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Is there sustainability in exoticized territories?
The case of Amazonia
by
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
14.496
Dissertation submitted in part fulfilment of the
Degree of Master of Cultural Studies
Department of Media, Communication and Cultural Studies
Goldsmiths University of London
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
1
Is there sustainability in exoticized territories?
The case of Amazonia
ABSTRACT
One of the most complex and vital networks of humans and non-human life
forms part of the Amazonian territories. However, given the impact of human
activities, the current (and not so new) violence in these territories has intensified
year after year. While sustainability has become one of the most ubiquitous,
contested, and essential concepts of our time, colonial legacies are inseparable
from contemporary environmental issues. As the impacts of sustainable violence
are mainly presented through images of ecology, the representation of Amazonia
becomes a central element to debate the relation between hegemonic power and
sustainability.
In this sense, this dissertation will analyse a group of images that maps the
permanence of modern vision in Amazonia. The visualisation of Amazonia
concerning ecological issues indicates that the environmental debate remains
trapped in modern rationality. This is a central dimension of the threat to the
continuity of life in these territories. Therefore, in order to contribute to a
decolonial view on [Brazilian] Amazonia, this study argues that an adequate
approach toward creating a sustainable future requires emancipation from the
hegemonic way of perceiving Amazonia. Therefore, this dissertation aims to
contribute to humans and non-human rights by speculating about the
possibilities for social transformation in the aftermath of environmental ruin.
Keywords: images of ecology, ways of seeing, decolonisation, Amazonia, violence,
erasure, multispecies, futures.
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
2
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 4
PROBLEM STATEMENT ................................................................................................................................ 4
RATIONALE ................................................................................................................................................ 7
SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROBLEM .................................................................................................................... 7
RESEARCH QUESTION .................................................................................................................................. 8
2. PHENOMENON ................................................................................................. 8
3. LITERATURE REVIEW ....................................................................................... 8
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND ........................................................................................................................... 8
AMAZONIA IN THE MODERN LOGIC .............................................................................................................. 11
OTHER WAYS OF SEEING ............................................................................................................................ 15
4. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK .......................................................................... 17
5. METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................. 19
6. ANALYSE ....................................................................................................... 23
VISUAL GUIDE ......................................................................................................................................... 23
VISUAL CULTURES AND ENVIRONMENTS ....................................................................................................... 32
SEEING FROM THE INSIDE ........................................................................................................................... 42
7. CONCLUSION ................................................................................................. 44
8. FURTHER WORK ............................................................................................ 46
9. ACKNOWLEDGMENT ...................................................................................... 47
10. BIBLIOGRAPHY .............................................................................................. 48
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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FIGURES
FIGURE 1 THIS IMAGE ILLUSTRATES THE GROWING ENVIRONMENTAL CRIMES IN 2020. THE IMAGE
WAS TAKEN BY INPE (NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR SPACE RESEARCH), WHICH IS RESPONSIBLE
FOR PROVIDING EVIDENCE OF CHANGES IN THE AMAZON RAINFOREST. IT WAS TAKEN FROM THE
BRAZILIAN NEWS WEBPAGE UOL (2020). ...................................................................... 20
FIGURE 2 PICTURE TAKEN IN COMBU ISLAND OF CABOCLOS PICKING AÇAÍ. SOURCE: MYSELF ...... 22
FIGURE 3.POSTER ADVERTISEMENT. IMAGE TAKEN FROM MORAES’S THESIS ABOUT THE ARTIST
JEAN-PIERRE CHABLOZ (2012). ................................................................................... 24
FIGURE 4. PICTURE OF THE KUARUP INDIGENOUS COMMUNITY IN THE MAGAZINE O CRUZEIRO.
IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE BRAZILIAN IMAGINARY ABOUT AMAZONIA (2002, P. 113) ........... 25
FIGURE 5. ADVERTISEMENT OF THE BRAZILIAN MILITARY GOVERNMENT. IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE
BRAZILIAN IMAGINARY ABOUT AMAZONIA (2002, P. 118) ............................................... 26
FIGURE 6. SPECIAL EDITION OF VEJA MAGAZINE ABOUT AMAZONIA. IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE
BRAZILIAN IMAGINARY ABOUT AMAZONIA (2002, P. 121) ............................................... 27
FIGURE 7 SPECIAL EDITION OF VEJA MAGAZINE ABOUT AMAZONIA. IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE
BRAZILIAN IMAGINARY ABOUT AMAZONIA (2002, P. 121). .............................................. 28
FIGURE 8. PICTURES OF THE BURNING FIRE IN AMAZONIA IN 2019. IMAGE TAKEN FROM THE
NEWSPAPER THE GUARDIAN WEBPAGE (SIEGLE, 2019) ................................................... 29
FIGURE 9. PICTURES OF 2020’S INCREASE IN DEFORESTATION OF AMAZONIA. IMAGE TAKEN FROM
THE GREENPEACE WEBPAGE (ABELVIK-LAWSON, 2020) ................................................... 30
FIGURE 10 THIS IMAGE IS A SCREENSHOT THAT I TOOK FROM THE GOOGLE PAGE. ...................... 31
FIGURE 11 PICTURE OF BELÉM, WHICH IS THE SECOND LARGE CITY IN THE BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA,
FROM A RIVERINE COMMUNITY IN THE COMBU ISLAND. SOURCE: MYSELF ........................... 34
FIGURE 12 PICTURE TAKEN IN THE TUCUNDUBA CANALS. IT IS AN AFFLUENT OF THE GUAMA RIVER
THAT SURROUNDS THE CITY OF BELÉM. SOURCE: BRUNO CARACHESTI .............................. 41
FIGURE 13 PICTURE TAKEN IN COMBU ISLAND OF CABOCLOS PICKING AND CLEANING AÇAÍ.
SOURCE: MYSELF ......................................................................................................... 43
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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1. Introduction
Problem Statement
The impacts of human activity on Brazilian Amazonia have long been debated.
Nonetheless, it was the recent burnings (2019), resulting from the relaxation of
public policies that protect the tropical forest, that have led us to recognise the
immediacy of the environmental catastrophe. This emergency brought about the
current debate on the necessity of ‘saving the Amazon’. However, what does
‘saving the Amazon’ mean? What does sustainability mean in a territory that is
based on extractive capitalism? This dissertation aims to analyse the production
of subjectivity through the image representation of Amazonia in order to debate
social ecologies and material alternatives to the environmental emergency.
This paper focuses on investigating the different meanings of sustainability in
Brazilian Amazonia (Portuguese - Brazil) which is a region that covers seven
million square kilometres, of which five and a half million square kilometres is
covered by tropical forest. Amazonia is made up of territories belonging to nine
nations, with the major portion of rainforests (60%) being contained within Brazil
(Ab’Saber, 2002). The term Amazonia is usually associated with a set of
ecosystems surrounding the hydrographic basin of the Amazonas River or with
it portions of rainforest. However, in this work, the term Amazonia will
correspond not only to the tropical forest but also to an environment formed by
an urban network that has developed along the main regional roads and rivers as
well as communities, riverine villages and indigenous territories. It is a
sophisticated space in which the environment may be understood as an
integrated network of humans and non-humans agents acting historically
(Ingold, 2000). The complex formation of the Amazonian territory will be
discussed further in chapter six when the impact of its representation is analysed.
Given the recent Brazilian colonial past, the history of Amazonia is also marked
by the history of the West. Western society has Cartesian dualism as its
rationality, in which the forest represents a limit against the human condition. As
studied by many academics around the world (Fanon, 1986; Hooks, 1992; Said,
2003; Quijano, 2014), the imposition of Western rationality, which is the Western
way of perceiving, came to be a central tool in the long history of modern
domination. The decolonial feminist Maria Lugones (2010), for example,
acknowledges the modernity/coloniality relation must be understood as
fundamentally shaped by race, gender, and sexuality. She shows how the
production of such categories/divisions went hand in hand with the
categorisation of different forms of life and knowledge. In this sense, the colonial
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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project was set in Latin America (and other parts of the world) as a modern
Western way of perceiving and experiencing things. Nicholas Mirzoeff called this
process visualisation, “meaning the making of the processes of ‘history’” (2011, p.
5).
Nonetheless, what does hegemonic power have to do with sustainability? In order
to introduce this topic, I would say that the inspiration for this analysis comes
from the work of Naomi Klein, who she examines how ideas of racial hierarchy
- described by Edward Said as “Orientalism” - have been “the silent partners to
climate change” (Klein, 2016). Klein argues that the “other” does not “have the
same rights, the same humanity, as those making the distinction” (Ibid, p. 4),
which is the main reason that those deemed to be others are more exposed to the
consequences of climate change:
The thing about fossil fuels is that they are so inherently dirty and toxic that
they require sacrificial people and places: people whose lungs and bodies
can be sacrificed to work in the coal mines, people whose lands and water
can be sacrificed to open-pit mining and oil spills […] There must be theories
of othering to justify sacrificing an entire geography – theories about the
people who lived there being so poor and backward that their lives and
culture don’t deserve protection. (Ibid, p. 5)
In the remainder of this dissertation, I seek to explore the things that are made
visible/invisible in the representation of the ecocide in Amazonia. This will
provide some elements to explain the relation between hegemonic power and
sustainability in the Amazonian territories.
In discussing the relationship between power and ways of perceiving, I will
present a group of images that map the modern project in Brazilian Amazonia.
