Ethnographies of Conservation
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Ethnographies of Conservation

Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege

David G. Anderson, Eeva Berglund, David G. Anderson, Eeva Berglund

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eBook - ePub

Ethnographies of Conservation

Environmentalism and the Distribution of Privilege

David G. Anderson, Eeva Berglund, David G. Anderson, Eeva Berglund

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Anthropologists know that conservation often disempowers already under-privileged groups, and that it also fails to protect environments. Through a series of ethnographic studies, this book argues that the real problem is not the disappearance of "pristine nature" or even the land-use practices of uneducated people. Rather, what we know about culturally determined patterns of consumption, production and unequal distribution, suggests that critical attention would be better turned on discourses of "primitiveness" and "pristine nature" so prevalent within conservation ideology, and on the historically formed power and exchange relationships that they help perpetuate.

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Year
2003
ISBN
9780857456748
PART I
ANTHROPOLOGY, ECOPOLITICS AND DISCRIMINATION
1
PITFALLS OF SYNCHRONICITY
A Case Study of the Caiçaras in the Atlantic Rainforest of South-eastern Brazil
Cristina Adams
To successfully resist ongoing systems of domination, racial or ethnic stereotyping, and cultural hegemony, the first necessity of disempowered peoples, or of marginalized subcultural groups within a national society, is that of constructing a shared understanding of the historical past that enables them to understand their present conditions as a result of their own ways of making history. (Hill 1996: 17)
Introduction
The first protected area to be established in Brazil was the Itatiaia National Park, in 1937, inspired by the North American conservation model. Since then many Protected Areas have been instituted by the Brazilian government, and divided into categories of restrictions. According to national environmental laws,1 restrictive protected areas (national parks, biological reserves, ecological and biological stations) should be used only for scientific, leisure or conservation purposes, remaining uninhabited. As in most developing countries, the establishment of protected areas in Brazil was a top-down process motivated more by political than by technical reasons. A significant number of protected areas were defined on a map after a flight over the region.2 As a result, many restrictive protected areas were established in places already occupied by human populations, especially indigenous people. According to law, these peoples should have been expropriated, receiving payment in exchange for their land. In reality, in most cases nothing was done about it, with the result that populations found themselves illegally inhabiting their own ancestral lands, prevented from practising subsistence activities, such as swidden cultivation, hunting, collecting, fishing and extracting wood, fibres, fruits and nuts (Vianna et. al. 1995). Similar conservation strategies have produced the same outcome in the Philippines, Nicaragua and the United States (Novellino, Nygren and Halder respectively, this volume).
Encouraged by international discourse, the debate over whether or not to remove human populations from restrictive protected areas in Brazil gained momentum from the 1980s. Many sections of national society were involved: government agencies, non-governmental organisations (mostly of environmentalists, Roman Catholic or Pentecostal churches, local inhabitants, politicians) as well as the academic community. As elsewhere (Ellen 1993, Milton 1993), debate became polarised between two groups: ‘anthropocentrists’ on the one hand, championing the permanent right of indigenous populations to occupy their ancestral homes, and ‘conservationists’ supporting their removal on the other. The former believe that indigenous or traditional subsistence activities are based upon ancient awareness of the habitat and do not affect ecosystems in a negative way. Indigenous people would be an example of humanity living in a ‘harmonious’ relationship with nature. The latter base the argument for removal on the fragility of ecosystems and maintain that local people cause degradation.
This chapter is concerned with the particular debate regarding the protection of the last remnants of the coastal Atlantic Rainforest growing in the south and south-eastern coast of Brazil, inhabited by indigenous Caiçara populations.3
