NEWS |
Photo credit: Bruno Kelly
|
¡Felicidades a Natalia Buitron, ganadora del premio al mejor artículo de estudios amazónicos 2020!
"Autonomy, productiveness, and community: the rise of inequality in an Amazonian society." The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, vol. 26, no. 1, 2020, pp. 48 - 66. ABSTRACT: In Amazonian societies, autonomy is said to be a core value motivating egalitarian politics. This article shows how the quest for autonomy and productiveness presently sets in motion processes that encroach upon these very values. Among the Shuar of Amazonian Ecuador, the realization of autonomy and productiveness increasingly depends on the capture of state resources. Shuar interact with the local state as members of relatively recent sedentary communities and through the mediation of elected leaders. In these processes, ‘community’ itself is transformed: being a channel to regenerate domestic livelihoods, it also becomes an end in itself, giving rise to new economistic attitudes while legitimizing inequalities between commoners and leaders. The article suggests that the pursuit of autonomy and productiveness within a process of village formation is central to the transformation of egalitarianism that occurs when small-scale Amazonian polities engage with nation-state politics. También felicitamos a Patricia Vieira y Susanna Hecht y Raoni Rajão, cuyos artículos recibieron menciones de honor. “Rainforest Sublime in Cinema: A Post-Anthropocentric Amazonian Aesthetics.” Hispania, vol. 103, no. 4, 2020, pp. 533-543. ABSTRACT: In this article, I use aerial footage of the Amazon as a guiding thread to argue that the sublime is the most fitting concept to describe our aesthetic response to the representation of Amazonian nature in cinema. In my discussion of rainforest aesthetics, I focus on two Brazilian films, made ten years apart: Glauber Rocha's short Amazonas, Amazonas (); and Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema: An Amazonian Love Affair, 1975), by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna. I interpret the depiction of nature in both of these films as an instantiation of what I call "rainforest sublime." Despite their similarities, I argue that the two movies resort to sublimity to convey contrasting portrayals of the Amazon. While Rocha goes back to an age-old narrative of economic progress as a response to the natural sublime, Bodanzky and Senna's rainforest sublimity is more nuanced and chimes in with environmentalist discourses in its firm rejection of unbridled development and in its call for a respectful approach to Amazonia. “'Green Hell’ to ‘Amazonia Legal’: Land use models and the re-imagination of the rainforest as a new development frontier." Land Use Policy. July 2020. ABSTRACT: Critical scholars have addressed land use models and related technologies by pointing to their epistemological underpinnings and the social consequences of visibilities and invisibilities induced by these instruments to different forms of governance. More recently, in addition to reaffirming the old dictum that the map is not the territory, some scholars have analyzed how land use models can shape perceptions, narratives and policy, and in this way “make” the territory and the state. In this study, we adopt the notion of sociotechnical imaginaries to highlight the role of land use models and basin-wide development schemes in the emergence of military developmentalism in the Brazilian Amazon. We show that earlier surveys of the Amazon were created in order to substantiate territorial claims and to guide the exploitation of natural rubber and other extractive resources. Mapping of the rivers as arteries with limited upland assessment implied a view of the Amazon as an immutable and invincible nature where resources were given as elements of natural landscapes. The approach of economic sectorial mapping that had dominated earlier surveys began to shift during and especially after World War II in an effort to imagine Amazonia as a separate and identifiable policy space which transformation would be possible with the application of development frameworks, such as the one derived from Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). Likewise, experts from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization played a key role in providing land use models and assessment that “proved” the economic viability of large-scale colonization projects. This article points out that the extensive occupation and ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest was also informed by US large-scale planning regimes infused with technoscientific approaches derived mostly from Global North scientific institutions. Those concepts underpinned imaginaries of an integrated region whose “planning surface” would be oriented by the idea of the “Legal Amazon”, subject to a technocratic, centralized and authoritarian style of developmentalism. In this way this paper shows how land use models are not mere representations of the territory but also carriers of sociotechnical imaginaries that coproduce radical changes in social and natural landscapes. Comments are closed.
|