These images will show how the modern view perpetuated itself throughout
history and how the narrative of sustainability, mainly presented in the media,
has become a factor in maintaining this logic of power. The objective is, from a
decolonial approach, to challenge the mainstream concept of sustainability
through critical analysis. I seek to demonstrate that this concept, expressed in the
current discourse of ‘saving the Amazon’, is directly linked to the hegemonic
logic of power that perpetuates an exoticized view of Amazonia and enables the
extractivist logics that threaten life there. I am being critical of the mainstream
concept of sustainability to advocate for more radical change that challenges the
dominant structures of power, which is central in the debate as proposed by T.J
Demos in the article “The Agency of Fire: Burning Aesthetics” (2019a).
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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It is essential to say that I will present the images as evidence of the perpetuation
of modern vision in Amazonia, considering them to be a suitable instrument to
observe this phenomenon rather than an instrument for a semiotic analysis of
Amazonia’s historical representation. Thus, the images will be treated not merely
as the backdrop against which political events take place, but as the medium
through which modern/colonial violence (historical and contemporary) is often
validated. To do so, I selected images from the twentieth century until the present
day (2020). This is because Amazonia came to be seen through the lens of
sustainability after the impact generated by the recolonization of the territory
from the beginning of the 20th century (Gondim, 1995; Loureiro, 2001; Bueno,
2002).
Although this dissertation focuses on the case of Brazilian Amazonia, the process
of violence and domination understood hegemonically as a linear, uninterrupted
process of “development”, associated with the “domination of nature”, is also
what shapes the world-system in which we live today (Quijano, 2001). “The
democratic order, the plantation order and the colonial order had, for a long
time, twinned relations. These relations are far from accidental. Democracy,
plantation and colonial empire are objectively part of the same historical matrix.
This original and structuring fact is central to any historical understanding of the
violence of the contemporary world order” (Mbembe, 2017, as cited in Lima,
2018). In this sense, this dissertation project aligns with the decolonial studies in
which the development of new modes of understanding can apply to both local
and global scales.
For this purpose, evidence will be produced to challenge the Western division
between “nature” and “culture” by unpacking the image representation of
Amazonia concerning environmental issues. After analysing the group of images,
I will debate the impacts that this representation generates on the territory. The
aim is “the contestation of easy colonial dichotomies between nature/culture,
female/male, active/passive, subject/object, indigenous/invasive,
tradition/progress, and so on […] In other words, the continued forms of
colonialism, after the end of formal colonialism, that permeate contemporary
social, cultural, political, and epistemological orders.” (Orlow, 2018, p. 30).
Finally, to be able to imagine entirely different ways of seeing and being this
dissertation is a critique of the hegemonic power of Western modernity based on
the environmental degradation in Amazonia.
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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Rationale
One of the most complex life networks of humans and non-human life forms
part of the Amazonian territory. Studying this subject is highly relevant given the
current (and not so new) situation of violence there. As Arturo Escobar (2018) has
pointed out, the transition from modernity’s one-world ontology to a pluriverse
of socio-natural configurations is urgent to support the existence of those whose
lives have been objectified and rendered invisible throughout the process of
Western violence and domination. If the future is determined in the present, it is
urgent to imagine a non-apocalyptic future, a future of living together, as distinct
from a forgotten past. This project aims to contribute to the rights of humans and
non-humans by speculating about new ways of seeing that oppose the ruinous
effects of the logic of capital.
Moreover, sustainability has become one of the most ubiquitous, contested, and
essential concepts of our time. Although the concept was first introduced in
response to environmental concerns, the legacies of colonialism are inseparable
from contemporary environmental issues. As a means to contribute to the debate
about decolonising the concept of sustainability in Brazilian Amazonia, this study
argues that an adequate approach to a sustainable future requires emancipation
from the hegemonic way of perceiving Amazonia and the many forms of life that
compose it. In order to overcome the infertile idea of homogeneous humanity,
we must start from the premise that “ways of acting in the environment are also
ways of perceiving it” (Ingold, 2000, p. 9). This is why understanding
representation will allow us to notice the things that are generally not available
to the naked eye (Gómez-Barris, 2017).
Significance of the Problem
This dissertation will contribute to the existing debate about the decolonisation
of thought and offers, more specifically, a decolonial view of Amazonia. In this
sense, this study calls for the need to pay attention to what is happening close to
the ground. It is important to reinforce that the intention is to contribute with a
non-normative perspective in which, instead of searching for a central truth,
plurality becomes a central aspect. Thus, it calls for a change of perspective of the
hegemonic world-system. The goal, therefore, aligns with subaltern studies
through the premise of “learning from” (Savransky, 2017) the stories of humans
and non-humans that have been living outside the matrix of power.
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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Research Question
The central question this project aims to answer is: What are the different current
meanings of Amazonia in the modern Western world?
The questions that are consequently asked are:
1. As informed by history, how does the modern imaginary favour the
development and implementation of policies that threaten the continuity of
life in the region?
2. How does this hegemonic perspective contribute to the maintenance of
extractive capitalism and modern-Western power relations founded on the
inequality of races, gender, territories and species?
3. In what ways and to what extent do present day images/representations
contribute to economic exploitation?
2. Phenomenon
The phenomenon that will be analysed is the permanence of modern view and
rationality in Amazonia. The evidence for this phenomenon will be presented in
the form of a visual guide in the first part of the Analysis (chapter six). In order
to debate both the representation and what is understood of Amazonia, the visual
guide corresponds to a set of images from different historical periods, as
mentioned in the introduction. In aiming to map modernity in Amazonia, these
images will serve to analyse the relationship between the continuation of modern
rationality and environmental degradation in Amazonia.
3. Literature Review
Historical Background
While it may be easy to claim that nature is a cultural construction, it is not so
easy to ascertain what might be meant by this. In this sense, the task is less about
uncovering the meaning of Cartesian thought and more about the effects of this
rationality. There has been a short-circuit in the ideology of separation between
nature and culture since this division has produced numerous crises. The
converging crises we live as human civilization on the planet demonstrates how
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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modernity produces catastrophic events, such as the ecological crisis, which
reveal the impossibility of this dichotomy between nature and culture.
Although the division between nature and culture is the basis of modern Western
thought, the root of the problem is not nature in the scientific sense. According
to Bruno Latour (1993), the division between nature and culture is, above all, a
way of doing politics, of bringing things together in two systems, for reasons that
come from the logics of modernity itself. Among the various ways of
understanding the place of thought in the [modern] historical construction of
reality, the theory of the Coloniality of Power developed by Anibal Quijano
(2000; 2001) reveals many of the contradictions of the world in which we live.
He argues that the Americas and its history are “the very source from which the
world emanates the categories that allow us to think modernity”(2014, p. 23).
To elucidate the socio-political developments of this process - a pattern of global
domination -, Quijano coined the concept of coloniality of power, highlighting
the key mechanisms through which colonization takes places: the violent
destruction of cultural symbols; the repression of (indigenous) knowledge,
imaginary, and expression; the extraction of useful indigenous knowledge for the
benefit of the coloniser; and the establishment of European knowledge and
culture. He demonstrates that colonial power is a system of domination based on
a network of intersubjective social relations in which the configuration and
naturalization of the idea of "race” sustain a hierarchical social classification of
the world population (Quintero, 2010). Such a classification has played a central
role within the new global identities that were constituted with colonialism.
The association of colonial ethnocentrism and universal racial classification
helps to explain why Europeans came to feel not only superior to all the
other peoples of the world, but, in particular, naturally superior […] From
this point of view, intersubjective and cultural relations between Western
Europe and the rest of the world were codified in a strong play of new
categories: east-west, primitive-civilized, magic/mythic-scientific,
irrational-rational, traditional-modern — Europe and not Europe. (Quijano,
2001, p. 788)
If, according to postcolonial studies, the Orient was a geographical creation which
enabled the West to ‘exist’, thus marking the very foundation of the ‘other’ (Said,
2003), then for Quijano and decolonial studies, the creation of the America[s]
invented Europe.
Quijano thus shows that, with the conquest of the Americas, a new system of
labour control is generated. In the production of the coloniser subject - along
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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with race, gender, and sexuality - capitalism becomes the central element in the
colonial matrix of power. The construction of racial and gender hierarchies and
the appropriation of natural resources coincided with the constitution of an
international division of labour. From this perspective, Quijano defines the
concept of coloniality as something that goes beyond the particularities of
historical colonialism because it does not disappear with independence or the
decolonisation of the Americas (see more in Assis, 2014). This formulation is an
attempt to explain modernity as a process intrinsically linked to the colonial
experience. The distinction between colonialism and coloniality, therefore, is
that the latter is a word that explains the continuity of colonial forms of
domination after colonialism.
Pablo Quintero, a scholar of Quijano's work, argues that “what is termed
globalization is a culmination of a process that began with the constitution of
America and colonial/modern Eurocentered Capitalism as anew global power”
(2010). The author has pointed out that with Latin American independence in the
early nineteenth century, a process of decolonisation began but not decoloniality.
By analysing Quijano’s concepts, Quintero shows that the new Latin American
nation-states managed to become independent from the hegemonic powers, but
coloniality and its fundamental effects continued to operate within the different
countries and with different effects
1
. Over time different social structures were
produced; however, they were all articulated under the cloak of the colonial
system of differentiation and the control of labour through capitalism. Without
a doubt, the coloniality of power is the central element in the structuring of Latin
American society.
It is important to notice that the most powerful feature of modern Western
power is Eurocentrism, which has been a way of imposing a distorting mirror on
the dominated that will force them (us) to see themselves (ourselves) with the
eyes of the dominator. This has the effect of blocking and covering up the
autonomous historical and cultural perspectives of the dominated.
