Are the indigenous ecological?

Indigenous people, traditional people and conservation in the Amazon.

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha and Mauro W.B. de Almeida1
Daedalus/Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol.129, n.2, 2000, pp. 315-338. Em www.brasilemb.org/cunha.pdf

In a stunning reversal of ideological fortune, traditional people in the Amazon, who until recently were deemed at best candidates for, if not hindrances to ‘development’, have been promoted to the forefront of modernity. This change has occurred primarily via the association made between traditional people with conservation and valuable knowledge. On the other hand, indigenous peoples, formerly despised or hunted down by their neighbors, have become role models to dispossessed people in the Amazon.

We felt compelled to write this paper partly in response to two major current misunderstandings. The first one questions the foundations of traditional peoples’ commitment to conservation. Is such commitment some kind of forgery, is it, more blandly phrased, a case of a western projection of ecological concerns onto an ad hoc constructed “ecologically noble savage”? The second misunderstanding, one that is clearly linked to the former, asserts that ‘foreign’ non-governmental organizations and ideologies were responsible for the connection made between conservation of biological diversity and traditional people of the Amazon. This misunderstanding makes for strange bedfellows. Progressive first-world activists and scholars, third-world military and communists alike share in that belief. To dispute these views, we will devote some time to clarifying the Brazilian historical context in which this process took place and to the respective roles of grass-root, Brazilian and ‘foreign’ agents in the construction of such a connection. Lastly, we will deal with the meaning it carries in local terms, its importance for Brazil and for the international community and we will discuss some of the conditions for its success.
Who are traditional people?
The use of the terms ‘traditional people’ is intentionally encompassing Yet, this should not be mistaken for conceptual fuzziness. To define traditional people by their following a stable age-old tradition would run counter anthropological knowledge. To define them as populations having a low impact on the environment and then go on to assert their ecological soundness would be tautological. To define them as people outside the market sphere would make them indeed very hard to find. True, categories in academic and legal texts are
1 Manuela Carneiro da Cunha is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Mauro Almeida is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Campinas (Unicamp).
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most often described through the properties or characteristics of its elements. But categories can also be described “in extension”, that is by pointing to elements that pertain to them. It is our contention that ‘Traditional people’ is for the time being best defined in extension, that is by enumerating its current ‘members’ or the current acceptable candidates to such ‘membership’. This approach is in consonance with our emphasis on the creation and taking over of categories. But more importantly, it also points to the formation of subjects through new practices.
This is hardly novel. Terms such as ‘Indian’, ‘indigenous’, ‘tribal’, ‘native’, ‘aboriginal’, ‘mixed blood’, are all creatures of the metropolis, generated by encounter. And yet, artificial and generic as they were at the time of their creation, they have progressively come to be ‘inhabited ‘ by flesh and blood people. At times, yet not necessarily, this is the outcome of the elevation of these terms to a legal or administrative status. What is remarkable, however, is that as often as not, these forced inhabitants were able to seize these highly prejudiced categories and turn them into banners for mobilization. Deportation to a foreign concept results in squatting it and patrolling its boundaries. This is very often the point at which what was previously defined “in extension” is analytically redefined in accordance to a set of characteristics.
To this day, the expression ‘traditional people’ is at that initial stage of existence. It is a hardly inhabited class, and yet there are already members as well as obvious candidates for membership. For one, it enjoys an administrative existence, since a “national center of traditional people” is a division of Ibama, the Brazilian official environmental administration. It originally congregated rubbertappers and Brazil-nut collectors from the Amazon. It has since moved on to cover other people such as for example clam gatherers from southeast Brazil. What all these people have in common are at some point in time a good environmental record based on low-impact techniques and stakes in retaining or regaining control of the territory they exploit. But more fundamentally, they are ready for a trade-off: in return for control of the territory, they commit themselves to providing environmental services.
