Why read some 600 pages dedicated to Euclides da Cunha, a Brazilian surveyor of whom you have never heard? Although this sounds like a tough question, Susanna Hecht fortunately has all the answers in a brilliant book that grips the imagination and the intellect in equal measure. Those answers can be arrayed under four headings.
First, da Cunha鈥檚 life as retold by Hecht reads like a real-life venture into the magical realism of Gabriel Garc铆a M谩rquez. Born in provincial obscurity, a sickly but brilliant child, da Cunha would rise via military training to join the ranks of the Brazilian elite as it forged a national identity in the closing decades of the 19th century. And yet, despite marrying into that elite, da Cunha would eschew many of its European values, coming to see in the cultures of northeast Brazil and then in the western depths of Amazonia the true Brazil of the future. Here was an indigenous, hybrid culture of tough resilience and adaptation to the tropical conditions that gave European imperialists fits (literally and metaphorically).
Da Cunha encoded this message in his first masterpiece, Os Sert玫es (Rebellion in the Backlands), a 1902 work that led to his literary lionisation. And being feted for his prose skills led seamlessly, in da Cunha鈥檚 career, to political elevation under the cultivated tutelage of Jos茅 Maria da Silva Paranhos, the Baron of Rio Branco, 鈥渢he most skilled diplomat in Brazil鈥檚 history鈥. In 1904, the Baron sent da Cunha to survey the Pur煤s River in Amazonia. It was a task that should have set the seal on his reputation, bringing together as it did his skills as a surveyor, his nationalist vision and his literary brilliance as he projected an Amazonian magnum opus, Um Para铆so Perdido (Lost Paradise). Instead, the Pur煤s venture became a Heart of Darkness-esque experience and Lost Paradise got no further forward than a few fragments as, with tragic inevitability, da Cunha鈥檚 turbulent personal life came to destroy him. For in his absence, da Cunha鈥檚 wife Ana Em铆lia began a passionate affair that would lead to his death in 1909 at the hands of her lover. Da Cunha鈥檚 son sought to avenge him seven years later, only to be shot by the same hand.
For da Cunha鈥檚 life and work were inextricably interlinked with the period in which the Brazilian monopoly over the production of rubber and latex led the global economy to descend on the remotest extremities of Amazonia
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And yet da Cunha鈥檚 life, fascinating as it is, is not Hecht鈥檚 core concern: the focus is on 鈥渞ubber realism鈥, not magical realism. The second achievement of the book, then, is to narrate a neglected moment in economic, environmental and political history, the 鈥渟cramble for the Amazon鈥. For da Cunha鈥檚 life and work were inextricably interlinked with the period in which the Brazilian monopoly over the production of rubber and latex led the global economy to descend on the remotest extremities of Amazonia in search of one of the most valuable products on the planet, an 鈥渆lastic gold鈥 that drove, connected and stretched the Industrial Revolution.
Da Cunha was not sent up the Pur煤s merely to fill in a blank on the map for its own sake, but to stake a claim to the territories of its basin against the rival interests of Peru and against the gunboat-diplomatic incursions of the Americans and the British. And to build Brazil鈥檚 claim, he mapped the area, showing it to be a dense tangle of local settlements of predominantly Brazilian indigenes and creoles, not the empty luxuriance of natural tropical abundance that Europeans such as Alexander von Humboldt imagined. He also gave the area a history, showing that the dense habitational tangle revealed by his surveys was the outcome of centuries of treaties and piecemeal settlements. As da Cunha鈥檚 employer, the Baron, put matters in an earlier diplomatic context, surveys and historical analysis were at the heart of the 鈥渟avage tournament of historical geography鈥 that was the scramble for territorial sovereignty, quite as much in South America as in the more celebrated contemporary wranglings in Africa and Europe.
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His geographical joustings were successful: in a twist of timing typical of his remarkable life, some three weeks after he was shot, the boundary commission for Peru and Brazil adjudicated on his work, carving the modern map of Amazonia and making that area become something that had by no means been inevitable when he set out in 1904, a space almost synonymous with Brazil.
