Human Impacts on Amazonia

The Role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Conservation and Development

Darrell A. Posey, Michael J. Balick, Darrell Posey, Michael Balick

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9780231517355
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Biological Sciences

From the pre-Columbian era to the present, native Amazonians have shaped the land around them, emphasizing utilization, conservation, and sustainability. These priorities stand in stark contrast to colonial and contemporary exploitation of Amazonia by outside interests. With essays from environmental scientists, botanists, and anthropologists, this volume explores the various effects of human development on Amazonia. The contributors argue that by protecting and drawing on local knowledge and values, further environmental ruin can be avoided.

1	Romance and Reality The First European Vision of Brazilian Indians John Hemming

The Romance

The first encounter between the Portuguese and the indigenous peoples of Brazil occurred on April 22, 1500, at Monte Pascoal in Porto Seguro, some 800 kilometers north of Rio de Janeiro. As we shall see, it was a meeting that was to have an extraordinary impact on European intellectuals of the time.

A fleet bound for the Cape of Good Hope and India was blown westward; sailors following land birds brought the fleet to the coast of Brazil. Luckily for us, that fleet contained a brilliant observer, Pero Vaz de Caminha. He described the excitement of the new discovery and its exotic people to the king of Portugal, in a long letter that was carried back to Europe in a ship loaded with Brazilian produce. The letter was so vivid and accurate that it has been hailed as Brazil’s first anthropological source.

Vaz de Caminha (1500) told how the European discoverers celebrated the first mass on Brazilian soil. Their admiral, Pero Álvares Cabral, ordered a cross to be made. The Indians avidly watched the Europeans cutting the wood. Vaz de Caminha reported: “Many of them came there to be with the carpenters. I believe that they did this more to see the iron tools with which they were working than to see the cross itself. For they have nothing made of iron. They cut their wood and boards with wedge-shaped stones fixed into pieces of wood and firmly tied between two sticks.” During the ensuing mass, the Indians carefully imitated everything done by the strangers who had appeared in their midst. “And at the elevation of the host, when we knelt, they also placed themselves with hands uplifted, so quietly that I assure Your Majesty that they gave us much edification.”¹

That story contains two elements that were to become constants in the colonization of Brazil. One was the natives’ obsession with metal cutting tools. As Vaz de Caminha (1500) explained, the Indians could fell trees only laboriously, using stone axes. To them, the strength and sharpness of metal were miraculous. To this day, metal axes, machetes, and knives remain the tools with which isolated tribes are seduced, leading to their eventual contact. Initially, these are the only possessions of our society that newly contacted people really covet. I myself have been present when contact was first made with four indigenous groups in different parts of Brazil, and I can vouch for the power of attraction of metal blades.

The other constant was the Indians’ apparent willingness to accept Christianity. Vaz de Caminha (1500) wrote to his king: “It appears that they do not have nor understand any faith. May it please God to bring them to a knowledge of our holy religion. For truly these people are good and of pure simplicity. Any belief we wish to give them may easily be stamped upon them, for the Lord has given them fine bodies and handsome faces like good men.”

Thus were the ideas of the handsome noble savage and the blank slate introduced. When the first Jesuits reached Brazil fifty years later, their pious leader Manoel da Nóbrega was thrilled by the natives’ apparent lack of religion. “A few letters will suffice here, for it is all a blank page. All we need do is to inscribe on it at will the necessary virtues, to be zealous in ensuring that the Creator is known to these creatures of his” (Nóbrega 1931, letter of Aug 19, 1549).

The first missionaries were unaware of the Indians’ intricate spiritual world and rich mythology. The apparent innocence and simplicity of the native population suggested to the newcomers that here was a blank page upon which they might inscribe their own religion. The most striking manifestation of the Brazilians’ simplicity was their nakedness. Two handsome warriors came aboard Cabral’s ship and they were “naked and without any covering: they pay no more attention to concealing or exposing their private parts than to showing their faces. In this respect they are very innocent” (Vaz de Caminha 1500).

Portuguese sailors, coming from the morally circumscribed world of fifteenth-century Iberia, were dazzled by the sight of unclothed women. Vaz de Caminha (1500) described them as being “just as naked as the men, and most pleasing to the eye . . . [but] exposed with such innocence that there was no shame there.” One girl in particular stood out. Vaz de Caminha wrote to the king that “she was so well built and so well curved and her privy part (what a one she had!) was so gracious that many women of our country, on seeing such charms, would be ashamed that theirs were not like hers.”

The first observer noted that the Brazilians had no domestic animals or any cereals other than manioc. “Despite this, they are stronger and better fed than we are with all the wheat and vegetables we eat. . . . They are well cared for and very clean” (Vaz de Caminha 1500). Medieval Europeans washed themselves only rarely, so the natives’ cleanliness made a big impression. The French priest Yves d’Évreux (1615) remarked that “the reward always given to purity is integrity accompanied by a good smell. They are very careful to keep their bodies free from any filth. They bathe their entire bodies very often . . . rubbing all parts to remove dirt. The women never fail to comb themselves frequently.” Another French pastor, Jean de Léry ([1578] 1980), admitted flogging women who did not wear clothing. “But it was never within our power to make them dress. As an excuse for always remaining naked, they cited their custom of . . . diving into streams with their entire bodies like ducks, more than a dozen times a day. They said that it would be too much effort to undress that often! Isn’t that a beautiful and cogent reason?”