The repression fell, above all, over the modes of knowing, of producing
knowledge, of producing perspectives, images and systems of images,
symbols, modes of signification, over the resources, patterns, and
instruments of formalized and objectivised expression, intellectual or visual.
It was followed by the imposition of the use of the rulers’ own patterns of
expression, and of their beliefs and images served not only to impede the
cultural production of the dominated, but also as a very efficient means of
1
It is important to point out that the process of colonization and the process of becoming independent was
different in each country of Latin America, and here I am not trying to be a generalist. Instead, I am focusing on
the creation of the world-system.
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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social and cultural control, when the immediate repression ceased to be
constant and systematic. (Quijano, 2007, p. 169)
The modes of production and control of intersubjective relations acquire a
specific character from this pattern of power, marked by the control of the social
imaginary, historical memory and production of knowledge. “This coloniality of
power expressed through political and economic spheres”, Quijano continues,
“was strongly associated with a coloniality of knowledge (or of imagination),
articulated as modernity/rationality” (Bhambra, 2014, p. 117). Historically,
"Eurocentrism" has, obviously, involved the appropriation of the intellectual and
technological achievements of the colonized.
In the same line, Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011) develops a comparative decolonial
framework for visual culture studies, explaining how the techniques of
classification, separation, and aestheticization have been central to the
legitimisation of Western hegemony. He named such a process ‘the visualisation
of history’. The notion of visuality actually refers to a set of mechanisms that
order and organise the world, not necessarily based on images but ways of world-
making. These [violent] transformations of the world are the expression of the
self-authorising tendencies of hegemonic thinking.
As the decolonial critic Frans Fanon had it, such repeated experience
generates an ‘aesthetic of respect for the status quo’, the aesthetic of the
proper, of duty, of what is felt to be right and hence pleasing, ultimately
even beautiful. (Ibid, 2011, p. 3)
The understandings of decolonial studies, and the concept of coloniality and
Eurocentrism developed by Quijano more specifically, have propelled many
theses and concerns. In the case of this dissertation, it was the in-depth study of
the decolonial theories that allowed me to question the different meanings of
Amazonia.
Amazonia in the modern logic
Neide Gondim in The Invention of Amazonia (1995) points out that many of the
meanings associated with Amazonia constitute representations that allow the
region to be conceived as an invention. The author argues the concept of
Amazonia was invented by Europeans: “Amazonia was not discovered, not even
built. In fact, the invention of Amazonia occurs from the construction of India,
which was manufactured by Greco-Roman historiography in the stories of
pilgrims, missionaries, travellers and traders” (Ibid. p. 9). As debated in the social
sciences literature for some decades now, particularly in studies about ethnic
Natalia Figueredo
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groups (Said, 2003; Morris, 2010), the ‘Orient’ was (and still is) synonymous with
‘exoticism’. Gondim highlights, thus, the imagination of medieval people was
populated by legends that described the fantastic ‘oriental’ world. Amazonia,
from this perspective, is the result of the imagination of the European colonizer
influenced by the images of Indian and Greco-Roman mythologies, which they
considered ‘exotic’.
Coelho (2012), in turn, calls attention to the fact that Europeans attributed the
term ‘Indian’ (Indio in Portuguese) to the inhabitants of the ‘new’ continent. In
naming America’s native population as ‘Indigenous’, they alluded not only to the
region of India but mainly to all the differences the Europeans observed in the
climate, vegetation, animals and the physiognomy of native peoples. The name
is attributable to the social and cultural alterity observed in the ‘other’. While the
representation of Amazonia as a realm of shimmering, fragile nature and its
ferocious jungle alter ego do have deep roots in the past, its present-day
incarnation has more to do with the global environmental movement that
emerged in the 1980s. It has continued to morph over time.
Amazonia remained a territory isolated from the rest of Brazil for a long time,
mainly due to its difficult access. However, from the 1930s, in addition to the
ancient myths of the New World, Amazonia came to be considered as an
anachronistic region, displaced from the continuum of Western linear time. The
physical, economic and cultural isolation – which, for a long time, had prevented
(or at least delayed) the establishment of developmental and civilizing ideals –
prompted the creation of new myths about the region, as pointed out by Loureiro
(2001). Thus, "the distance in space is now understood as distance in time”
(Loureiro, 2001, p. 41). It brought about the construction of an imaginary of
Amazonia as a giant frontier that must be transformed into a wellspring of
profitable resources.
In the 30s, debates within the Brazilian government on the reconfiguration of
the Brazilian territory intensified. According to Magali Bueno (2002), the
governments’ objective was to increase the political and economic control over
states to achieve greater national integration. The Brazilian government
stimulated what was called the March to the West (‘Marcha para o Oeste’), a
movement to ‘occupy’ the tropical forest. The settlement of Amazonia became a
strategy to open the country’s centre-west and northern regions to development
for national interests. As such, it became a symbol of the nation's size and
imperial aspirations (Coelho, 2012). The state development agenda was marked,
from then on, by a nationalist, interventionist policy and embryonic state
planning.
Natalia Figueredo
August 2020
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However, since the military coup, which lasted from 1964 to 1980, that the
policies of occupying and developing Amazonia increased. Recognizing the
potential of the natural resources of the Amazonian region, the military
government intensified the developmental policies towards the territory.
The word Amazonia may refer to different territorial configurations. If
Amazonia primarily corresponded to the river basin that gave it its name,
its boundaries were somewhat accommodated for statistical purposes and
correspond to the area of the states that make up what is known as the
Northern region of Brazil. However, the most significant change, both in the
contours and boundaries […] occurred in 1966 with the creation of Brazil’s
Legal Amazonia by the dictatorship government. (Bueno, 2002, p. 163).
During this period, the government aimed to create infrastructure and give tax
breaks to attract economic projects to the region. To do so, it opened highways
such as the Belém-Brasília and Transamazônica. It also built hydroelectric dams
to subsidize activities such as logging, agribusiness and industrialization in
productive centres such as the Manaus Free Trade Zone. In addition, mining
projects gave rise to large undertakings such as the Trombetas Project (the
exploitation of bauxite and raw material for aluminium, in Pará) and the Grande
Carajás Project (the exploitation of gold, iron, copper, manganese and nickel, also
in Pará).
João Santos Nahum in Região, discurso e representação: a Amazônia nos planos de
desenvolvimento (2012) analyses the political actions during the dictatorship that
reorganized the territory of northern Brazil in order to insert Amazonia into the
world capitalist logic as an extractive zone. Nahum draws attention to the
relationship between region and representation in the Amazonia Development
Plans (PDAs). According to the author, the word ‘region’ was just an attempt to
materialize a set of hegemonic interests in a particular ‘space’. Therefore, in order
to understand the regional dynamics, one must consider the relationship
between the spatial configuration of the region and its representation:
Nature is a topic that soon comes to the fore in all these plans. References
are made to it either in general or even dedicating a specific chapter to it
under the title of ‘natural resources.’ The theme space is another constant in
the plans which often comes with the adjective ‘empty’ or the expression to
be ‘occupied and/or integrated’ into the whole of the national and world
space [...] The theme ‘men’ appears timidly in PDAs, under the label of
‘population’, ‘labour’, ‘people’, ‘rural worker’, among others. The ‘men’ is
associated with the ideas of ‘occupation’, ‘official or spontaneous
colonization’ and ‘migrations’. (Ibid, p. 32)
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14
Nahum points out that under the PDAs (Amazonia’s Development Plans),
Amazonia became a separating agent; when seen as nature, the untouched
rainforest was not considered part of the (national) whole. Thus, nature and
humans were initially separated. “Amazonian as nature, is a stock of resources.
The space is empty, neutral and unhistorical, and the men is an object” (Ibid, p.
7). Thus, when migrants arrived in the Amazonian “empty space”, they were
converted into human resources to exploit nature. Thus, Amazonia becomes part
of the whole when "men" and "nature" come together.
Contrary to state publicity that advertised Amazonia as an empty territory, it was
a place where Indigenous people, Quilombolas (blacks), Caboclos (riverine
communities) and descendants of Northeastern rubber soldiers lived. Under the
label 'Integrate to not surrender' ('Integrar para não entregar'), aero-
photogrammetric, cartographic, pedological, and mineral survey projects,
among others, were financed and created in order to decide which lands would
be 'preserved' and which would be exploited. Thus, they moved native
populations from their places of origin and defined migratory flows according to
the economic project.
Due to intense economic activity and the impact these activities in the
Amazonian territory, from the 1980s – and especially after the Eco-92 (United
Nations Conference on Environment and Development) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992
– the discourse on the preservation of the rainforest intensified. Bueno shows
that environmental discourse is strongly associated with what nowadays is the
imaginary about Amazonia. The idea of ecological paradise, purity, and the
virginity of the rainforest became associated with the new concepts of
preservation, conservation and responsibility. The mass media, such as
newspapers, magazines, radio and television, played a fundamental role in the
dissemination of this view.
Bueno’s analysis of reports on Amazonia that were published in widely
circulated, and influential magazines from 1957 to 2000 shows that the imaginary
about Amazonia that is present all over the world was produced in large part by
the mass media. Illustrated magazines such as O Cruzeiro, Realidade, Manchete and
Veja played a significant role in the construction of this imaginary in Brazil
(Bueno, 2002). The author defines four categories of analysis for the photographs
used in the reports based on recurring themes: long-distance aerial photography,
deforestation, roads and Indians (Ibid, 2002, p. 125). These are cliché images,
often only illustrative and not very informative.
