthropology.......2004-01-02

"In Amazonia" tells an engaging and well-researched story of epic proportions. Raffles' lyrical style draws the reader close to the narrative but stops short of romanticizing. Appropriate for academic research or an interested layperson. Highly recommended!

A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia

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One month later Still waiting for the book
AMAZING TRAVEL AND SCIENCE WRITING ON THE AMAZON
Richly textured
Excellent!
some good, some bad

A Land of Ghosts: The Braided Lives of People and the Forest in Far Western Amazonia
David G. Campbell
Manufacturer: Houghton Mifflin
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 039571284X

Book Description

The western Amazon is the last frontier, as wild a west as Earth has ever known. For thirty years David G. Campbell has been exploring this lush wilderness, which contains more species than ever existed anywhere at any time in the four-billion-year history of life on our planet. With great artistic flair, Campbell takes us with him as he travels to the town of Cruzeiro do Sul, 2,800 miles from the mouth of the Amazon. Here he collects three old friends: Arito, a caiman hunter turned paleontologist; Tarzan, a street urchin brought up in a bordello; and Pimentel, a master canoe pilot. They travel together even farther into the rainforest, set up camp, and survey every living woody plant in a land so rich that an area of less than fifty acres contains three times as many tree species as all of North America. Campbell knows the trees individually, has watched them grow from seedling to death. He also knows the people of the Amazon: the recently arrived colonists with their failing farms; the mixed-blood Caboclos, masters of hunting, fishing, and survival; and the refugee Native Americans. Campbell introduces us to two remarkable women, Dona Cabocla, a widow who raised six children on that lonely frontier, and Dona Ausira, A Nokini Native American who is the last speaker of her tribe's ages-old language. These people live in a land whose original inhabitants were wiped out by centuries of disease, slavery, and genocide, taking their traditions and languages with them -- a land of ghosts.

Customer Reviews:

One month later Still waiting for the book.......2007-10-09

I wouldn't mind reviewing this book but I still haven't recieved it yet. It's now a month since you posted it, perhaps you could please chase it up. Thankyou

Paul Lightfoot

AMAZING TRAVEL AND SCIENCE WRITING ON THE AMAZON.......2006-09-08

Though there are many books that describe nature in the Amazon, David Campbell definitely is among the top writers on it. In this book he offers, from start to finish, a very interesting mix between storytelling with lyrical qualities and scientific analysis with social commentary.

He is a scientist, focused on botany, and his knowledge of all aspects of science related to the forest are outstanding. We learn about the strategies employed by frogs to reproduce, or by snakes to identify prey, or by trees to attach polen to beetles. While learning about the science behind such activities and how they evolved, the author leads the reader through his travel log, meeting people and species and learning much about the history of the region he is visiting.

Besides all the interesting science, the author also provides a very deep character description of the people who live in this remote frontier. The stories range from rubber tappers left over from a period of abundance, to old indians who became westernized, to occupants moving there from the south due to government incentives. Each has a story and a way to deal with the challenges of the forest; some have a way to prosper in the exact same circumstances in which others fail. Some characters are presented as integrated in the forest, some as aliens beaten by the forest, some as leaders beating the forest.

Most amazing than all the history, social aspects and science however are the narrative abilities of the author. The book is a work of art, as it becomes clear that every word has been hand picked and every metaphor was chosen to provide the reader with the correct image, texture, taste, sound and smell of the forest. Reading is an experience of immersion and is to be savoured as very few books provide such a deep experience. It becomes quite clear to anyone reading the book that the author has a deep connection with his subject, much beyond science.

This book is the very best description of the Amazon I have encountered, written with gusto. It is the kind of book you will wish you had written. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the region, in nature writing or in popular science.

Richly textured.......2005-07-14

This book delivered much more than I expected. The author is a scientist, not just a traveler. Each observation went several steps deeper into the biology and history than typical with this kind of book. The story was made much richer by these details.

It is true that the vocabulary was a bit advanced. However, I never bothered to check the dictionary, and it didn't hurt the narrative.

Highly recommended.

Excellent!.......2005-07-06

A Land of Ghosts is a splendid journey through Amazonian Brazil. Infused with enlightened historical, ecological, and anthropological perspective, Campbell stands alone in his ability to fuse eloquent science writing with a tale of adventure. At times haunting, this book reveals the deep causes of rainforest destruction in the region. However, this book presents these causes in a unique way, and, at least for me, marks a new style of conservation advocation. Indeed, a refreshing one. If you have any interest in tropical ecology, and like works by such authors as David Quammen or Tim Flannery you will love this brilliant work.

some good, some bad.......2005-06-03

The "good" is that there are some very interesting stories in the book. The "bad" is that, in my opinion, it rambles in some places, especially in the last half of the book. Another "bad" is that the author uses a lot of uncommon words that only someone with an incredible vocabulary would understant. Example: page 127 (picked at random)uses the words: Flummoxed, estivation, tropeiro, mealy, prehensile, transect, naunce, anthocyanins, cotyledoms, transect, bromeliads. Trying to get through that for over 200 pages was a workout for me. The author also uses meters and hectars, not feet and acres, so distances and area are hard to understand. In addition he uses a lot of Portuguese words. There is a Portuguese glossary in the back if you don't mind flipping back and forth while you read, which I don't take the time to do. The author is an excellent writer, too bad it is so difficult to read.