When the Portuguese conquerors first contacted the Amerindians in 1500, the Atlantic Rainforest covered most of the coast, stretching for more than 4,000 km north to south, from 5° S (Cabo de São Roque, RN) to 30° S (Rio Taquari, RS). After five centuries of exploitation it has been reduced to only 5 percent of its original area (Brown and Brown 1992), and receives less attention from international media and environmental organisations than the Amazon. Figure 3 shows the states of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, Paraná and Rio de Janeiro and existing remnants of Atlantic Rainforest.4
The existence of Caiçara settlements within protected areas in the Atlantic Rainforest presents a legal problem that should be solved by the resettlement of populations. As a result, however, of the lack of funds to resettle and police such vast areas, governments have left the Caiçaras within protected areas undisturbed, although prohibiting their subsistence activities (primarily swidden agriculture and hunting). Overall, this ambiguous situation has left many families in an unbearable situation, where cases have been reported of households being searched by forest wardens checking cooking pans for evidence of illegal game concoctions.
In this chapter I demonstrate that historically Caiçara societies have been underprivileged, both ecologically and socio-economically at global, regional and national levels. Holding a peripheral position within Brazilian society, their identities are often misappropriated for political objectives. My argument here is that the ‘ecologically noble’ Caiçara (mis)representation, although constructed with the aim of assuring their right to remain within protected areas, has only contributed to their disempowerment. Indeed, the appropriation of the ‘ecologically noble’ representation by the Caiçaras themselves, as a political instrument to try to overcome pressing problems, may trap them forever in a peripheral situation.
image
Figure 3 Brazil, showing the Amazonian and Atlantic Rainforests and the Transama-zonica
Finally, it is suggested that if anthropology is to play a key role in the debate concerning ecological underprivilege, it should avoid the pitfalls of synchronicity, examining other societies and cultures in a more processual way (Scoones 1999, Wolf 1997). Anthropology's marginal interest in Brazilian ‘historical peasant societies’ (Nugent 1993) is clear from the scant number of ethnographic case studies of Caiçaras (and current representations of the Caiçaras perpetuate an image of timeless stasis). Giving back their histories to peoples not only helps them create their own identity, thus preventing external manipulation, but also stresses their role in building natural landscape. This chapter is an initial attempt to reframe the Caiçara case within the context of environmental history (Balée 1995, Hill 1996, Scoones 1999).
A diachronic point of view
The first Brazilians – namely mamelucos – were the result of genetic interadmixture of Portuguese colonisers and the several Tupí-Guaraní groups which formed a complex and dynamic social system stretching along the coast from southern Brazil to the mouth of the Amazon river, in the beginning of the sixteenth century. The spread of Old World pathogens, massive slave raiding and slavery soon caused the indigenous populations to flee inland, abandoning their villages, which were appropriated and duly became the first European settlements (Wolf 1997). Even if population was drastically reduced, Tupí-Guaraní knowledge of subsistence in the Atlantic Rainforest remained key for the survival of the settlers (Schaden 1994). In the first four decades of colonisation (1500–1540) the influence of African slaves was very small, but their subsequent incorporation into the local socio-economy gave birth to what Ribeiro (1995) calls ‘the Brazilian people’.
The relationship between pre-colonial Amerindian society and subsequent neo-Brazilian peasant societies (Caiçaras and Caboclos) has been complex (Nugent 1993). As argued by Nugent, ‘instead of there being a focal culture/identity formation process, there is a diffuseness’ (1997: 37). For this reason, Caiçaras may be considered as Caipiras (the peasants established in the south-eastern Brazilian hinterland) by some (Mussolini 1980, Noffs 1988, Pierson and Teixeira 1947, Silva 1993), while others prefer to attribute them a separate identity (Setti 1985).
The identity-formation process of the Caiçara merged several cultural features of the Amerindians of the coast (fishing, manioc cultivation and use of native plants) with Portuguese ones (language, Roman Catholic religious practices and folklore). African culture survived only to a limited extent. Several socio-cultural elements link the Caiçaras from the littoral to the Caipiras from the hinterland: swidden agriculture,5 voluntary collective work (mutirão), labour exchange (troca dia), manioc (Manihot sp.) flour cultural complex, and Roman Catholic religion (Willems 1996, Mussolini 1980).