The third reason the book is such a success rests with its author. Hecht writes not only with extraordinary historical assurance about her remarkably complex subject, but also with great passion and literary elegance. The book is, like da Cunha鈥檚 own work, the product of years of mediation, and brings together Hecht鈥檚 political-ecological research on and in Amazonia with a lot of archival spadework. There is also elegance of characterisation: not all academic authors would dare to describe their subject as having 鈥渢he lambent eyes of a nocturnal animal鈥. Hecht does, she is right and the reader is grateful for her authorial courage. At times, the book can feel a little self-indulgent and in need of pruning as one wades through dozens of pages about the treaties that carved up Amazonia centuries before da Cunha ventured into the forest or as one traverses chapters composed entirely of translations of da Cunha鈥檚 own words; and yet by the end the reader recognises that herein lies one of the strengths of the book. Da Cunha鈥檚 remarkable fusion of the scholarly and the literary with all its acuity and also its eccentricities is matched by Hecht鈥檚; style mirrors subject.
Finally, just as da Cunha always had present-day political purposes in his literary and historical work, so does Hecht and this is the fourth reason the book is such a fascinating one. For in the present day, as Hecht is acutely aware, the Pur煤s River region is a national park, celebrated and preserved as a slice of pristine nature. In short, the area has reverted to the imagining of von Humboldt, the densely settled depiction of the area da Cunha developed a century ago dropping off the radar. In part this reflects global economic realities: once latex and rubber could be produced in Asia - something pioneered a decade after da Cunha鈥檚 death - capitalism could bypass the tangled terrors of the Amazonian interior and so global circuits of capital took different geographical loops. The tropical rainforests fell quiet and were ripe for reinvention. And yet it is the inevitable burden of both da Cunha鈥檚 work and Hecht鈥檚 that this is a fantasy; Amazonia is still being reinvented in the global economy, but now as a reservoir of biodiversity and an imperilled green lung that allows a planet menaced by climate change to breathe. This is, as Hecht makes clear, another of the Baron鈥檚 鈥渟avage tournaments鈥, dependent on historical and geographical remembering and forgetting to build the image of a pure Amazon. Above all, such an image of a pristine Amazonia relies on forgetting da Cunha and the scramble for Amazonia. If we want to think about planetary futures in informed and intelligent ways, we need to dispense with geopolitical fantasies and think more precisely about the historical trajectories that have built places: da Cunha and Hecht invite us to undertake just this adventure for the mind through this remarkable book.
The author
Professor in the School of Public Affairs and the Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles and an upper-level dressage rider, Susanna Hecht 鈥渨as born and raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, which is a Mormon theocracy. The place is lovely, though, and I spent much of my youth in the mountains hiking with my dogs, a sort of pre-board for later Amazonian work.鈥
Utah鈥檚 鈥渄octrinaire religiosity鈥, Hecht says, 鈥済ave me my love of science. But it was also place of cowboys and Indians, and southern Utah still had a very Old West feel with lots of great storytellers and a rich and gorgeous native culture. It was also home to a lot of biological agent testing and fallout from nuclear tests, so southern Utah was one of the throwaway places of the Cold War. Like much of the Amazon, it was assumed to be empty, and at the margins of history. The Utes, of course, are the ancestral Aztecs, so鈥t was a place that gave rise to many processes in Latin America. It was also full of gorgeous landscapes with lots of human traces visible on it, but nonetheless categorised as 鈥榰ntrammelled鈥 by man, even as the pueblos dotted the cliffs and you could find arrowheads everywhere, and as nuclear radiated particles drifted invisibly down.
As a child, she recalls, 鈥渋t seems I was always reading and botanising and practicing childish natural history鈥.