Aerial-photos of the forests are one of the main clichés associated with Amazonia,
not only in print media but also in cinema and television (Bueno, 2002;
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Gonçalves, 2009; Coelho, 2012). According to Bueno, these images almost always
refer to the grandeur of the region and aim to break the ‘monotony’ of the
landscape. Another interesting observation by Bueno regards the representation
of the inhabitants of the region. She points out that the image of Indigenous
peoples is privileged, whereas the presence of other social groups, such as
caboclos, blacks (Quilombolas) and whites (in urban centres) is practically
ignored. Indigenous people came to assume a cultural, symbolic character that,
like the forest, needs to be preserved.
All of the authors consulted for this historical analysis of the representation of
Amazonia (Gondim, 1995; Bueno, 2002; Gonçalves, 2009; Coelho, 2012; Nahum,
2012), highlighted that the journalistic article was absorbed as factual by a
majority of their audience. In fact, in most cases, the media resort, whether
intentionally or not, to reality-cliché images. Bueno calls attention to the fact that
those images end up being as fictional and subjective as a created novel or film
about Amazonia (Bueno, 2002, p. 138). It is possible to say that, in the current
moment, the meaning attributed to the region favours the concept of nature
while ignoring the complexity of the territories and the different forms of life
there. Therefore, the question that remains is whether the image representation
of Amazonia contributes to knowledge of the region and its problems or if it
reinforces the concepts of exotic wilderness and nature.
Having reviewed the current literature, it is evident that there is a need for
research from decolonial and social justice perspectives on the impact of the
modern imaginary of Amazonia. Many authors, as mentioned above, have
studied the meaning of Amazonia within the hegemonic logic of the globalised
world, either in words or images. However, it is necessary and urgent to analyse
the impacts of the modern imaginary of Amazonia not just to diagnose them, but
also so that we may discuss the possibility of surviving in the aftermath of
environmental ruin.
Other ways of seeing
The purpose of investigating ways of seeing aligns with the decolonial approach
to engage in epistemic disobedience, as Mignollo (2005) states. Moreover, in the
last decade, there has been debate on the need for projects that do not reproduce
the bias of Western theory (Bhambra, 2014; Santos, 2016; Savransky, 2017),
demanding a realignment of history (Quijano, 2014). From this perspective, this
study engages new modes of understanding “to move beyond the very abyssal
line that bifurcates knowledge from reality” (Savransky, 2017, p. 13).
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To do so I carried out an extensive study of the literature concerned with this
‘epistemic disobedience’. On the one hand, there are the studies of Boaventura
de Sousa Santos and readers of his work, such as Martin Savransky in the essay
“A Decolonial Imagination: Sociology, Anthropology and the Politics of Reality”.
Due to “more than a scholarly interest in the history of scientific knowledge,
Santos’s is an ethical and political project of taking seriously the critical question
of what kinds of social, cultural and political life such forms of knowing have
made available at a global scale, and at what cost” (Savransky, 2017, p. 14). This
work aims to drive an urgent transformation of the social order in which we live.
On the other hand, there is the literature concerned with other ways of being,
such as the article “Subaltern Modernity Kerala, the Eastern Theatre of Resistance
in the Global South” by Raman, K Ravi, Gurminder K Bhambra, and Boaventura
De Sousa Santos (2017). In this study the notion of subaltern modernity is
developed. The objective of studying this topic is to support the idea that there is
more than one modernity, that is, more than one way to build a world. This
argument makes it possible to refute the modern Western hegemonic
construction of a homogeneous humanity (“humankind”). I have also researched
authors that work with ways of perceiving, such as Eduardo Kohn’s book How
Forests Think (2013), and the great research of Paulo Tavares (2014, 2016) and
Macarena Gómez-Barris (2017) in the field of visual culture, creative practice and
politics.
As a way of approaching an anthropological - and philosophical - concepts that
mark the difference between Western modernity and other modernities, the
work of two other authors are also important: first, the concept of “equivocation”,
defined by the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (2014), which
explains the mode of communication among Amerindian peoples and other-
than-human subjects in Brazilian Amazonia; and second, the perception of the
environment by Tim Ingold (2000, 2005) who brilliantly offers a reflection on
how human beings perceive their surroundings.
Finally, in order to bring the debate closer to studies dedicated to ecology, I
engaged with the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four
Theses” (2019), in which the author presents some responses to the climate
change crisis by making a connection between the environmental crises and
historical events (present, past and concepts of future). I also studied Donna’s
Haraway’s essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene:
Making Kin” (2015) and Anna Tsing’s book “The mushroom at the end of the
world on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins”(2017). In both works, Haraway
and Tsing imagine new ways of being in a multispecies world. They argue that
storytelling is an essential part of strategies to imagine a different world.
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Moreover, stories are a way to de-link from the hegemonic concept of a one-
world established by Western modernity. At the same time, Naomi Klein’s
aforementioned text (2016) about the relation between the climate crisis and
Eduard Said’s concept of the “other” (2003) is useful to debate environmental
racism.
This review shows that despite extensive literature both on the decolonisation of
thought and on the relationship between ways of perceiving and ecology, this
debate is far from over. Specifically, there are still very few decolonial studies
that concern the maintenance of modern/colonial practices in the
environmentalist representation of Brazilian Amazonia. Moreover, discussing
decolonial strategies is central to thinking about building different futures. Thus,
this research on the ways of seeing within the debate about sustainability aims to
contribute to the existing efforts to decolonise knowledge production by
enriching different perceptions of the Amazonian territories that favour more
just futures.
4. Theoretical framework
Given that the production of subjectivity is a powerful feature in modernity
(Eurocentrism), images come to be a powerful way to perceive that things, such
as identity, gender, race, are not spontaneous but culturally constructed(Berger
and Corporation, 2008). Even though knowledge can be represented through
images or words, this project is dedicated to analysing representation through
images and their impacts on the production of subjectivity. Considering that
images are made up of families of different kinds of representation (Mitchell,
1984), this dissertation will use graphic images, particularly photos, as part of the
analysis.
According to Stuart Hall, “we give things meaning by how we represent them - the
words we use about them, the stories we tell about them, the images of them we
produce, the emotions we associate with them, the ways we classify and
conceptualize them, the values we place on them” (1997, p. 3, emphasis in
original). From such a perspective, representation is where one thing stands for
another. “Representation is a signifying practice” (Ibid, p. 4). Hall argues that
shared signs and images form a conceptual map that gives meaning to the world
rather than merely reflecting it, indicating the centrality of culture in shaping our
collective perceptions.
The production of images has far-reaching consequences on how we ‘make sense
of the world’. Image-making technologies, such as maps and prints, have played
a vital cultural role in the modern project of domination. They are a mechanism
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of knowledge production that has the capacity to embody information. Alford
Korzybski stated, "a map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a
similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness" (1942, p. 58).
This is why, in the recent past, to document, communicate, and transport claims
about the New World, modern/colonial power used visual epistemology as a
technique for producing and circulating knowledge (Bleichmar, 2015).
The notion that visual images work as a technique of world-making is not new. It
is something that feminist, anti-racist, queer, postcolonial, and other critical
theorists have long argued (Fanon, 1986; Hooks, 1992; Latour, 1993; Butler, 2015).
Beginning with white European theorists, Walter Benjamin, in his text The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), analyses the relation between
the social determinants of our vision and our relationship with the world of
images. The author states that every image embodies a way of seeing because its
creation presupposes several choices and gestures (Bouch, 2012). Michel
Foucault’s in the theory of power/knowledge (1995) has called attention to the
fact that “the universality of our Knowledge has been acquired at the cost of
exclusion, bans, denials, rejection, at the price of a kind of cruelty about reality”
(Claris, 1971, pt. 00:04:10). Foucault exposes in his work the gap between the
discursive and the “visible,” the seeable and the sayable.
The study of representation has tended to focus on the way in which different
social groups (gender, race, sexuality and class) are represented. The Other is
often represented as being exotic, violent, hostile and mysterious, and either
stands in opposition to or is portrayed as being completely different from the
Westerner (Ahmed, 2000). At the very beginning of the essay “Can the Subaltern
Speak?” (2010), Spivak points out:
An understanding of contemporary relations of power, and of the Western
intellectual’s role within them, requires an examination of the intersection
of a theory of representation and the political economy of global capitalism.
A theory of representation points, on the one hand, to the domain of
ideology, meaning, and subjectivity, and, on the other hand, to the domain
of politics, the state, and the law.
The author states that representation is a structuring tool within modernity, such
that the image seems to be the privileged view of late modern culture. Especially
nowadays, with mass media and our means of global communication, images
surround us with their meanings. The article “Modality and representation” on
the webpage Visual Memory (Chandler, 2017) acknowledges that, over time,
certain methods of production, such as cinema and photojournalism, become
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naturalized. It brought about the content that has come to be accepted as a
'reflection of reality'.
Therefore, through images, it is possible to decode not only ways of seeing, but
also the bias of modernity/coloniality. To borrow some words from Michell,
W.T.J, I am not saying that all these different encounters with visual
representation can be reduced to a single thesis. The crux of the matter is to
understand what the image says about the viewer, or even what the images are
'documenting'. In terms of Amazonia, do they reflect 'the truth' about the
territories, or is there more than one kind of truth depending on its
representation? After all, decolonisation is essentially an act of confrontation with
a hegemonic mode of thinking, seeing and being.
5. Methodology
This project was carried out by reviewing secondary information from a
bibliography that includes articles from magazines, books and theses related to
the themes of visual culture and decolonial studies. It is worth bearing in mind
that much of what has already been written in both fields belong to many areas
of knowledge, such as Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and Philosophy.
