The Political Nature of the Forest

Quechua plantations. Beni Department, Bolivia, 1913-1914. | Erland Nordenskiöld, Museum of World Culture | Public domain

In colonial and modern imaginaries, the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia have always been defined by categories of incom- pleteness, absence, and lack: as societies without faith, law, and writing; societies without agriculture, domesticated animals, and resource management systems; societies without market economies and complex governmental institutions. They were societies in a state of nature, societies without history.[1] One of the most conspicuous arguments supporting this view was the alleged nonexistence of urban complexes in the forest land- scape, both in the ancient past, as archaeological evidence, and in the modern present, as large-scale spatial infrastructures. Supposedly constrained by the environmental conditions of the tropics, technological limitations and “subsistence econo- mies,” forest peoples thus also were said to lack that most remarkable product of civilization—the city. They were non-urban societies, in the sense that they could not develop the technological, spatial, cultural, and political structures that characterize urban formations. The cartographies presented in this essay challenge this colonial perspective. They are part of an investigation into the genocidal campaign conducted against the Indigenous peo- ples of Amazonia by the Brazilian State during the military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. Through an archaeology of the violence as it registers in maps, documents, and the forest’s botanic fabric, this research reveals a radically different image of the nature of Amazonia. By carefully studying this evidence we see that the forest is to a great extent a designed construction that results from the various ways Indigenous societies engage, manipulate, and transform the land.

Geoglyph Culture. Throughout the deforested areas of southwest Amazonia, one of the regions most severely affected by the colonization schemes implemented during the 1970s and 1980s, hundreds of geometric earthworks have been identified.

The Designed Nature of the Forest

Standard cartographic interpretations portray the Amazon rainforests as undisturbed environments, classifying the entire area as an unbroken mass of old-growth forests or high forests, terms used to designate forestlands that display a primary char- acter and have not been modified by human action in neither the recent nor remote past. This “optical blindness” in mapping is to a large extent the spatial correlative of an “epistemological myopia” that has historically conditioned the ways by which modern sciences have interpreted the nature of Amazonia. In a wide array of fields—ethnography, biology, archaeology, geography, etc.—as well as in Western culture more generally, there is a consistent assumption that Indigenous societies exerted no influence on the species composition and biological diversity of Amazonia. Recent ethnobotanical and archae- ological studies have demonstrated that nothing could be further from the truth. Not only do the modes of inhabitation of forest peoples leave a clear signature in the landscape, as the archaeology of the missing villages reveal, but they also play a remarkable function in shaping the vegetative associations and species contents of the forest.[2]

Indigenous landscape management systems in Amazonia are traditionally formed by several pockets of swidden in var- ious stages of use distributed inside the forest, and each field tends to contain an impressive number of plants and culti- vars.[3] When the forest re-grows over this tapestry of plants and gradually reclaims the site of abandoned villages, it is a different kind of forest that emerges, with particular species of trees and plants sown by the activities of the villagers and animals that are attracted to former settlements. Many soc- ieties native to Amazonia recognize that swiddens and other manipulated zones function as attractors of important dis- persal agents, and deliberately manage certain types of plants to increase their presence and thus enhance the seed distri- bution and germination of particular species. The resultant composition of forest that grows over an abandoned field is similar to an orchard that continues to be utilized and often bears important symbolic connotations for Indigenous peo- ples, configuring a living, populated architectural element within a larger urban infrastructure composed of ancient and new villages.

Since these secondary forest formations appear to be as natural as old-growth forests and contain similar rates of biodiversity, the untrained eye can barely detect them in the landscape. Yet, they are the product of long-term social engagement with the environment, or, in the definition of ethnobotanist William Balée, they are “cultural forests,” anthropogenic botanical constructions forged by specific types of interaction between cultural and natural dynamics that harbour “inscriptions, stories, and memories in the living vegetation itself.”[4] Fallow forests originating from Indigenous land management systems “represent a kind of indigenous reforestation,” Balée argues, “insofar as species richness of high forests is being replaced by equivalently rich secondary forests through cultural mediation.”[5] Therefore, such systems act towards the enhancement rather than depletion of biodiversity, and hence we tend to see these human artifacts as pristine nature, for to a large extent they are proper “natural” forests.