Early observers viewed not only the Indians as pure and innocent, but their government and society as well. Amerigo Vespucci, the boastful Florentine who visited Brazil in 1502 as a passenger in a Portuguese flotilla, made such an impression with his description of these wonderful people that two continents were named after him. Vespucci lived with the Brazilian Indians for twenty-seven days. From that experience he concluded that “they do not recognize the immortality of the soul. They have no private property, because everything is common. They have no boundaries of kingdoms or provinces, and no king! They obey nobody, and each man is lord unto himself. There is no justice and no gratitude, which to them is unnecessary because it is not part of their code. . . . They are a very prolific people, but do not designate heirs because they hold no property” (Vespucci [1503] 1974:285, trans. Morison).

Vespucci—whose letter was rapidly translated and disseminated throughout Europe—was putting forth some very subversive ideas. The Portuguese chronicler Pero de Magalhães [de] Gandavo noticed that the Tupi language (like modern Japanese) did not use the letters f, l, or r. By coincidence, those were the first letters in the Portuguese words for faith, law, and king. So Gandavo (1576) concluded that, though the Indians had “nem fei, nem lei, nem rei,” yet they thrived without these three pillars of European social order.

We now know that these observations were flawed. It was incorrect to say that the Indians had no faith, since they believed in an elaborate world of spirits, legend, and shamanism. Nor were they devoid of laws. Even today, native villages appear very tranquil, but they are highly conservative and regimented. Their conformity functioned without any need for codified law or a legal profession.

It was, however, reasonably correct to say that Brazilians had no kings. Their tribes had chiefs, but these were only primus inter pares. Each family was a self-sufficient entity and each head of household ranked roughly equally in tribal society. Michel de Montaigne (1580) asked a Tupinamba chief what advantages or powers he gained from leading five thousand men. The Indian answered simply, “To march first into battle.”

Chroniclers also contrasted Indian generosity with European avarice. Gandavo (1576), in an important passage, described a society based on hunting and communism: “Each man is able to provide for himself, without expecting any legacy in order to be rich, other than the growth that nature bestows on all creatures. . . . They have no private property and do not try to acquire it as other men do. They thus live free from greed and inordinate desire for riches that are so prevalent among other nations. . . . All Indians live without owning property or tilled fields, which would be a source of worry. They have no class distinctions, or notions of dignity and ceremonial. And they do not need them. For all are equal in every respect, and so in harmony with their environment that they all live justly and in conformity with the laws of nature.”

All this fitted with European fantasies of the noble savage. The simple and generous Brazilians were portrayed as living in the midst of an opulent nature. Amerigo Vespucci ([1503] 1974) was impressed by the intricacy of native architecture and the abundance of foods. He marveled at the diet of fruits, herbs, game, and fish, and “great quantities of shellfish—crabs, oysters, lobsters, crayfish and many other things that the sea produces.” He portrayed Brazil as a delightful place whose evergreen trees yielded “the sweetest aromatic perfumes and . . . an infinite variety of fruit.” Vespucci told his readers about the flowers, birds, and exotic animals of the new world that was to be named after him. He concluded, “I fancied myself to be near the terrestrial paradise.”

There was a long tradition of these romantic visions. They were a return to the golden age of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a book much read at that time. Writing of his thirteenth-century travels, Marco Polo praised primitive man. In The Divine Comedy (1307–1321), Dante’s Master Brunetto Latini said that Africans were innocent, naked, and not greedy for gold. And the Belgian John Mandeville (14th c.) described savages as “good people, full of all virtues and free from all vice and sin.”

In the year 1500, when Cabral’s sailors first saw Brazil, the Italian Pietro Martire d’Anghiera ([1530] 1969) wrote that among peoples of the new world “the land belongs to all, just as the sun and water do. ‘Mine and thine,’ the seeds of all evils, do not exist for these people. . . . They live in a golden age. They do not surround their properties with ditches, walls, or hedges, but live in open gardens. They have no laws or books or judges, but naturally follow goodness.”

Such visions of indigenous peoples may have been exaggerated and inaccurate, but they contained a powerful political message. In 1508, Erasmus of Rotterdam was in London, staying with his friend Thomas More. While there, he wrote the satire In Praise of Folly (1509); its heroine, Folly, came from the Fortunate Islands, where happy people lived in a state of nature and the land yielded abundant food. Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) had a leading character who was described as being one of the people left at Cabo Frio by the expedition on which Vespucci was a passenger. More declared that in utopia man should live by nature and his own instincts, and he praised the Indians’ disdain for material possessions. Utopia had a great influence when it was first published and translated into many languages—and again when retranslated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century.