The word Caiçara has its origin in the Tupí-Guaraní term caá-içara, meaning ‘the man from the coast’ (Sampaio 1987). The Tupí-Guaraní used this term to refer to the wooden fences that protected households and villages, and also to the sticks used as a device to trap fish on the shore. Later, it began to be used to refer to the huts built by fishermen on the beach, in which to keep their canoes and fishing devices. Eventually it was used to identify the inhabitants of Cananéia, in the south of São Paulo and subsequently all individuals and communities along the coast of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Paraná and Santa Catarina states (Fundação SOS Mata Atlãntica 1992). It is not clear exactly when the term Caiçara was first used in literature. The first anthropological studies about these societies already referred to them as Caiçaras (Willems 1966, Mussolini 1980) although they make no reference as to how the Caiçaras referred to themselves.
During the first decades of colonisation, huge amounts of resources were extracted from the Atlantic Rainforest, mainly brazilwood (Caesalpinia echinata) (Por 1992, Dean 1996). Soon, however, Portugal was faced with the task of finding an economic substitute for extraction so as to justify the huge costs of defending its possession. Thus it was that around 1520, Portuguese colonists started producing cane sugar for export in plantations (engenhos) set up in the tropical lowlands of the Brazilian littoral owned by Portuguese immigrant families. As a result, the colony became definitively tied to European markets by the production of export crops and by the expanding commerce of slaves (Dean 1996).6
The economic cycle based around sugar production inaugurated in Brazil a pernicious clientship that would perpetuate itself during the next centuries and remains embedded in today's political life-style (Valença 1999). The small neighbouring freeholds that supplied engenhos with primary goods and other services were linked to the landowners by a patron–client relationship that reinforced their peripheral position in local, national and international economies (Furtado 1968, Wolf 1997). While the patron (patrão) provided resources, protection and links to the outside world, the client had to offer support and obedience: ‘The engenhos were under the landowners’ control and few dared to challenge them, not even Governor-Generals and Bishops. The boss's wealth – land, slaves, mills and other equipment – and their strategic role in Portuguese colonial policy made them increasingly powerful’ (Valença 1999: 6).
The small Caiçara communities that settled around the engenhos in the sixteenth century were also greatly influenced by the landscape, particularly along the south-eastern coast. The high altitudes of the south-eastern coastal mountain range (Serra do Mar) covered with Atlantic Rainforest and the little availability of land for agriculture in the coastal plains restricted the number of engenhos, and also forced the Caiçaras to settle in small coastal plains and piedmonts, where they produced manioc flour and fish (Dean 1996, Mussolini 1980). Thus, besides occupying a peripheral political economic position, Caiçaras were also pushed to marginal lands in the slopes of the Atlantic Rainforest. Most of all, by limiting the size and mobility of Caiçara communities, geographical features influenced their manner of landscape occupation and use of natural resources, as well as their social morphology (França 1954, Mussolini 1980, Marcílio 1986).
Colonial Brazil was characterised by a sequence of economic cycles. After the Dutch invasions in north-eastern Brazil upset the sugar economy in the first half of the seventeenth century, Portuguese investments focussed alternatively on tobacco, mining, cotton and coffee (Furtado 1968).
In the south-eastern littoral of Brazil, periods of intense economic activity alternated with periods of stagnation, population decrease, simplification of subsistence activities and increase in the number of small communities.7 In 1836, the northern coast of São Paulo State had 370 coffee farms, twenty distilleries of cachaça (liquor made from cane sugar, similar to rum) and seventeen sugar mills. In the southern coast of São Paulo State, on the other hand, rice cultivation prevailed, due to existing ecological conditions. Extensive, well-irrigated coastal plains allowed for the existence of eighty-two rice processing plants (Willems 1966).
As shown by França (1954), in São Sebastião Island (northern coast of São Paulo State) demographic density fell from 32.7 inhabitants/km2 in the middle of the nineteenth century to 14.3 in 1950, although 86 percent of the population still lived exclusively from subsistence activities. In the same period, the amount of land undergoing cultivation fell from 126 to 6.8 km2, contributing to the regeneration of the Atlantic Rainforest. Indeed, ‘changes on the level of the world market had consequences at the level of household, kin group, community, region and class’(Wolf 1997: 310).