Hecht lives in Topanga Canyon, 鈥渙ne of the bohemian canyons in the Santa Monica Mountains that surround Los Angeles. It鈥檚 a place of about 3,000 people and many of them are artists and writers and other creative types, some associated with the film industry. It has a lot of open space, wild life (coyotes, cougars, bobcats wild parrots, ravens) so it鈥檚 got an un-urban feel even though it is quite close to Santa Monica and 鈥榯he Valley鈥. I live embraced by a community of friends and neighbours. And, as they say, I live quietly. I have a dog named Ramon and an upper-level dressage horse named Bolero.鈥
Los Angeles itself, she observes, 鈥渋s complex: it is like living in several countries, and it is one of the largest Latin American cities. It has great food, great music and art, and the landscape from the beach to the mountains is dazzling. As a city where more than 113 languages are spoken, it always feels both exotic and like home. It鈥檚 great for people watching, and more places are walkable than one might imagine. It has tons of sidewalk cafes and places to sit outdoors and have coffee and drinks. It鈥檚 a place of neighbourhoods, and these are often illegible to outsiders who mostly see the nightmare of its traffic. Some of its most delicious dining establishments are hole-in-the-wall places in nondescript and inauspicious strip malls. LA teaches you to see differently in this urban form. Traffic is the least agreeable thing about LA, except possibly for its propensity for fire.鈥
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Among her favourite places is 鈥淏el茅m, Brazil in Amazonia where I lived a lot over the years. A huge tropical port, with mango trees lining the street and Amazonia in all its humour and complexity right at the door.
鈥淲丑别苍 I first arrived in Bel茅m at 4am it seemed like stepping into a large wet sock. I was soon ensconced in the Goeldi Museum. Em铆lio Goeldi [its founder] had an important and very little-known role in the Amazon scramble - he also selected the first woman head of a Brazilian national scientific institution, Emilie Snethlage, as director of the museum when he retired.鈥
During Hecht鈥檚 time at the famed institute, she recalls, it was 鈥渉ome to a bunch of young grad students from everywhere who basically lived in a zoo and natural history and anthropology museum. One was always exposed to new finds and the treasures of the old collections: staggeringly complicated pottery from the Santarem civilisation, Marajo burial urns that look like extraterrestrials and featherwork by modern-day groups that were exceedingly beautiful, and spoke to a material aesthetic I鈥檇 never imagined before. But also one awoke to the sounds and noises of the forest - macaws, jaguars - and it had both the plant perfume and the caged animal funk that made living there wonderful and unusual. And, yes, it had the usual interdisciplinary crowd of botanists, anthropologists, ornithologists, each bringing back amazing tales from the new frontiers of this Amazon time. And lots of romances and the very pleasurable gossip that goes with it.鈥
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Hecht took her undergraduate degree at the University of Chicago and her doctorate in geography at the University of California, Berkeley; she has been a resident fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton University and at Stanford University鈥檚 Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences.
Asked for her thoughts on these institutions, she says that she found Chicago 鈥渁mazing for the esteem it holds for knowledge and the intellectual discipline that it develops in young students. UC Berkeley was much more of an interdisciplinary place and awash in the applied sciences - forestry, soil science, agricultural economics, and in the integrative anthropology and of course geography that provided a great background for looking at the way that cultures create landscapes, and provided the technical tools to carry out and evaluate the dynamics of tropical development. I was lucky that there were always tropical ecologists around at both Chicago and Berkeley.
鈥淧rinceton and Stanford were great, too, in their insistence on interdisciplinarity, and the exposure to ways of thinking that were much different than my own, and especially to historians. Often they were scholars looking at the 鈥榮ecret鈥 histories of places, like Richard White. Social historians of peasantries, of the Cold War, and social anthropologists of many types, were quite central to my intellectual formation, and helped me think through a lot of my questions about the scramble for the Amazon.
These institutions are also, Hecht adds, 鈥減laces that let nothing slide. UCLA, my home institution, has had the virtue of leaving me alone. I am in a planning school and I do carry out a lot of contemporary development analysis in the American tropics, but most of my colleagues are sort of confused by my work and interests. Many are transportation planners, so they have rather different concerns. But UCLA has great geographers and Latin American historians and, if anything, my intellectual home has been in the Center for Latin American Studies. UCLA came very late to what we take as modern environmentalism, but now it has an Institute of the Environment that has also become very interdisciplinary, and a real intellectual haven. It has begun a very dynamic programme in environmental humanities. I鈥檝e been fortunate to get to work in lots of institutions - always migrating to the most interdisciplinary venues. And I鈥檝e been lucky to be able to do this, since each was quite unique, and always pulled me in new directions. I鈥檝e also worked in the best libraries in the world for Latin America.鈥
She first became interested in Euclides da Cunha when working on her doctorate on cattle ranching in Amazonia.