It was the French who most avidly developed the theme of the noble savage. French sailors from Normandy traded actively with Brazilian Indians, and they brought some of their Tupinamba friends back to France. The French established colonies at Rio de Janeiro from 1555 to 1560 and at Saint-Louis (São Luis) in Maranhão from 1612 to 1615. Both colonies were rapidly extinguished by the Portuguese, but each produced two splendid chroniclers; those early writers greatly added to ethnographic knowledge of indigenous peoples and partly added to romantic misconceptions about them. The four were Jean de Léry and André Thevet at Rio de Janeiro, and Claude d’Abbeville and Yves d’Évreux at Maranhão.

François Rabelais knew Thevet and other Frenchmen who had visited Brazil, and he drew on Erasmus and More in the first part of Pantagruel (1532). The poet Pierre de Ronsard (1550) idealized the innocence of the Tupinamba Indians, who were subject to no one, “but live as they please and answer to no one: they themselves are their law, their senate, and their king.” He begged that these noble people be left alone: “Live, you fortunate people, without distress or cares. Live joyously. I wish that I could live like you.”

The political theorist who was most closely identified with Brazilian Indians was Michel de Montaigne. He had studied in Bordeaux under the Portuguese André de Gouveia, a teacher who inspired his students to find the meaning of man in nature. Montaigne drew on the works of both Léry and Thevet; he owned a collection of Brazilian artifacts, and he interviewed three Tupinamba whom he met in Rouen in 1562. In his famous essay Des Cannibales (1580), Montaigne concluded that Indian virtues led to subversive revolutionary doctrines. He imagined a conversation between some Tupinamba and the French King Charles IX. When asked what they thought about France, the Indians replied that they had noticed some Frenchmen gorged with all manner of possessions while there were emaciated beggars at their gates. They found it strange that “those needy opposites should suffer such injustices, and that they did not take the others by the throat or set fire to their houses.” The contrast with the Indians’ communal and communistic society was obvious. Montaigne was particularly struck by the modesty of Brazilian chiefs who had no special powers, no aura of majesty, no luxurious establishments. He copied Léry’s description of a fierce intertribal battle, but he claimed that it was fought from altruistic love of honor rather than for revenge. He also followed Ronsard, Gandavo, and others in noting that Indians flourished without an established church, monarchy, or written law.

The initial fascination with Brazilian Indians was soon eclipsed by the sensational conquests of the more sophisticated Maya, Aztec, and Inca empires. By the mid-seventeenth century the Portuguese had driven all other Europ...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Preface
• Coeditor’s Note
• Acknowledgments
• Thoughts on the Future of Amazonia: The Region, Residents, Researchers, and Realities
• 1. Romance and Reality: The First European Vision of Brazilian Indians
• 2. Constructing Tropical Nature
• 3. Demand for Two Classes of Traditional Agroecological Knowledge in Modern Amazonia
• 4. Fire in Roraima, 1998—Politics and Human Impact: What Role for Indigenous People in Brazilian Amazonia?
• 5. The Cerrado of Brazilian Amazonia: A Much-Endangered Vegetation
• 6. A Review of Amazonian Wetlands and Rivers: Valuable Environments Under Threat
• 7. Fragility and Resilience of Amazonian Soils: Models from Indigenous Management
• 8. Is Successful Development of Brazilian Amazonia Possible Without Knowledge of the Soil and Soil Response to Development?
• 9. Fragile Soils and Deforestation Impacts: The Rationale for Environmental Services of Standing Forest as a Development Paradigm in Amazonia
• 10. Concurrent Activities and Invisible Technologies: An Example of Timber Management in Amazonia
• 11. Institutional and Economic Issues in the Promotion of Commercial Forest Management in Amerindian Societies
• 12. Collect or Cultivate—A Conundrum: Comparative Population Ecology of Ipecac (Carapichea ipecacuanha (Brot.) L. Andersson), a Neotropical Understory Herb
• 13. Extractivism, Domestication, and Privatization of a Native Plant Resource: The Case of Jaborandi ( Pilocarpus microphyllus Stapf ex Holmes) in Maranhão, Brazil
• 14. Peasant Riverine Economies and Their Impact in the Lower Amazon
• 15. Conservation, Economics, Traditional Knowledge, and the Yanomami: Implications and Benefits for Whom?
• 16. The Commodification of the Indian
• 17. Euphemism in the Forest: Ahistoricism and the Valorization of Indigenous Knowledge
• 18. What’s the Difference Between a Peace Corps Worker and an Anthropologist? A Millennium Rethink of Anthropological Fieldwork
• 19. Traditional Resource Use and Ethnoeconomics: Sustainable Characteristics of the Amerindian Lifestyles
• 20. Enhancing Social Capital: Productive Conservation and Traditional Knowledge in the Brazilian Rain Forest
• Appendix: Findings and Recommendations
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Series List