The mappings of village ruins are evidence of the socio- historical process of “architectural construction” of the forest, which was nearly destroyed by the politics of erasure devised by the military dictatorship. Besides the political nature of the violence directed against Indigenous modes of inhabitation, this archaeology reveals that the nature of the forest is in itself political, that Amazonia is the product of social-spatial arrangements that are sustained by—and by themselves sustain—the life of the forest. The extermination of the former is conducive to the destruction of the latter, inasmuch as biological and social diversity, nature and culture, are structur- ally interdependent in Amazonia.

Images of Nature – Landscapes of Violence

In a ground-breaking study published in 1989, Balée estimated that at least 11.8 percent of Amazonia is composed of anthro- pogenic forests. This is the equivalent of imagining a territory larger than France covered by an extremely biodiverse environ- ment engineered by Indigenous landscape managing systems.[6] Since then, new archaeological findings have demonstrated that this figure is probably much higher, thus confirming that the past of the Earth’s most biodiverse territory is as rich in culture as in nature. In other words, the rainforest’s botanical structure and biological composition is to a great extent an “urban heritage” of Indigenous designs.

Amazonia has long figured as the quintessential represen- tation of nature in the imaginary and epistemic constructions of Western culture and sciences, but as the archaeology of the recent and the deep past of the forest reveals, this image of nature is in fact a product of colonial violence. Rather than evidence of lack, the alleged absence of architectural evidence in the forest landscape indicates limitations in the ways that modern knowledge has interpreted the humanized landscapes of Amazonia. The fabrication of this epistemology was inti- mately connected to colonial imaginaries that functioned as one of the most powerful and enduring instruments in the historical extermination of Indigenous peoples.

The forest ruins show that violence has been a determining factor in shaping the representations and environs of Amazonia, at the same time as they make visible how dominant notions of society and nature served to inform and legitimize such violence. As we investigate and learn the histories of these living ruins, they start to reveal alternative modes of conceiving and organizing the relations between populations and envi- ronments, describing spatial technologies that were capable of “producing nature.” These biodiversity-enhancing designs are very much alive in the memory and everyday practices of forest peoples. The protection of their land rights thus also means the design of a more resilient planetary ecological system in face of ruinous anthropogenic climate change.

De-Colonizing the City

Observing the architecture of Indigenous modes of inhabitation in Amazonia requires a radical shift in perspective and an exer- cise in the decolonization of the gaze. Instead of seeing the absence of the city, it is the very concept of the city that has to be widened and transformed. The spatial distribution of tree and plant species, the geometry of the canopy, the mosaic patterns of forest formations, mild variations in relief and topography, differences in soil composition, etc., are all indexes of specific forms of social assemblages, “architectural records” that are the product of complex interactions between human actions, envi- ronmental forces, and the agency of other nonhuman entities— themselves co-participants in the “design of the forest.”

Soil Evidence. Terra preta de índio—dark-earth profile clearly demarcated within a trench excavated by archaeologist Eduardo Neves in central Amazonia. So-called terras pretas, or “dark earths,” anthro- pogenic black soils that are highly fertile and rich in carbon compounds, constitute archaeological indexes of Indigenous soil fertilization. Contemporary settle- ments tend to be situated in areas rich in dark earth, demonstrating continuous, long-term human occupation. Image courtesy of Eduardo Neves.

Just as architects read the city as a historical palimpsest produced by social forces that become coded into material form—layers upon layers of ruins constituting a living fabric of social relations—Amazonia must be interpreted through the syntax of urban design, or else the concept of the urban must be crafted anew to incorporate the constructed nature presented by the forest. The relation between figure and ground is subverted, insofar as that which was defined as the surround- ings—the antithesis to, or outside space of, the civic—are in- corporated as a constituent part of an “expanded polis,” within which humans and nonhumans cohabit in a common political space. In this process an entire new concept of the urban is made visible, one whose contours encompass a multi-species polity that we may initially find difficult to recognize because for too long our perspective has been confined to the epistemic enclosures of the Western city.

The radical other the forest presents is not a completely natural landscape, the absolute negation or antithesis to the culturally saturated urban environment. It is an altogether different form of architecture itself, one that challenges the colonial foundations of hegemonic categories of knowledge by revealing the power structures they sustain, and the violence they inflict.