MICHAEL J. HECKENBERGER - The Ecology of Power

Amazonia is one of the last earthly frontiers of the modern imagination. New species, in complex webs of biodiversity, seem to turn up as quickly as biologists and botanists go out to look for them. Many scientists, in fact, feel that the cure for a whole host of world ills, everything from cancer to climate change and ecological well-being, may well be found as the Amazon yields its secrets. It is among a handful of places where isolated indigenous groups still stride into the consciousness of the civilized world (the distant second being New Guinea, according to the New York Times Magazine, October 31, 1999). It is no surprise the region is shrouded in mystery, because the lush tropical forests that dominate this vast area, which is easily the size of Europe, pose significant challenges to intruders: explorers, colonists, and scientists alike. It is a place where Western travelers and voyeurs still hope to encounter refuges of unknown or extinct species, untouched islands of natural biodiversity, untapped fonts of valuable resources, as well as our own alter egos, isolated pockets of Stone Age tribes, something preserved from ancient times: lost worlds.

It is ironic that we Western observers often look to Amazonia to encounter our living ancestors, some archaic state of nature or orientation of society, because the pastthe Amazonian pastis an enigma. Recent scientific attempts to characterize, classify, and catalogue the present nature of the Amazon forest or its people too frequently assume that present conditions characterized the past, creating an image of a primordial nature or human condition. Yet, such assumptions generally lack supporting evidence; all too often they lack even a shred of corroborating history or archaeology. Even so, old views die hard, and the centuries-old portrayals of the tropics as a torrid zone inhabited by primitive peoples and filled with jungle still pervade the scientific and popular imagination. We see them time and time again: an early condition of nature and humanity, a Garden of Eden, or a Green Hell.

The majority of native Amazonians today live at the margins of the increasingly globalized world, but was it always so? Was Amazonia always so marginal, held in place by some ecological or social imperative and distanced from the pulses of imperialism that have washed across the continent for over five hundred years? The point of view taken in this work is that native Amazonian societies, considered against the backdrop of a deep history that extends beyond 1492, were far more advanced, in terms of their cultural achievements than typically assumed. Like other Native American peoples, Amazonians faced centuries of colonialism, and the size and often fugitive nature of social groups in the twentieth century must be seen as the result of this European colonialism impacted heavily upon the indigenous peoples of the region, no less so than elsewhere, but we are still ill-prepared to consider the magnitude of colonialisms impact or, particularly, of what came before. Certainly, nothing as massive as the Inka empire ever emerged here, but the long popular view that an adaptation to the environment or some social contract prevented population growth or social complexity also is no longer tenable. Amazonian civilizations were every bit as complex, in terms of actual human lives and the changes they experienced, as temperate Europe, North America, the Pacific Islands, and Africa. Civilization in Amazonia over the past few thousand years must be measured on its own terms, and not on the Procrustean bed of Western historical experience, in comparison to European or Mediterranean examples of towns and cities, temples, palaces, and marketplaces.

Writing Amerindians as active agents in complex histories, rather than as pristine bands and tribes who are today caught, like gamebirds, in the trap of our mechanistic civilization, (Lvi-Strauss 1961: 42), has gained momentum in the 1980s and 1990s. Amazonia boasts a wide range of ethnographic studies from the late twentieth century that permit anthropologists to consider in detail the native peoples of Amazonia during this recent episode in their histories. Still, we know relatively little about their histories prior to this time, particularly their deep histories. The situation is compounded by the fact that in those few areas where we do know something about archaeology or early colonial periods, there are generally no indigenous populations, and detailed studies bridging this gap are generally lacking in regional anthropology.