Book review: Betty J. Meggers’ “Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise” (1971)

Roberto Ponce CorderoJanuary 12, 2017January 13, 2017Inglés

More than thirty years after its original publication, and more than a decade after the appearance of its revised edition, Meggers’ book on the relationship between nature and culture in Amazonia, or rather on culture as an adaptive strategy employed by a species (Homo sapiens) to survive in a truly inhospitable environment, is still the perfect introduction to the complexity of this region and the problems it poses to both anthropology and ecology, among other fields of study.

Thus, as if to attract laypersons to read about this issue, Meggers starts by enumerating some superlative facts about the Amazonian basin in the introduction (p. 3), only to put them (and others she adds later) in a scientific perspective during chapter one, dedicated to “hard data” available about the ecosystem as a natural formation. In the following four chapters, however, she turns to systematic portraits of overall seven different aboriginal peoples, emphasizing the peculiar ways in which some features of their cultures seem to have adaptive functions in evolutionary terms – that is, to have been established as fundamental in any given culture through a more or less unconscious process of natural selection aimed at improving the probability of survival of the members of that culture.

As if to offer a contrast, Meggers then turns to the time after the European “discovery” and colonization of Amazonia, in order to show how modern exploitation of resources and transfer of foreign economic and cultural traits has broken the fragile equilibrium that had hitherto existed, and which was due (as she once again explains in the last chapter) to thousands of years of adaptation to the region’s environment.

Finally, in an “epilogue” written for the new edition, she takes more recent research into account (some of which even partially contradicts her past thesis – for instance, her assertion that the várzeas were very densely populated in pre-Columbian times) and concludes, somehow unsurprisingly, that the discordance between the current human (ab)use of Amazonia and the natural realities of its ecosystem is not only far from obeying any logic of natural selection and of adaptive evolutionary mechanisms, but has put the whole area, and thus the whole ecological balance of the world, in danger, and indeed on the brink of a potentially irreversible catastrophe.

True laypersons who are not particularly interested in Amazonia may shy at the exhaustive ethnographic descriptions of the Camayurá, Jívaro, Kayapó. Sirionó, Waiwai, Omagua and Tapajós populations (descriptions devoid, for the sake of “objectivity”, of all “human” details, in Meggers’ words [p. 42]), as well as of the results of scientific studies on, say, the soil quality or the sedimentation processes in the region. But anyone at least mildly interested either in the region per se, in anthropology as a way to learn about “alien” worlds, or in the ecological relevance of the Amazonian basin, will surely enjoy this book – most especially its introduction, its two final chapters (“Amazonia in the Modern World” and “The Evolutionary Significance of Adaptation”), and its epilogue – as well as find it useful and instructive.

Specialists in the field, however, may react differently. While Meggers offers lots of information and – for their time – undoubtedly inspiring insights, her reluctance to quote her sources and provide the reader with a scholarly sound literature apparatus can be irritating. On a much more fundamental level, it represents a small tour de force to try to compare the cultural traits of peoples that still existed by the time she was writing (the terra firme-based) with the ones of extinct ones (the várzea-based ones, of which we only know from problematic sources, as she implicitly admits on p. 187), especially since she describes all of them as representing some kind of ahistorical, original cultural/natural status not only virtually untouched by European influence but also by the passage of time. It is as if she had rather elegantly composed a snapshot of a living culture and reconstructed a snapshot of a dead one in order to compare both, without acknowledging that centuries lie in between and that time at least arguably also passes in Amazonia, however slowly it may pass.

This lack of historicity may in fact stem from a related problem, which is common to a good part of the anthropological research done before the last decades, namely the conviction that these cultures studied are indeed more “primitive” than others, and of course most evidently more “primitive” than ours (whatever ours may be). While Meggers is not prominently conspicuous at this (and while she is surely well-intentioned), she does call the peoples she describes “primitive” (pp. 2, 3, 109, and 165, for example) and elaborates a whole hierarchy of peoples based on criteria imposed on them by their observers (in this case, by Meggers or, by extension, by Western anthropology and science [pp. 115ff, among others]).

Moreover, she often compares Amazonian people to animals (she even uses the metaphor of “dissecting” and “spreading out” the cultures she wants to depict [p. 44]); in fact, that human beings are animals is her whole point, in the sense that she is out to prove that natural selection is the underlying force of both biological and cultural evolution and change. She does not compare Europeans to animals, however – not once. And she certainly does not approach the colonization of Amazonia by peoples other than aboriginal ones as purely adaptive mechanisms that respond to biologic determinism (and it is presented as determinism, regardless of how interactive with cultural developments it is supposed to be).

To her credit, and even though she still does not think that it is necessary to reflect her own position as observer and the whole power of her (scientific) gaze, she does not call indigenous peoples “primitive” in the epilogue anymore, and indeed she ends it with an appeal to get rid of the “Eurocentric bias” and to acknowledge different types of “complexity” – a point she actually made in her book, but ultimately undermined herself by firmly remaining within a rather deterministic evolutionary model (p. 197).

(Crédito de imagen de thumbnail: http://arenet.org/Betty_Meggers.php. Crédito de imagen de inicio de post: https://www.amazon.com/Amazonia-Man-Culture-Counterfeit-Paradise/dp/0882956094).