Candace Slater

In Search of the Rain Forest

The essays collected here offer important new reflections on the multiple images of and rhetoric surrounding the rain forest. The slogan “Save the Rain Forest!”—emblazoned on glossy posters of tall trees wreathed in vines and studded with monkeys and parrots—promotes the popular image of a marvelously wild and vulnerable rain forest. Although representations like these have fueled laudable rescue efforts, in many ways they have done more harm than good, as these essays show. Such icons tend to conceal both the biological variety of rain forests and the diversity of their human inhabitants. They also frequently obscure the specific local and global interactions that are as much a part of today’s rain forests as are the array of plants and animals. In attending to these complexities, this volume focuses on specific portrayals of rain forests and the consequences of these characterizations for both forest inhabitants and outsiders. From diverse disciplines—history, archaeology, sociology, literature, law, and cultural anthropology—the contributors provide case studies from Latin America, Asia, and Africa. They point the way toward a search for a rain forest that is both a natural entity and a social history, an inhabited place and a shifting set of ideas. The essayists demonstrate how the single image of a wild and yet fragile forest became fixed in the popular mind in the late twentieth century, thereby influencing the policies of corporations, environmental groups, and governments. Such simplistic conceptions, In Search of the Rain Forest shows, might lead companies to tout their “green” technologies even as they try to downplay the dissenting voices of native populations. Or they might cause a government to create a tiger reserve that displaces peaceful peasants while opening the doors to poachers and bandits. By encouraging a nuanced understanding of distinctive, constantly evolving forests with different social and natural histories, this volume provides an important impetus for protection efforts that take into account the rain forest in all of its complexity. Contributors. Scott Fedick, Alex Greene, Paul Greenough, Nancy Peluso, Suzana Sawyer, Candace Slater, Charles Zerner

The Poetry of Salvador Espriu: Bare Crag into Song

Although the poets work is very different from that of many twentieth-century writers, it is undeniably modern. If Jorge Luis Borges had a social conscience, he might write like Salvador Espriu. An overriding concern with time and illusion, death and memory, unites the two artists. Fascinated by the image of the labyrinth, both draw upon a diverse array of erudite sources such as the Cabala in their writing. Of course this comparison has limits. Whereas Borges writes some books with a gauchoesque flavor (e.g., the Milongas) and others about chimeras and mazes, Espriu consistently fuses the local and metaphysical, injecting a note of contemporaneity and social criticism into even his most philosophical work. Furthermore, as initially stated, he continues to write not in Borgess Spanish but in his own native tongue. From the publication of his first book at the age of sixteen, Espriu has written in Catalan, even during that period in which its use was illegal.2 Bearer of a proud tradition dating from the thirteenth century, Espriu works the elements of everyday Catalan life (goat paths, fennel) into a profoundly tragic vision of history which remains both individual and communal.