This study developed a systematic literature review from a multidisciplinary
perspective to interpret issues that concern the interaction between ways of
seeing and the politics of ecology.
The methods applied to carry out this research were distributed on three fronts:
I. Visual Guide
A group of images (or visual guide) will be presented as the material source to
consider how the hegemonic representation of Amazonia – for example, images
that reinforce the understanding of Amazonia and nature as synonymous –
involves more than a mere description of its objective geological periodisation.
Instead, the selected images will evidence the perpetuation of modern/colonial
rationality toward Amazonia. In order to build the visual map, first, publications
related to the power of images were analysed. This literature contributes to the
existing debate among scholars in the humanities and the social sciences that
have provided robust and sophisticated post-colonial and decolonial analyses
about the process of visualisation. This literature provided the basis for the
development of the visual map.
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Figure 1 This image illustrates the growing environmental crimes in 2020. The image was taken by INPE
(National Institute for Space Research), which is responsible for providing evidence of changes in the
Amazon rainforest. It was taken from the Brazilian news webpage UOL (2020).
Second, in order to define the images that would compose the visual guide, I
consulted research which includes semiotic analysis of Amazonia. To do this,
relevant bibliographic material was considered (e.g. books, articles, dissertations,
theses, and interviews), especially those linked to the production of knowledge
mainly within cultural and media studies, visual arts and literature, such as the
works of Neide Gondim and João Nahum which were mentioned in the literature
review. A Google search was also performed on the most searched topics and
results in relation to the word Amazonia.
Third, eight images were selected from three different sources. The first is Magali
Bueno's thesis, “The Brazilian imaginary about Amazonia” (2002), which studies
the meanings of the word Amazonia in school geography books and popular
magazines in Brazil. Bueno also took a survey in three major cities in Brazil - São
Paulo, Belém and Manaus - to understand what people understood when they
heard the word Amazonia, both in terms of the region and their mental image.
Another work that helped in the selection of the images was the Master's research
by Coelho “Animated Amazonia: Representation of the Amazonian region in
Brazilian animation cinema” (2012), which analyses the representation of
Amazonia in cinema, Brazilian arts (such as the paintings of romanticism and
modernism), and mass media. Finally, the most recent images representing
Amazonia, which concern the latest events of environmental violence, were
taken from reports of great international newspapers (such as The Guardian) and
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the Greenpeace website. It is important to say that the text “The agency of fire”
by T.J Demos (2019a) in the web newspaper e-flux, which discusses the aesthetics
of fire, helped in the selection of images that concern the current situation in
Amazonia.
The images were selected based on three criteria: 1) being linked to major
information vehicles; 2) being part of a report on Amazonia or a special issue
about Amazonia; 3) and, finally, corresponding to different historical periods
(within modern Western linearity) in Brazil. It is also important to note that only
eight images were selected to discuss the impact that the representation of
Amazonia has in the region itself, rather than to elaborate a thesis on how
Amazonia is represented. There are already brilliant works, such as those
mentioned above, that undertake a broad survey of the history of the
representation of Amazonia.
II. Visual cultures and environment
After presenting the images, I will analyse their impact in Amazonia by way of
textual analysis. The objective is to analyse the pictures to understand the
messages present in them. The analysis will be divided into two different
processes:
a. Unpacking the image – what the image tells
On the one hand, I will examine the image systems of the global crisis in order
to critically investigate how the colonial past continues to haunt those living in
the present. In other words, I will analyse the meanings contained in these images
in order to show how the spectres of modernity/colonialism are still present as
the hegemonic way of seeing. The objective is to show that these images, which
embody the mainstream discourse on sustainability, do not challenge the power
structures responsible for environmental degradation. Instead, they actually
favour exploitative logics by perpetuating the modern separation of nature and
culture.
b. Impact
On the other hand, following the analyses that situate the images within the
modern matrix of power, I will analyse the impacts of this imaginary on the
region. The questions of who is the "we" in the discourse of sustainability and also
who has the right to speak in the debate over climate change will be discussed. I
draw attention to how this system of representation not only erases the
emergencies of the past but also neglects causes in the present.
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III. Seeing from the inside
As a final point, this work will engage with the concept of “learning from”
(Savransky, 2017), in order to cultivate futures of justice and multispecies
alliances. It seeks to demonstrate how the significant consequence of the
hegemonic view of Amazonia is that this way of perceiving renders invisible not
only the complex formation of the different territories that make up Amazonia
but also the multiple forms of life that compose them. I will argue that there is
no single modernity, but rather multispecies world. In this sense, this study will
finish exploring the idea of stories (narratives) as a method to resist and reinvent
(Haraway, 2015; Tsing, 2017). In order words, I argue for the need to break with
the hegemonic power from the perspective of resisting subjects and agents.
Finally, I intend to centre these particular subjective experiences in order to
speculate about new material solutions in Amazonia without relying on the myth
of a global identity that compresses humanity into one single humankind, as
Dipesh Chakrabarty has pointed out (2019).
Figure 2 Picture taken in Combu island of Caboclos picking Açaí. Source: myself
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6. Analyse
Visual Guide
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• Recolonisation
In 1943, the Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas (1930-1945) prompted a
migrational movement to recolonize Amazonia, known as the “march to the
West”. The Swiss artist Jean-Pierre was invited by the Special Service for the
Mobilization of Workers to Amazonia (SEMTA) to illustrate posters that invited
workers from Northeastern Brazil to collaborate in the ‘rubber battle’.
Figure 3.Poster advertisement. Image taken from Moraes’s thesis about the artist Jean-Pierre Chabloz
(2012).
Translation: “Everyone in their own place! Brazil towards VICTORY”
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The magazine O Cruzeiro in 1957 published a special edition about Amazonia in
which one article, entitled “Kuarup”, explains a ritual practiced by indigenous
peoples in the Xingu region.
Figure 4. Picture of the Kuarup indigenous community in the magazine O Cruzeiro. Image taken from
The Brazilian imaginary about Amazonia (2002, p. 113)
Translation: “Fabulous documentary of the most primitive fishing process”
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• Development
This image is an advertisement by the Brazilian Military government in 1971. It
is part of a special edition of the magazine Realidade about Amazonia. The choice
of the font of the letters was the same as that of the magazine's edition so that the
advertising would be incorporated into the magazine's reports.
Figure 5. Advertisement of the Brazilian Military Government. Image taken from The Brazilian imaginary
about Amazonia (2002, p. 118)
Translation: Advertising information: “The development of Amazonia is born here today”
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• Sustainable development
In 1997 the Brazilian magazine Veja published a special edition about Amazonia
with 89 pages and 12 reports. Two of these were dedicated to deforestation and
one other addressed topics about biodiversity and indigenous communities. The
magazine's index includes topics such as economics and the Jungle Almanac
(numbers, volumes, extension and curiosities of the region).
Figure 6. Special edition of Veja magazine about Amazonia. Image taken from The Brazilian
imaginary about Amazonia (2002, p. 121)
Translation: Cover: Amazonia, a threatened treasure; Report: The destruction of
Amazonia. The besieged forest
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In the 2000s, Veja launched another magazine whose cover makes reference to
Amazonia, but includes only two reports on the topic, both focused on the
problem of deforestation. The first report shows the pace of devastation and the
second exposes the infrastructure projects in the region, associating them with
the destruction of the environment.
Figure 7 Special edition of Veja magazine about Amazonia. Image taken from The Brazilian imaginary
about Amazonia (2002, p. 121).
Translation: Cover: Amazonia. Until when?; Report: How long can the Amazon resist?
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• Current Situation
In August 2019, the newspaper The Guardian published a report about the fires
burning in Amazonia. Showing data about the speed of deforestation, the report
argues that the destruction of the forest is directly associated with consumption
culture, in particular with the fashion industry and leather production in the
region.
Figure 8. Pictures of the burning fire in Amazonia in 2019. Image taken from the newspaper The
Guardian webpage (Siegle, 2019)
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On the Greenpeace website (2020) this image that appears to explain the increase
in deforestation in the beginning of 2020 and how it threatens indigenous
people. The report also explains that the boost in the destruction of the
environment this year is related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Figure 9. Pictures of 2020’s increase in deforestation of Amazonia. Image taken from the Greenpeace webpage
(Abelvik-lawson, 2020)
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These are the images that appear on Google (June 2020) when searching
Amazonia.
Figure 10 This image is a screenshot that I took from the Google page.
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Visual cultures and Environments
a. unpacking the image
In the last few years, we have seen many [impactful] images in articles that
emphasise the emergency of climate change. In 2019, for example, through the
media, we witnessed the massive loss of life in the pictures of fire consuming
Amazonia. Even though in the catastrophic era of climate change ecological
images are vital tools to call attention to the urgency of climate breakdown,
mainstream images “present a misleading visual field of aesthetic contemplation
[…] A denialist visual epistemology where fires burn more than wood and bodies”
(Demos, 2019a, p. 2). It is also possible to question the extent to which these
images generate empathy or are just an image archive of the destruction of the
tropical forest.
Under the current Brazilian government, with Bolsonaro as president, there has
been an intensification of the fires and deforestation in Amazonia. At the same
pace, images of ecocide have become increasingly frequent in the media. At the
time of this writing, the fire season has just started [again] in Amazonia. It is
already possible to see the first images of the fire that, for yet another season, will
consume plants, animals, and cultures. The importance of denouncing this is
undeniable. However, the problem with the representations of mainstream
environmentalism is that these images do not capture “the deep circumstances
of its emergence, focusing instead on the visible effects” (Ibid, 2019, p. 7). Put
simply, much of the mainstem images of ecology addresses the emergency
without challenging dominant structures of power.