鈥淚 had read his Rebellion in the Backlands in my Latin American history courses, but - like most of his readers - had no idea that he had any presence in the Amazon. At the time, everyone had pretty much stopped thinking about him, his life and adventures and placed him in an amber-like literary world associated with his great book. But he was, at the end of the day, a revolutionary, and a formidable explorer as well as one of Brazil鈥檚 greatest writers.
鈥淗is Amazon work was to be a sequel to his Backlands book, and it would show the triumph of his bronzed titans as they created a new Amazonian (indeed Brazilian) geography. There was a collection by Leandro Tocantins, one of Amazonia鈥檚 major historians, of his Amazon snippets, which mostly didn鈥檛 make any sense but the writing was - well, it was Euclides writing about Amazonia, with all his scholarly skill and his fantastic prose. At first I was just taken by his writing about Amazonian environments - no one is better, by the way. But later, as I worked more in the state of Acre, the scene of major scrambles over centuries, and explored the references that pepper his writing about which I knew absolutely nothing, it seemed like a small task (ha!) to just familiarise myself with the context of his time.鈥
Hecht continues, 鈥淪oon this remarkable Amazonian social and geopolitical history emerged. Amazonia is often seen as a 鈥榣and without history鈥 and 鈥榯he last unfinished page of Genesis鈥, partly because its contemporary conservation politics regularly denied any history other than that of a sort of charming sparse indigenous presence, and the modern-day cult of wildness and emptiness that infuses the conservation dynamics has so shaped our understanding of the region. That, and modern development catastrophe on the other. But the idea about the place being regularly transformed as difference phases of globalisation washed over it, of having had a major geopolitical history where the US, as well as France, Britain, Holland and Belgium as well as the other Amazon countries had significant agendas, I think, helps us to see the Amazon very differently from a region at the ends of the earth and the beginnings of time, as a place only now arriving on the world stage. And it helps us to frame global geopolitics not as something novel, but as a continuation of processes of place that had a major role in global politics, and today this is true of its environmental and energy/carbon politics and its development politics. What Euclides said of it is true: Amazonia鈥檚 history is like the river - always turbulent, always insurgent.鈥
Hecht is co-author of a landmark 1990 work, Fate of the Forest: Destroyers, Developers and Defenders of the Amazon, recently republished in a revised edition.
Asked whether today she is optimistic about the region鈥檚 future, she observes, 鈥淲ell, in 2000 no one would have taken a bet that deforestation would drop to levels below those of 2004 by the end of the decade. There is a lot going on - this is the subject of my next book! - and there have been enormous structural and institutional changes. What is critically defining the region has a lot to do with the carbon and energy economies (including carbon in the ground, namely gas and oil) as well as hydro power, biofuels and climate change; there are new and interesting markets for legal tropical commodities, like the forest based acai and the deforested soy economy. There are huge clandestine economies of prized timbers, drugs and gold.
Hecht adds: 鈥淎s usual, I defer to Euclides da Cunha, who remarked that only when they faced the great forest would Amazon countries come into their own histories. Amazonia and its people surprise everyone all the time. There鈥檚 that turbulence, that insurgency. And just as it has a deep history of scrambles, it also has a long history of Utopias.
鈥淲丑别苍 The Fate of the Forest was first published, the Amazon was on the cusp of its new politics shaped by conservation in inhabited environments stimulated by the work of the Forest Peoples鈥 Alliance and [the environmentalist and trade union activist] Chico Mendes, the new constitution that permitted historical claims for ancestral lands and thus claims could be ratified by means other than clearing, the rise of environmental institutions at the national level, the globalisation of environmentalism. There were also two big - perhaps equally defining - technical events: Jim Hansen鈥檚 1988 congressional testimony on the implications of carbon and climate change models, and the rise of continuous monitoring of deforestation. These set new parameters in the debates over Amazonian development and also stimulated a 鈥榖ig science鈥 effort focused on the region. Social movements, globalised economies, technical change, transformative institutional change鈥ell, Amazonia has experienced this before, so we鈥檒l see what this round has in store. But Amazonia is, in very profound ways, the hinge of the world, and what happens there has planetary implications.鈥
Karen Shook
The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha
By Susanna B. Hecht
University of Chicago Press, 632pp, 拢31.50
ISBN 9780226322810
Published 10 June 2013
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