Amazonia was originally described as a land without Law, Creed, or King—essentially a social tabula rasa upon which the virtues or economies of European societies could be inscribed, their deficiencies corrected, or sovereignty implemented through the creation of new kinds of polities. While not widely recognized, Amazonia has been a fertile ground for social and planning experiments since the time of Discovery. There is a consistent history of social interventions, especially over the past 100 years, which we outline in this talk. These engagements all occurred in a context of unfamiliar and often misassessed biotic exuberance. This tropicality—understood as “the essence of nature”—and tropicalism—the set of ideologies about the Amazonian tropics—stand in contrast to the widely deployed colonial idea of Orientalism, which has been consistently misapplied to Amazonia and much of the New World tropics. Orientalism (to simplify) was largely concerned with civilizational decadence, despotism, the Islamic world, and densely inhabited environments. By contrast, the New World tropics, particularly Amazonia—its tropicalism—were viewed politically as culturally empty or nascent and ecologically unmanaged: a world ripe for providential completion and open to utopian or socio-environmental experiments of various kinds. More recent archaeological research, environmental history, and ethnography are revealing the depth and complexity of populous Indigenous occupation and environmental management. Amazonia has a unique and complex history and is home to great cultural diversity. It has generated alternative “utopias” in the past and could be critical in developing frameworks for the future. We discuss these differing Amazonian engagements and explore what these historical forays might suggest about the region’s future.
May 9, 3pm
Zoom Link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86089522694?pwd=A4Sfh2cXdb71bts0bRSzveAV5n4NdO.1