Stephen Nugent

Assessing cultural anthropology

Part 1 Diversity and divergence within the anthropological community: essays by Philip Salzman George Marcus Robert Murphy Marvin Harris. Part 2 Enhancing the comparative perspective: essays by Laura Nader Maurice Godelier Adam Kuper Roberto DaMatta Veena Das. Part 3 Rethinking the past: essays by Roy Rappaport Russell Levy Sylvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier Marilyn Strathern Eric Wolf Nancy Scheper-Hughes, Part 4 Rethinking the cultural: essays by Jack Goody Ward Goodenough Maurece Bloch Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn Roger Keesing. Part 5 The culture in motion: essays by Andrew P. Vayda Andrew Borofsky Fredrik Barth Sally Falk Moore Marshall Sahlins Conrad Kottak and Elizabeth Colson. Part 6 Applying anthropological perspectives: essays by Claude Levi-Strauss Stanley Tambiah Valery Tishkov Clifford Geertz.

Whither O Campesinato? Historical peasantries of Brazilian Amazonia

Brazilian Amazonian peasantries have attracted relatively little scholarly attention, and even with the opening up of Amazonia via the TransAmazon Highway (c.1970) and a significant expansion of social science research in the region, recent frontier colonists and environmental crises have been the major foci. This article examines some of the factors contributing to the relative invisibility of historical peasantries in the region and tries to show the relevance of such peasantries to debates concerning agrarian structure, economic transformation and state-led modernization efforts. A key feature in the portrayal of Amazonian peasantries (and Amerindians) has been the unique role attributed to the neo-humid tropical landscape in restricting the possibilities for an elaborated social landscape. Drawing on anthropological, archaeological and historical studies, the article advances the notion that these simplifying assumptions are unwarranted and are impediments not only to a more accurate understanding of the legacy of colonial society in Amazonia, but also to efforts to mitigate social conflict and environmental depredation. The visibility of Amazonian peasantries in scholarly or general literature has been highly variable over time. Currently and in the recent past, the activities of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) and the Rubber Tappers Union (CNS)(see glossary) have provided concrete examples of what an Amazonian peasantry might represent, but these are hardly representative of the diversity of Amazonian peasantries, and in the main, Amazonian peasantries have tended to be subsumed under a rigid structure of naturalism within which social life – whether Indian or mestiço – is treated as contingent and burdened by what Blaut [1994: 70] has referred to as the ‘Doctrine of Tropical Nastiness’. The main purpose of this article is to try to account for the relative absence of studies of Brazilian Amazonian peasantries from the anthropological and

Anarchism out west: some reflections on sources

The ‘West’ of the title provides a hook for discussing three contacts with anarchist thought. The first contact is a personal one with Ammon Hennacy and Bruce Utah Phillips, two figures of the small world of Salt Lake City anarchism of the 1960s (way out West of the Rockies). The second contact is with an idealized conception of Amazonians as exemplars of a kind of anarchist sociality imagined as a retrievable model (way out in the interior of Brazil/South America). The third contact is with a strand of rationalist-naturalist thought closely associated with Chomsky, and its exclusion from anthropology (way out in the EthnoWest).

Utopias and Dystopias in the Amazonian Social Landscape

This chapter starts by relating the invisibility of caboclo societies in the anthropological literature of the 1960s and 1970s. The invisibility of caboclo (or, to use Nugents terminology, historical peasant) societies was grounded on four main reasons: the idealisation of the Amazonian landscape as strictly natural; the fact that the historical Amazonian peasant has never been incorporated by the plantation; Amazonia’s frontier character; and last but not least, the fact that caboclo agrarian systems are neo-colonial ‘experiments’, significantly based on immigrant practices. Regarding a central point appearing in various degrees in a number of the articles brought together in this volume, Nugent discusses, the a-historicity that typifies a large portion of anthropological production on Amazonian societies, including caboclo. Nugent argues that the central element behind this Amazonist anthropological tradition is the ideological naturalisation of which the local human populations are victims.

The Rise and Fall of the Amazon Rubber Industry : An Historical Anthropology

This book offers a revisionist account of the Amazon rubber industry 1820-present. In analyzing the long-term, stable commodity chain linking remote forest tappers and key industrial processes in Europe and North America, it challenges widely held assumptions rubber production and rubber trade as well as the persistence of a hyper- naturalistic ‘lost world’ of the Amazon where ‘the challenge of the tropics’ is still to be faced and the ‘frontiers of development’ are still to be settled.

Reviews : George Marcus (ed.), Rereading Cultural Anthropology. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1992, 403 pp

This book comes with baggage. The title itself invites all manner of scrutiny: ’cultural anthropology’ is both the US gloss on ’social anthropology’ (although it may be contested who is glossing whom) and the title of a new(ish) journal (of which this volume is a ’best of’ collection); ’rereading’ conjures up both a structuralist episode and its textualist (re-)reckoning. That’s just the cover. Inside is a collection of articles published in Cultural Anthropology between 1986 and 1991. These are diverse: Stephen Tyler leads off with a prophet-like discussion of orality (’But this age of ours, the one just before the age of the new writing, is a stage which not even the eye can long survive. In order for the new

The Ghost of Subsistence

theoretical problem in economic anthropology, annoying because among the strengths it claims for itself is a rigour which is frequently contradicted by its own pronouncements. An example of these two facets of the book is the following: 1) Gudeman relies on Sraffa for the construction of a ’cross-cultural or comparative measure of the functioning of the economy, a measure which is independent of prices (p. 54)’; it is argued that the calculations used (see pp. 50-8) for measuring surplus in non-market economies show a measurement of value (as a function of labour-time) which takes account of the specific cultural context in this case the Panamanian village of Los Boquerones and is also comparable cross-culturally: 2) in order to sustain this analysis, however, Gudeman relies on a notion of

Explaining Amazonia (1

The power of the romantic imagery employed in discussing Amazonia is undeniable. So well known are the elements of the imagery that rather elaborate stereotypes are conjured by mere mention or the terms ’noble savage’ or piranha, for example, and even those authors who are conscious of the way the imagery of Amazonia is employed to give false impressions, as is the case in the Brazilian state’s manioolation of the Amazonian stereotynes in the context of expanding its internal frontiers, are often unable to resist using the catalogue of cliches available.