Amazonia

Amazonia. The name conjures western images of luxuriant vegetation, unbridled nature, and vast, unexplored lands. Whether envisioned as a tropical paradise or a “green hell,” the salience of the naturalistic and idealistic features associated with Amazonia has implications for the perception of its human inhabitants. From its inception, Amazonian anthropology has been a highly contested and fractured intellectual field, partly resulting from the manner in which Amazonia was imagined as a cultural category of colonialism centuries before the advent of modern ethnographic exploration.

Early European encounters with indigenous Amazonians provoked debates about the nature of humanity in a manner that would inform subsequent centuries of colonial rule. Yet we can distinguish Amazonia from other colonized regions partly by the manner in which its native peoples were characterized as the prototypical primitive people. Long before ethnographic investigations of Amazonian societies, Westerners stereotyped Amazonians as savages, noble or otherwise, and considered them to be outside the domain of (Western) civilization and closer to nature.

The beginnings of anthropological investigation in the region remained infused with inherited stereotypes about the nature and culture of Amazonia. Ethnographic studies appeared relatively late in the region, which was still largely unexplored scientifically well into the 20th century. The diversity of societies encountered over five centuries of contact has contributed to the mosaic character of region, in which diversity itself remains an important hallmark, frustrating attempts at regional synthesis. The first regional synthesis provided in 1948 by Julian Steward in the Handbook of South American Indians inherited many of the presumptions of earlier periods. Revisions of the standard model provided by Steward have predominated the past few decades of Amazonian anthropology, during which time ethnographic studies of Amazonian peoples reached unprecedented growth. The search for a new synthesis in Amazonian anthropology remains an important goal in the field, yet is further complicated by the increasingly abundant and varied literature regarding Amazonia.