Campbell, Jeremy M

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Roger Williams UniversityDOCS@RWUFeinstein College of Arts & Sciences FacultyPublications Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences2005Some Other Amazonians: Perspectives on ModernAmazonia by Stephen Nugent, Mark HarrisJeremy M. CampbellRoger Williams University, jmcampbell@rwu.eduFollow this and additional works at: http://docs.rwu.edu/fcas_fpPart of the Arts and Humanities CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted forinclusion in Feinstein College of Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, pleasecontact mwu@rwu.edu.Recommended CitationCampbell, Jeremy M. 2005. "Some Other Amazonians: Perspectives on Modern Amazonia by Stephen Nugent, Mark Harris." Journalof Latin American Studies 37 (4).government policy makers ’ (p. 135) in the early 1930s, an attitude that would only bereinforced during the dictatorship of the Estado Novo. Thus, he concludes, ‘workeragitation was as much if not more a caso de polı´cia under Vargas as it had been duringthe First Republic ’ (p. 139).Drowning in Laws is an excellent discussion of – and engagement with – severalof the most important threads in the historiography on Vargas and Brazilian state-labour relations, reflecting French’s substantial experience in this field. It is,however – somewhat surprisingly if we are to judge by the title – less about labourlaw. French points out the often paradoxical reference to labour law in workers’rhetoric as, on the one hand, an ideal and a hope, and, on the other, as a fraud.But even if this discursive element – how the law is talked about – is important,it can only be a starting point to finding out how the law actually worked. Here,French offers little more than the general reflection that there existed an abyssbetween the CLT on paper and the CLT in practice and that the slow process ofthe labour courts often prevented workers from obtaining their legal rights.While this is plausible, it does not help us understand more about the nature ofBrazilian labour law. How did severance pay, pensions, accident compensation,union recognition and collective bargaining work in practice? Were there differ-ences – and what were they – between the individual and collective aspects oflabour law? How did interpretations of the laws change over time? How did thefederal nature of the Brazilian state influence the workings of labour law? Whatwere the legal strategies used by employers to circumvent the laws?And what were the legal strategies attempted by workers to enforce them?These are all questions the answers to which would have helped us understandmore, both about the nature of the CLT, and why workers simultaneously rejectedand idealised it. We might even understand more about why workers resorted tothe labour courts in increasing numbers in the period following the courts’ estab-lishment, in spite of all the evident obstacles they faced.L I N E S C H J O L D ENUniversity of BergenJ. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X0529020XStephen Nugent and Mark Harris (eds.), Some Other Amazonians : Perspectives onModern Amazonia (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, Universityof London, 2004), pp. ix+211, £14.95 ; $19.95 ; E20.00, pb.Some Other Amazonians poses a simple but critical question: if most ethnographicresearch in the Amazon has focused on Amerindian groups, and more recently onthe socio-ecological impact of ‘development ’, what other social realities have beenmissed? Each of the authors of this collection’s nine articles addresses that question,revealing the Amazon to be a diversely populated region, with multiple, and oftenpoorly understood, local histories. As might be expected from Stephen Nugent’sand Mark Harris’s prior pioneering work on caboclo communities, Some OtherAmazonians challenges common stereotypes of the Amazon as a region where‘nature ’ prevails and ‘civilisation ’ is destructive. The anthropologists, historiansand economists that the editors have assembled write of other Amazonians – otherpeople, economies and connections that help define a specifically Amazonianmodernity, other Amazonians who do not fit the dominant scholarly and popularmoulds for the region.824 ReviewsOther people. The strongest articles in Some Other Amazonians undermine whatthe editors call ‘ the hegemony of_ primordialism and modernization ’ in regionalscholarship by bringing people other than Amerindians and developers into ethno-graphic focus (p. 6). Nugent’s history of Sephardic Jews in the Lower Amazon sincethe 1820s is a case in point, as it demonstrates the long and continuous habitation ofMoroccan Jews in the region. His research in Bele´m and Santare´m fills an importantethnographic gap and also contributes to Jewish diaspora studies, as he explicatesa hierarchy of prestige within the socially and geographically dispersed Jewishcommunity in the Amazon. Nugent deftly explains how santareno Jews are margin-alised by belenenses, who in turn are held peripheral by Sa˜o Paulo Jews.Similarly, Rosa Elizabeth Acevedo Marin and Edna Maria Ramos de Castrofollow the conflicts that have marked the formation of quilombos (communitiesdescended from escaped slaves) in the Trombetas region. Their history shows that,both well before and long after the tumultuous Cabanagem rebellion (1835–6),quilombo communities were able to maintain their integrity and resist dominationby external political or economic forces. This work is timely due to the growingconflict over land claims in the Trombetas region, and the general lack of ethno-historical scholarship available to support quilombolas’ claims.Harris’s contribution also has a political goal in mind, as it approaches ‘otherAmazonians ’ through the framework of ‘ the agrarian