One could argue that, in the modern era, whose current political-economic
structure is capitalism, several concepts emerge in order to reaffirm the
dominant social and political system: democracy, development, progress,
globalization and more recently sustainable development. Thus, if modernity is
established by the binary system that separates nature from culture, the way of
perceiving the environment will be the same regardless of the socio-political
system. Tim Ingold’s argues:
For the world can exist as nature only for a being that does not belong there,
and that can look upon it, in the manner of the detached scientist, from such
a safe distance that it is easy to connive in the illusion that it is unaffected by
his presence. Thus, the distinction between environment and nature
corresponds to the difference in perspective between seeing ourselves as
beings within a world and as beings without it. (2000, pt. 20)
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Bruno Latour affirms that “from the time the term ‘politics’ was invented, every
type of politics has been defined by its relation to nature” (2004, p. 1). In this way,
the current image of Amazonia ends up being part of the same matrix which has
used representation as a tool of domination. Moreover, the fact of global
warming (through the constant release of CO2 emissions) is also part of this long
history of Western world power (Chakrabarty, 2019). Thus, it is necessary to
question whether Amazonia is only being consumed by the fires that appear in
pictures.
The idea of Amazonia spread daily in the mass media such as television and
magazines, is impregnated with meanings determined centuries ago. In the
images presented above (the visual guide) it is possible to recognize many of the
elements that have historically constituted this understanding of Amazonia. The
first factor is the idea that Amazonia consists [only] in a jungle, a mass of wild
green. Amazonia and rainforest are generally understood as synonymous,
although the urban web continues to grow there. The Brazilian geographer
Bertha Becker was a pioneer in describing the demographic explosion in the
region. Amazonia is an “urban forest”, Becker said. The author highlighted the
intense urbanization process starting in the second half of the twentieth century,
attributable to the high mobility of the workforce that resulted from new
relationships, such as the production of urban space to create spatial conditions
for extractive activities, that developed at the regional level. Trindade Jr, a scholar
of Berta's work, argues that urbanization is the driving force behind the spatial
reconfiguration of Amazonia.
The Amazonian region, however, continues to be represented and understood
mostly as a “natural” landscape. According to the researcher Antonio Chagas
(2016):
One of the gaps in environmental policy concerns the particularities of
urban problems in Amazonia. In general, its existence is neglected by myths
that regard the region as an empty green space.
This understanding of Amazonia is strictly linked to the dichotomy of Cartesian
thought. If the primary perception/representation of Amazonia is through its
condition as “nature”, a question remains: are the portions of deforested tropical
forest still considered Amazonia?
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Figure 11 Picture of Belém, which is the second large city in the Brazilian Amazonia, from a riverine
community in the Combu Island. Source: myself
The majority of the images presented above - with particular emphasis on figure
8 - represent Amazonia through aerial views of the landscape This representation
highlights the abundance of trees, the flowing rivers, and/or shows the scars of
deforestation that frequently contrast to a little mass of green that has not been
burned or cut. The pictures presented, from the first one (the 1943 illustrative
poster) to the last (the screenshot of the Google search page), suggest that the
bird's eye view is the ordinary way of seeing common to them all. This way of
seeing prioritizes a flat view of Amazonia which ignores cultural aspects.
This view marks a crucial difference between living in the territory and knowing
about it. With regard to visual perception, we can consider Tim Ingold's work
(2000). In his analysis of the surface of the Earth, Ingold, drawing on the work of
Merleau-Ponty, notes that observation does not consist in having a fixed point of
view on an object, but ‘in varying the point of view while keeping the object fixed’
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962 cited in Ingold, 2000, p. 226). In this sense, Ingold argues
that, because terrestrial creatures live their lives on the ground, their view of the
environment happens horizontally, since they see while they move. That is, in
the view from ‘above’ (the vertical view) “the world appears as an object of
contemplation, detached from the domain of lived experience.” (2000, p. 210)
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The aerial view is indeed an interpretation of the surroundings, that is, a broad
way of understanding a landscape. However, it is important to note that this view
“has its roots in a tendency, deeply sedimented in the canons of western thought,
to imagine that the world is presented to humans life as a surface to be occupied”
(Ingold, 2005, p. 103). It is not my intention to compare the aerial view with a
map that is a ‘fictional’ version of the region but to draw attention to the fact that,
as highlighted by Ingold, “the world would look from a point of observation so
far above the earth’s surface that the entire territory with which we are familiar
from journeys made at ground level could be taken in at a glance”(2005, p. 227).
In terms of life-and-death issues, such as deforestation, or the extinction of entire
species, this way of seeing can erase emergencies, and can make emotional
engagement difficult, even for the mourning of an extinct species or a non-
human environmental object (Demos, 2019b).
Rebecca Coleman and Liz Oakley-Brown (2017) have shown how the concept of
surfaces is a way to understand the emergence of unlimited ways of visualizing.
“It refers both to how surfaces become a means by which particular ideas,
relations, aspirations may be visualized and materialized, and to how surfaces
may themselves visualized, that is a spatio-temporal site through which relations
and materialities become visible, or not […] While the surface is a plane, it is also
patterned, textured and knotty: a conception that suggests that relations of power
exist and are co-ordinated” (2017, p. 6). The authors thus demonstrate that vision
is a ‘situated knowledge’.
This dissertation focuses on the perceptions of Amazonia, “one of the most
symbolic spaces through which this image of nature and society, and the
structures of knowledge-power it sustained” (Tavares, 2016, p. 4). It is possible to
say that the flat view facilitated by aerial photographs ultimately favours a
homogeneous view that reinforces the idea of Amazonia as an empty space. This
way of perceiving neglects both the urban web and the complex formation of the
Amazonian territory. It is essential not to forget that this view was one of the
central reasons to promote colonisation in the sixteenth century and
recolonisation throughout the twentieth century.
Besides its perception as [flat] nature, another common element in its
mainstream representation of Amazonia is the image of indigenous people, who
come to assume a cultural, symbolic character that like the rainforest, needs to
be preserved. The visual map offered in this dissertation includes three images
of indigenous people: the first one (figure 2) is an image of a Kuarup community
from 1957; the second (figure 4) is an image from 1997 that was taken from a
specific report on the deforestation of Amazonia; the third (figure 7) is the cover
image of the Greenpeace report on the fires in Amazonia this year (2020).
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These images primarily reflect the exotic view of occupation, a visualization that
has been present consistently over time. At the centre of these representations
are the indigenous populations, who were considered to be primitive and
therefore, a barrier to the creation of a developed country – as exemplified in
figure 2. On the other hand, since the 1980s, with the emergence of
environmental concerns (in Brazil), the debate over Amazonia turned attention
to the preservation of indigenous peoples, the forest and natural resources
(Bueno, 2002). The images show that, despite changes in the socio-political
scenario and even the characteristics of the occupation of Amazonia under the
processes of recolonization and development, the understanding of this region is
the same: nature inhabited by an exotic people.
The privileged representation of indigenous peoples has caused the presence of
other social groups, such as Caboclos (riverine communities), Blacks
(Quilombolas) and urban agents, to be practically ignored. That is, Indigenous
people are typically acknowledged as being uniquely sensitive to the impacts of
climate change. In this romanticized view, “indigenous suffering is used to sell
the importance of overarching mitigation efforts to the general public,
supporting initiatives that do not materially address vulnerabilities of Indigenous
communities to climate change” (Belfer, Ford and Maillet, 2017, p. 66). In the
production of the [mainstream] image of Amazonia, suffering is an object of
emotional engagement. The images of the suffering other, in this case,
indigenous communities, becomes a source of empowerment for the ‘we’ present
in environmental discourse.
It would be foolish not to consider the importance of indigenous people in the
debate about climate change. Indigenous communities are historically
threatened by the process of invasion, appropriation and violence. They are
indeed one of the most vulnerable groups of urgent issues about cultural survival.
Nonetheless, the images of indigenous communities usually reinforce
stereotypes and thus decontextualize the experiences and knowledges of those
communities. They also ignore the socio-political factors that have historically
created and sustained this group's vulnerability to climate change. “In this way,
climate change is constructed as problem for society as opposed to a problem of
society, mirroring broader scientific discourse around Indigenous peoples and
climate change and obscuring colonization’s tangible impact on mitigation and
adaptation responses” (Belfer, Ford and Maillet, 2017, p. 67).
Sara Ahmed (2000) in the text “Multiculturalism and the proximity of strangers”,
engages Ien Ang’s arguments that “othering can take place by acts of inclusion
within multicultural discourse”. According to Ahmed, contemporary capitalism
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deploys liberal and multicultural terms of inclusion to value and devalue forms
of humanity. Thus, cultural diversity becomes a way of imagining the nation:
Living together is here simply a matter of being aware of cultural diversity
[…] This statement powerfully evokes and then erases particular histories of
racial differentiation: racial difference, already construed as ethnic
difference, is redefined in terms of cultural diversity, that is, in terms that
erase any distinctions between groups (Ibid, p. 95).
By the same token, Paul Gilroy in “There ain't no black in the union jack” (1987),
argues that, in the context of the ‘Nation’, race disappears (or is made to
disappear) but takes on new forms – culture, identity, difference, customs.
Therefore, racism often works by making the category of ‘race’ disappear from
view and then it gets replaced with other terms.