Amazonia: The Land, the Wildlife, the River, the People

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Amazonia: The Land, the Wildlife, the River, the People
Alfonso Capelas
Manufacturer: Firefly Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Ecology | Environment | Outdoors & Nature | Subjects | Books

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Book Description

A panoramic look at Earth's most diverse ecosystem.

The Amazon river is fed by 1,000 named tributaries and as many anonymous ones. The river system spans the South American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to within 100 miles of the Pacific and drains an area nearly the size of Australia. A stretch of 2,300 miles is the world's longest navigable inland waterway.

Amazonia examines the diversity, grandeur, and history of an astonishingly dynamic eco-system. With clear terms and stunning photography, the book conveys the region's vast resources. Its forests and jungles are home to one third of all the living species on the planet. The region sustains more than 300 mammal species, up to 2,000 bird species, 2,500 tree species, 60,000 distinct plants, and an estimated 30 million insect species. The book is filled with spectacular images of orchids, strangler figs, armies of exotic insects, rare and endangered species, the rich variety of flowers and birds, and inhabitants of the region.

The book closely examines the hidden resources of the Amazon including huge deposits of iron ore, tin, aluminum, copper and gold. Amazonia tells fascinating accounts of boom and bust eras such as the black gold rush of the late 19th century that was fueled by the huge worldwide demand for rubber.

Amazonia also includes what is being done now and what can be done in the future to ensure that this remarkable region continues to nurture its huge reservoir of life.

Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers (Center Books in Natural History)

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Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers (Center Books in Natural History)
Paul E. Little
Manufacturer: The Johns Hopkins University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Book Description

In Amazonia: Territorial Struggles on Perennial Frontiers, Paul Little chronicles centuries of territorial disputes in Amazonia. Examining a wide variety of social groups from an environmental and anthropological perspective, Little describes the factors that have created two unique biophysical and political environments at opposite ends of the Amazon River basin's rain forest.

Little makes a comparative study of the Aguarico region in eastern Ecuador (at the western upper edge of the rain forest) and the Jari region of Brazil (at its eastern lowland end) using four time frames to examine early European invasions of indigenous homelands, fortune-building attempts in Amazonia, conservation concerns in the tropical ecosystems; and disputes over territorial claims that arose during the 1990s. By interweaving his examination between the two regions within each time frame, Little effectively highlights how similar globalizing forces were locally appropriated to produce widely divergent environmental and political histories.

A large part of the study is given to the period beginning in the 1950s. Little outlines the contemporary struggles -- social, political, economic, and ecological -- arising in Amazonia. He also examines the frontier processes of ethnocide and ethnogenesis whereby the indigenous communities of the upper Amazon have retained some control over their lands, while in the lower Amazon traditional riverine communities strive for existence against increasing industrialization.

Thoroughly researched and examining issues ranging from resource exploitation and conservation to colonization, urbanization, and industrialization, Amazonia will appeal to students and scholars in environmental studies, geography, ecology and conservation, cultural anthropology, and Latin American studies and history as well as anyone interested in Amazonia.

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Excellent

Amazonia
Loren O. McIntyre
Manufacturer: Random House, Inc.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Classics | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Exploring South America

ASIN: 0871566419
Release Date: 1991-09-15

Customer Reviews:

Excellent.......1997-07-21

Not only beautifully illustrated, but beautifully written as well. A genuine classic

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Amazonia (Ends of the Earth)
Susan Powell , and Rose Inserra
Manufacturer: Heinemann Library
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Library Binding

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Amazonia (Key Environments)

Manufacturer: Pergamon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0080307760

Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: Amazonia, redescoberta no seculo XVIII

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Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira: Amazonia, redescoberta no seculo XVIII

Manufacturer: Biblioteca Nacional
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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ASIN: 8533300158

Amazonia colombiana: Vision general (Biblioteca Banco Popular. Textos universitarios)

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Amazonia colombiana: Vision general (Biblioteca Banco Popular. Textos universitarios)
Camilo A Dominguez
Manufacturer: Fondo de Promocion de la Cultura del Banco Popular
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

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Mammals of the Rio JuruaÌÂ and the evolutionary and ecological diversification of Amazonia (Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History)

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Mammals of the Rio JuruaÌÂ and the evolutionary and ecological diversification of Amazonia (Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History)
James L Patton
Manufacturer: American Museum of Natural History
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Unknown Binding

Book Description

Anoxygenic Photosynthetic Bacteria is a comprehensive volume describing all aspects of non-oxygen-evolving photosynthetic bacteria. The 62 chapters are organized into themes of: Taxonomy, physiology and ecology; Molecular structure of pigments and cofactors; Membrane and cell wall structure: Antenna structure and function; Reaction center structure and electron/proton pathways; Cyclic electron transfer; Metabolic processes; Genetics; Regulation of gene expression, and applications. The chapters have all been written by leading experts and present in detail the current understanding of these versatile microorganisms. The book is intended for use by advanced undergraduate and graduate students and senior researchers in the areas of microbiology, genetics, biochemistry, biophysics and biotechnology.

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