question ’ posed throughoutLatin America, but, as he points out, rarely asked in the Amazon. Histories ofland and labour in the Amazon have been approached too broadly, he argues, andscholars would do well to explore the empirical realities of the diverse migrantsto the region, provisionally comparing Amazonian caboclos with other peasantries.Harris’s intervention is a refreshing countercurrent to most scholarship on theAmazonian floodplain, which, rather than tracing the longue dure´e of the developingpeasant landscape as he proposes, tends to frame social processes in terms of naturalresource management and community conservation.Other economies. Three of the volumes’ authors develop critiques of orthodoxeconomic history in the region by pointing out Amazonians’ agency in the devel-opment of endogenous and export-driven markets. Gregory Prang chronicles thedevelopment of the ornamental fish industry along the Rio Negro, and asks broaderquestions of the possibilities for innovation within the aviamento debt system.He notes that the global ornamental fish market developed at a time of significanteconomic uncertainty in the region – the end of the late nineteenth-century rubberboom – and offered a degree of freedom from patron/client relations. ScottDouglas Anderson highlights another post-rubber industry in his discussion ofsugar cane, which flourished in the lower Amazon from 1930s–1970s. The Amazonsupplied sugar and rum to markets throughout Brazil, and Anderson’s studychallenges prevalent assumptions about the region’s peripheral status. AsAmazonian rum and sugar met their demise via government interventions (highwaysand inflationary economic policies), the Amazon has in effect been de-industrialised,and thus re-naturalised, as a result of external intervention.In his explication of the vital role that regato˜es (itinerant river traders) have playedin the economic history of the Amazon, David McGrath foregrounds the perspec-tives of these controversial middlemen in the aviamento system. Rather than positingthe regata˜o as an instrumental tool of the wealthy patrons, McGrath tells of therelationships that developed between caboclo extractivists and river traders as theyconspired against the bosses downriver. McGrath mines the economic and socialReviews 825history of the region to show that the conventional view of merchant capitalism isflawed in its assessment of caboclos and regato˜es as powerless, opposing interests.Other connections. A third theme developed in the volume concerns how socialscientists have inadequately documented practices of social reproduction uniqueto the Amazon. For example, Raymundo Heraldo Maues’s short chapter on thegenealogy of a uniquely Amazonian concept, malineza (evil), nicely illustrates howsocial analysis might follow practices out from the Amazon, as opposed to assumingthat the region’s cultural life is only comprised of the shreds of other locales. Mauesrelates malineza to other Brazilian concepts, and argues that it is more apt than thesimilar and widely discussed panema for exploring the local significance of evil andsorcery. Also concerned with describing the unique elements of Amazonian of sociallife, Deborah de Magalha˜es Lima documents how small communities in the MiddleSolimo˜es, facing threats of external intervention, have developed an expansive, yetendogamous, kinship system to control land tenure. Kinship is not defined byblood, but rather indicates a strategic connection; Lima notes that this differs fromother rural kinship practices throughout the world, where ‘ relatedness ’ is oftendefined much more narrowly.Finally, in her article addressing the social legacies of 1960s–1970s developmentinitiatives, Neide Esterci notes a prominent connection between the Amazon andthe global liberation theology movement in the development of the Catholic Churchin the Araguaia region. By revisiting the role played by the church in the region’sland conflicts, she contends that the alliance between Araguaia colonists andchurch activists echoed throughout the Brazilian Catholic Church. Over subsequentyears, Amazonian pastoral politics played a decisive role throughout Brazil inorganising rural workers, mostly through the Pastoral Land Commission (CPT), aLatin America-wide initiative of priests and labourers that started in the Amazon.In sum, all students of the Amazon will find Some Other Amazonians useful : itsinterdisciplinary breadth is impressive and instructive. Latin Americanists moregenerally, and scholars interested in the regional, national and global reach of localhistories, will also appreciate the attention to the details of Amazonian socialhistory. The volume’s project is innovative and important, successfully complicating‘primordial ’ and ‘modernising ’ suppositions about the Amazon, it shows the wayfor scholarship and policy that might take the diverse inhabitants of the regionmore seriously.J E R EM Y M. C AM P B E L LUniversity of California at Santa CruzJ. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X05300204Jennifer L. McCoy and David J. Myers (eds.), The Unraveling of RepresentativeDemocracy in Venezuela (Baltimore, MD, and London: The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 2004), pp. xx+342, £35.50, hb.Political scientists offered two basic explanations in the 1990s for Venezuela’spolitical crisis, which was put in evidence by two abortive coups in 1992 and theimpeachment of President Carlos Andre´s Pe´rez the following year. One group ofwriters blamed the rigidity of political institutions that were set in place by inter-party pacts at the outset of the modern democratic period in 1958. Others attributedthe crisis to Venezuela’s dependence on oil income. This book presents a broader826 Reviews

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