In the mainstream ecology images, therefore, the indigenous people are
presented as a kind of salvation with the power to reconnect the Westerner with
a lost nature. However, despite being a central element in the mainstream
discourse about “saving the Amazon”, there is no absorption of indigenous
cosmology or alternative ways of knowing. This happens in such a way that these
images, when describing Amazonia, also produce Amazonia: it is imagined as an
empty and savage space that needs to be protected.
It is clear that the images selected here do not represent the entire universe of
representations of Amazonia. However, they were chosen from different years
to show that the main images presented by the mass media when debating
sustainability in Amazonia sustain the permanence of the modern view: natural
and exotic. In other words, the images create a preservationist discourse of purity
(Nixon and Loomba, 2005). Through the ordering of vision and the classification
of social organization, this representation composes a narrative coherent with the
modern rationality (Mirzoeff, 2011; Santos, 2016). These images show the
environmental debate in Amazonia is trapped in the nature-culture division,
reinforcing the hierarchical relation in which the Human is not only outside the
non-human but also above it (Aldeia and Alves, 2019).
b. impact
By determining what and who is recognised as Amazonia, the mainstream
images of ecology create an essentialist representation that renders part of the
territory invisible. In doing so, the predominant approaches obscure not only
forms of climate engagement but also the existence of certain [human and non-
human] realities. In this way, the representation of the territory erases issues
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from the past and neglects urgent causes in the present. Whose stories count?
Whose suffering count? Whose dead are mourning?
Rob Nixon (2005; 2011) brings the disciplines of environmentalism and
postcolonialism into dialogue to discuss the essentializing tendencies that
periodically creep into environmental discourse (Slovic, 2007). He points out that
“ecocritics have historically been drawn more to the discourse of purity: virgin
wildness and the preservation of ‘uncorrupted green places’” (Ibid, p. 235). By
remaining linked to a “spiritualized and naturalized national frame”, the
environmentalist vision produces historical amnesia that perpetuates false
binaries of western power. It also prevents the lessons of human destruction
during colonization from informing a broader understanding of the relationship
between the deprivation of rights and genocide (Howard-Hassmann, 2014).
When illustrating how the poor are often overlooked in the environmental
debate due to historical amnesia, Nixon argues that it is as if they (the ‘other’)
lived in another space and time, and thus are exposed to a type of violence that
is neither spectacular nor instantaneous. Nixon coined the concept of slow
violence in order to apprehend a plurality of forms of violence that, being slow,
widespread, or even hidden, are imperceptible amid the urgencies of our present.
In other words, in the images that show spectacular violence and are therefore
useful for mainstream discourse, the types of violence that happen in time and
space different than that of the aesthetic [contemplation] of the disaster become
very difficult to see and represent. This results in the invisibility of these realities
in the debate over climate urgency. In this sense, the main violence produced by
the mainstream ecological representation of Amazonia is the violence of erasure.
In addition to Nixon, many other authors have developed studies about the
concept of erasure. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, for example, called it “the single
story” which represents easily legible narratives that reinforce the existing order.
Adichie argues that “the single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with
stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete” (2009, pt.
00:12:55). In representing stereotypes, a range of characteristics and issues are
compressed into a singular and simplistic narrative, emphasizing how we are
different rather than how we are similar and, thus, reinforcing the concept of
other. The representation of indigenous people, for example, is a stereotype
reproduced as a single story.
The newspaper Nexo journal (Vick, 2020) published an article to expose the
current situation of the indigenous population living in cities, showing that
currently, 324,800 Brazilian indigenous people live in urban areas. The
Indigenous population in Brazil is made up of 896,900 people, equivalent to 0.4%
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of the Brazilian population (IBGE, 2010). In fact, the majority (more than 60%) of
the members of Brazilian native people live outside urban areas; some are on
indigenous lands demarcated by the government, while others do not have a
territory and are in cities. Nexo’s article shows that according to ONU-Habitat
(the program of the United Nations aimed at cities) one of the factors causing the
urbanization of indigenous peoples is the growth of urban areas, which ends up
swallowing indigenous territories. The second reason is the migration to large
cities, which may be voluntary or due to conflict, violence, insecurity, lack of
services or expulsion. Moreover, the report shows that indigenous people living
in urban areas are usually accused of being non-indigenous.
Beyond the idealized vision, there is a diversity of aspects that has drastically
transformed the political, social and economic dynamics of the Amazonian
region; the ecosystems that make up its biodiversity; and the aspects that define
the constitution of identity and the lifestyles of Amazonian communities. Moara
Brasil, an indigenous artist and activist for indigenous rights, said in a recent
publication (2020) on her Instagram:
How many times do we have to repeat the different stories of those who
were not born in a [indigenous] village? Or those who were born in invisible
roadside communities? Who did not have the opportunity to have the
FUNAI
2
seal because they were no longer considered indigenous for
speaking Portuguese? Or the story of adopted indigenous people who don't
know which community they came from? Or the story of so many
indigenous women stolen from their communities? What about the
indigenous people from the diaspora? [...] I ask you, what about the so-called
‘Caboclo’ who never had the chance and the privilege to connect with what
was taken from them [...] The indigenous stories of those who are self-
revendicating are built by memories of elders, for reconnections with
communities, for dreams, for spirituality, for reconnection with the forest
and the original knowledge, for their courage to access colonial wounds and
heal them. […] Everyone has their space and their narrative; everyone has
the right to have it! Indigenous people who live in villages, also indigenous
people who are reclaiming land and/or recognition, it is necessary to unite
more than ever in order to avoid that those who live in villages do not
become either a generic indigenous or an urban indigenous that nobody
wants to be. Do not fall into the traps of new colonization.
2
The National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) is the official institution of the Brazilian State
dedicated to Indigenous causes. The FUNAI is linked to the Ministry of Justice and is
responsible for the coordination and main execution of the Federal Government's
Indigenous policy.
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The permanence of the modern view denies constitutive aspects of the region:
the Indigenous population – generally treated as a single ethnic group – have
lived in Amazonia for over two thousand years; the riverine inhabitants, the
Caboclos, who are descendants of indigenous and Portuguese people, have also
lived in the region for about three hundred years; the Quilombolas, descendants
of African refugee slaves, have been living in Amazonia for at least two hundred
years; and the rubber soldiers, originally from northeastern Brazil, have been in
Amazonia for at least one hundred years (Soares, 2015). All these people have
built different ways of life. Not to mention the immigrants and native people that
moved to live in the Amazonian urban areas. Each way of life implies a different
use of the territory.
In search of a way to discuss the Amazonian territories that is dissociated from
the division between culture and nature, Gonçalves (2001) develops the idea of
AmazoniaS. This concept seeks to describe the “diversity in the unit” and the
different realities that exist there:
Now, it is increasingly perceived that the massacre is, in fact, the
epiphenomenon of a fundamental conflict involving matrices of different
rationality. In short, it is a conflict of different cultures with their forms and
their ways of appropriating symbolically-materially different nature. Not
only is the question of whom nature belongs to that conflicts, but also
different conceptions of what nature is. (Ibid, pt. 3035)
Gonçalves argues that the hegemonic representation of Amazonia reveals much
more about who produces it than Amazonia itself, since this hegemonic view is
only suitable for those who see the territory as a set of resources. The author also
reinforces that it is not the knowledge of the populations that traditionally inhabit
the region that has been taken as a reference, “if that were the case, culture would
not be on one side and nature on the other” (Ibid, pt. 301). The main problem
seems to lie not in the incapacity of the native populations to imagine/represent
themselves, but in the epistemic violence inflicted upon the inhabitants of
Brazilian Amazonia. This violence has disrupted ways of life by violently erasing
knowledge systems.
In producing an image of Amazonia based on modern rationality, the “Saving the
Amazon” discourse is actually an attempt to reinvent new modes of late
capitalism. This temporal bias toward spectacular, sustainable disaster
exacerbates the vulnerability of ecosystems treated as disposable by capitalism,
while simultaneously intensifying the vulnerability of those humans and non-
humans whom the capitalist power does not care to see (Cadena et al., 2019).
Being trapped within this logic, the ecology images that represent the
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environmental emergency in Amazonia present a discourse in which one’s
emergency is another’s oppression; one’s tragedy is another’s economic
opportunity; ones’ representation is another’s erasure (Demos, 2019b). After all,
capitalism is primarily an economic system that establishes a form of social
organization based on the production of violence.
Figure 12 Picture taken in the Tucunduba canals. It is an affluent of the Guama River that surrounds the
city of Belém. Source: Bruno Carachesti
As shown by many authors (dos Santos, 2000; Federici, 2004; Quijano, 2007),
capitalism accumulation requires loss, dispossession and the unequal
differentiation of human value. These binaries and inequalities happen through
racialization (Robinson, 2000). However, the capitalist system expresses itself in
different ways around the globe. It is precisely in the countries of the global
South, marked by the history of colonization and a dependent economy that the
violent aspect of this system is most pronounced (Fanon, 1967; Cesaire and
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Césaire, 2000; Mbembe, 2019). In this sense, it is essential to remember that
Amazonia is the periphery of the periphery, which makes violence against
humans and non-humans an architectural practice in this territory. As stated by
Walter Benjamin (1940), “the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state
of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”. That is, both
the status of periphery and the different types of violence practised are not a
random fact in Amazonia but are central to the imaginative production of this
place.
From this perspective, Naomi Klein (2016) analyses the relation between guns
that take black lives in cities and “the much larger forces that annihilate so many
black lives on arid land and in precarious boats around the world” to argue that
the various systems of othering are a factor that links environmental disaster to
the genocide of racialized communities in urban centres around the world. To
put it differently, racial capitalism (Robinson, 2000) is the mode which sustains
the world-system. That is to say, the extractive forces behind the ecocide of the
Amazon rainforest are the same ones that expose urban lives – human and non-
human - to violence in the other Amazonias.