Until the 1930s to 1950s the Caiçaras could be considered mainly as shifting cultivators and coastal canoe fishermen.8 This started to change when a few Japanese fishermen who relied on motorboats and fishtraps (cerco) for outstanding gains in production settled in the region. Several authors describe the effects of these two innovations. As male labourers shifted to fishing, agriculture was partially or totally abandoned. Thus, Caiçara way of life was reorganised and the sea acquired a significant new status in their culture (Mourão 1971, Silva 1993).9 According to Willems, Caiçaras were characterised by ‘a general alertness to new economic opportunities which are readily embraced or readily rejected depending upon price levels; considerable spatial mobility which is manifested in the frequent migrations of individuals to Santos and in trading expeditions to rather distant localities in the coast’ (1966: 6).
Thus, rather recent features of their lives were appropriated as central facts through which the Caiçara could be imagined as ‘ecologically noble’, that is, as traditional fishermen, familiar with a maritime symbolic and technological world. This process of hiding the agricultural past of indigenous peoples as a strategy to try to enhance their ‘nobleness’ is hardly exceptional, as Novellino (this volume) demonstrates for the Batak of the Philippines.
During the same period, wealth generated by the coffee economy in the south-east launched Brazilian industrialisation, giving rise to urban middle classes. After the 1950s several new highways were built to link littoral to hinterland, and socio-economic transformation accelerated. Urban middleclass tourists came to buy land from the Caiçaras, who moved inland to the fringes of the Atlantic Rainforest or to nearby growing towns. Although they had informal rights over their land (usocapião) most Caiçaras did not have registered legal property. It was not unusual for real-estate entrepreneurs wishing to occupy large amounts of land to threaten Caiçaras who resisted moving out (Silva 1979).10
Tourism and urbanisation quickly transformed the rural landscape, and Caiçara agricultural subsistence definitely lost its economic importance. As they abandoned their dwellings they also lost the easy access to the beach, and so coastal subsistence fishing was also gradually abandoned. Subsequently, in the 1980s, when the government began to establish restrictive protected areas in Atlantic Rainforest remnants, prohibiting swiddening cultivation and hunting, Caiçara families that still relied partially on agriculture had to change to artisanal fishing and services for tourists in order to survive (Luchiari n.d., Vitae Civilis 1995).
The ‘ecologically noble’ Caiçara
Brazilian protected areas have historically been established for scientific and aesthetic reasons, the main goal being to isolate great areas from human activity, with exceptions made for research and tourism (Vianna 1996). One of the most illustrative examples of the deleterious effects of this kind of policy on local people was the establishment of the Juréia Environmental Station (Estação Ecológica da Juréia) to protect part of the Atlantic Rainforest's remnants. It is the starting point of the debate over Caiçaras' right to remain in their ancestral lands.
In 1979 the Federal Environmental Secretariat (SEMA) signed an agreement over an area of 1,100 ha in the south of the State of São Paulo, establishing the Juréia Ecological Station. SEMA's director was a biologist and conservationist, very much concerned with Atlantic Rainforest biodiversity. In his own words, one of the main ‘problems’ to be solved was the existence of Caiçara settlements within the limits of the ecological station. Although admitting that these people deserved respect, he considered that ‘future generations have priority in relation to present necessities’. Care should be taken for local people's activities not to interfere with the main goal of the ecological station, that is ‘to allow scientific research and protect natural ecosystems and biodiversity’ (Nogueira-Neto 1991, my translation). In 1986 the State of São Paulo government increased the protected area to its present limits (72,000 ha) encompassing twelve Caiçara settlements within the Juréia-Itatins Ecological Station. Environmental civil servants working in close contact with the Caiçaras were divided into two groups, one concerned over the legal impediments to their livelihoods, the other anxious that their traditional activities damag...

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