Mainstream ecology images, thus, strategically ignore injustices in the space-time
of class, gender, race and sexuality that do not fit in the aesthetic spectacle of the
sustainable disaster. Instead of drawing attention to urgent problems, this
approach reinforces structural differentiation through misconceptions that
endanger the lives of humans and non-humans. In addition to being a region
especially affected by climate change, the process of making visible/invisible
intensifies the impacts of the environmental disaster in Amazonia, affecting
particularly dehumanised people - not to mention the impact on everything that
is non-human. Therefore, in this image-driven world where the media venerates
the spectacular, as well as where public policies are shaped around immediate
need, creating stereotypes is as valuable as the power to render invisible.
Seeing from the inside
The understanding of territory as heterogeneous and plural is necessary and
urgent in order to debate solutions that are de-linked from the modern Western
matrix of power. We must start with what is understood as Amazonia and what
do the Amazonian populations comprehend about themselves [ourselves]. As
pointed out by Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2016) “there is no social and
cognitive justice without existential justice, no politics of knowledge without a
politics of reality”. It is necessary to ‘learn from’ (Savransky, 2017) the social and
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political practices of the global South in order to more fully comprehend our
own modernity.
Social justice should be about a decolonial disobedience as proposed by Mignolo:
to delink in order to re-exist (2005, p. 40). Rather than the replication of biased
images in which extractive capitalism is disguised as sustainable development.
Namely, social justice should “take the risk of asserting the reality of what is
deemed improbable, implausible, marginalised, suppressed, irrelevant, even
scandalous, and seeks to draw out its possible implications for the transformation
of what is considered credible, reliable and serious (Savransky, 2017, p. 22). It is
necessary to shift not only the tone but also the narratives that often structure
environmentalist views. It is also necessary to change the way that Amazonia is
related to and the ways futures are imagined for Amazonia in order to cultivate
futures of multi-species justice and collective care.
Figure 13 Picture taken in Combu island of Caboclos picking and cleaning Açaí. Source: myself
After all, in each Amazonia – from Maranhão to Acre, from Brazil to Bolivia -
there are thinkers and activists from all walks of life, including curators, artists,
scholars, intellectuals. Everybody that is committed to debate solutions for the
environmental disaster in Amazonia should be learning from these humans and
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non-human narratives of other ways of being and resisting (oral, written, visual).
“To listen and to tell a rush of stories is a method,” claimed Anna Tsing (2017, p.
37). It can help open our imaginations to stories that are open-ended to diverse
possibilities for collaborative survival.
The Indigenous leader Ailton Krenak (2019) says in the book Ideas to Postpone the
End of the World that indigenous communities resisted against violence and
invasion by expanding their subjectivity and by refusing to accept the idea that
humans are all the same. Krenak makes this claim by reinforcing Eduardo
Viveiros de Castro's observation that humans are not the only beings that have a
perspective on existence. Krenak points out that despite “the times in which we
live being a specialist in creating absences” (Ibid, 2019, p. 13), it is necessary to
encourage the narratives of the many small constellations of life around the
world who dance, sing and make it rain as an alternative to the ‘end of the world’.
The alternatives to environmental disaster, therefore, should be on the side of
those like Krenak, Davi Kopenawa and the Yanomami community who have
been struggling to prevent the fall of the sky (2013) for at least five centuries. We
should listen to the stories of artists, activists, and of all people who recognize the
agency of nature in order to learn how non-humans represent themselves
through their ‘vibrant matter’ (Bennett, 2010). The state of disaster in which we
find ourselves should be addressed through a radical imagination and a desire for
change. In this way, we could hear the voices of those who see and live in a
manner that is alternative or even opposite to that which we are living now. It is
necessary to be equipped with other forms of [radical] imagination in order to
see beyond the disaster of modernity and its “sustainable” development.
After all, speculating about other ways of seeing and being in order to decolonize
the dominant modes of knowledge production is not just about the essential
critique of the violent modern process of othering to which humans and non-
humans have been subjected. It is also about the rescue of Amazonian traditions
and dialogue with the knowledge of our ancestral peoples who have been made
invisible by Eurocentric thinking. It is about unveiling new horizons for the
whole region of Latin America.
7. Conclusion
This project opened up to a series of issues of social and visual culture involving
Amazonia and its representation. These problems are spread daily through
images in the mass media and on social networks, making them widely known.
In this sense, access to the information that portrays Amazonia has favoured the
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reaffirmation of social representations that perpetuate the perception of the
territory through the modern lens. I have shown that the current [Western]
representations of Amazonia are distant from the image of an earthly paradise
and an inexhaustible source of natural resources. To the same extent, they
approach a pure, exotic view of occupation, invisible cities and populations, and
demographic and cultural emptiness, among others.
I have analysed the permanence of the modern view of Amazonia through its
representation in environmentalist discourse and have shown that this territory
is still seen as an imagined nature. My argument is that this essentialist
understanding is reinforced, mainly, by the aerial images of the territory, which
is how Amazonia is widely represented and popularly known. This is because the
bird’s eye view, first of all, represents the territory like a surface, which reinforces
the idea of emptiness by ignoring cultural aspects.
Through the study of Tim Ingold’s work, I demonstrated that the "vertical vision"
over Amazonia also generates indifference, as it presents an Amazonia as an
object of contemplation. This aspect denounces the insufficiency of the image
because this way of seeing captures the disaster but is unable to communicate the
loss, making the image no more than an aesthetic contemplation of sustainable
violence. Besides, when presenting the territory as a surface, the aerial view
allows "unlimited way of visualization". To put it differently, the image of
Amazonia as a surface not only reinforces old paradigms but also allows those
who represent Amazonia to invent it.
In addition to the idea of empty space, I analysed how ecology images explore
the representation of indigenous people. On the one hand, indigenous people are
shown as the only representative communities of Amazonia to the detriment of
all other human and non-human cultures that are part of the territory. On the
other hand, these communities are represented as a single ethnicity, ignoring
both socio-political aspects that have historically produced indigenous
populations' vulnerabilities to climate change, as well as ignoring their cosmology
and knowledge. I pointed out that this representation focuses mainly on
indigenous suffering, which intensifies the idea that they are both exotic and
fragile. Hence, for those included in the "we" of environmentalist discourse,
suffering also turns out to be a form of empowerment.
Challenging the mainstream image of Amazonia, my argument is that the central
problem of this representation is the invisibilization of the many agents that
make up the territory and, as a consequence, the simplification of what Amazonia
could mean. That is, the power to determine what is visible/invisible threatens
all forms of life that are not within the essentialist concept of Amazonia,
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especially those human and non-human lives that are exposed to types of
violence other than the spectacular ones typically useful to environmentalist
discourse.
As I hope to have shown, there is not only one Amazonia. On the contrary, there
are a lot of cultures and ways of life within what we call Amazonia. To remain
trapped in the modern view and its system of differentiation – one which is
inextricably linked to its capitalist, colonial, and patriarchal dimensions – is to
stay blind to the multiple specific space-time interrelations of life-elements. Also,
this essentialist colonial view obscures the role of neo-colonialist tools of
domination, as it favours precisely those who see the territory as a set of
resources.
More specifically, I argue that understanding the visualization of Amazonia in
relation to environmental issues draws attention to the ways in which these
problems should be conceived as a crisis of Western modernity itself. After all,
the discourse of sustainability reveals that 'saving the Amazon' is just another
facet of the same extractive capitalism that is based on a system of violence,
domination and differentiation that has threatened life historically, mainly in the
global South.
I conclude this dissertation by affirming that "this exercise of unthinking Western
modernity and its foundational epistemological and ontological assumptions
leads to the radical relationist study of the multiple and heterogeneous
interconnections between different life-elements of the world (s), neither of them
a priori classifiable as belonging to "humanity" or "nature" but rather thus
constituted through and along the very process of interrelation" (Aldeia and
Alves, 2019, p. 2). We are not only dealing with human elements but trees,
animals, water, gases, and mountains. It is thus necessary to see and hear the
Amazonias from different perspectives, especially those of non-humans that
already re-exist there.
8. Further work
Further research would be desirable to address the debate around who can speak
for others or on behalf of others. Moreover, undertake investigations on other
ways of seeing that already exist not only in the Brazilian Amazonias but also in
different places throughout the global South.
To sum up, there are many new investigations to be done concerning studies de-
linked from Western modes of knowledge production.
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9. Acknowledgment
This project was only possible because it was done collectively. I want to dedicate
this research to my beloved dream companions (Isa, Claudia, Marina, Camila,
Emilly, Roberta, Ornella, Maju, Ana, Gustavo, Kirsten, Sara, Jason, Rafa, Cassia
and Mar) who trusted me, believed in my project and helped me finance this MA.
I want to thank my life partner Martí, who, during the last seven years, has helped
me make my dreams come true. Moreover, I would like to thank our families for
their unconditional support.
I could not have developed this study without Juliana. Thank you for all the hours
of explanations, theories and debates about research, projects and plans. Not to
mention all the times that she encouraged me to develop my ideas by willing to
accompany me in the development of each one.
I need to thank Akanksha. In addition to the incredible knowledge she shared
with us, she welcomed me and taught me about the many possible worlds and
futures, always from the perspective of love and affection.
I want to thank my colleagues, for all the help and support during this crucial
period of my academic training. Finally, to all the people who directly or
indirectly contributed to my research, thank you.
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