Although, as we will endeavor to show, traditional people have somehow taken indigenous people as role models, the category in Brazil does not encompass indigenous people. This separation rests on a very fundamental legal distinction, namely that indigenous land rights are not predicated on conservation, even when indigenous land stands out as an island of environmental soundness within otherwise devastated landscapes. To stress the Brazilian specificity that sets apart indigenous people from ‘traditional people’, the former will not be subsumed under the latter and we will be using when necessary the longer and cumbersome expression “indigenous and traditional people”
How (small) people make history
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Indigenous people in the Amazon have come a long way in the last twenty years. In the seventies, a State governor would unashamedly refer to them as obstacles to progress. Right-wing politicians and many among the military would put them under suspicion, finding no other reason than greed for international concern with their fate. It was then commonplace to deplore their impending doom. Some would attribute their fate to the inexorable March of Development and Progress, while many leftist intellectuals would ascribe it to the no less inexorable March of History. All these fiercely marching brigades, stooping along in people's imagination, left no room for survival. Their stampede covered the minute actions that were the true agents of traditional peoples' afflictions. Small things, indeed, less impressive and inexorable than their imaginary counterparts: rather corruption at many levels, enticements by loggers and miners, eviction of peasants from big estates pushing them into indigenous land. And then governmental policies such as infra-structural projects and incentives for cattle raising. Similarly, it was political mobilization by an array of Brazilian and international sectors rather than an agent-free History that was to alter the course of events.
Indigenous issues became prominent as a national concern2 in the late seventies. Since the Constitution of 1934, and then in each and every Brazilian Constitution promulgated since (in 1937, 1946, 1967, 1969), indigenous land and its riches were collectively ascribed to the exclusive usufruct of each ethnic group. Dominion of the land is vested on the Federal Government, who cannot divert it for any other purpose. Indigenous land cannot be sold or alienated in any manner. On the other hand, in the Civil Code of 1916, indigenous people were lumped together with people over 16 and under 21 years of age as “relatively capable”. This was an awkward last-minute patch, since the Civil Code was not meant to deal with indigenous issues. “Relatively capable people”, because they are easy to deceive, have a special protection in their business dealings. Although the concept of tutelage over indigenous peoples sounds derogatory and anachronistic to say the least, in practice, it has provided them with very effective judiciary leverage. Any deal made to their disadvantage and without judicial assistance can be challenged and nullified in court. Moreover, since there was no other case in Brazilian law of a collective land title, indigenous peoples’ legal status as wards was commonly understood as the basis for the exceptional status of indigenous land titles. In reality, prior occupation, that is historical antiquity, is the real foundation of indigenous land rights.
2 The only previously comparable national mobilization around indigenous rights took place in the first decade of the twentieth century, resulting in the 1910 creation of the SPI (Indian Protection Service). Colonial examples are less clear, although seventeenth-century Jesuit struggles against Indian slavery could, with some anachronism, possibly be included among large-scale movements. The creation of the Xingu National Park, in 1961, although attracting great urban support, was an isolated experiment, to the extent that some would later contend that it had become a mere showcase. Ordinarily, massacres, evictions, and other kinds of violence were not treated as national issues, but rather as unfortunate local level violence. Structural conditions for such violence to occur were not perceived.
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In 1978, a cabinet secretary came up with a proposal of emancipating so-called "acculturated Indians". That would entail granting them individual land titles, which could then be put on the market. In other words, indigenous land could be sold. The effects of such a measure are well known not only from the U.S. nineteenth-century example, but also from precedents in Brazilian history. Starting from regulations put in place in 1850 and 1854, it amounted to a three decades' liquidation of Indigenous titles over land coveted by settlers (M.Carneiro da Cunha 1993).
Military rule, in 1978, still thwarted all political manifestations. Indigenous issues, however, were not deemed political. Repressed dissatisfaction, to the surprise of everyone involved, seems to have found a channel in such issues. The ban on any kind of political protest could well be the reason why the so-called emancipation of the Indians project, an issue that seemed quite remote to most urban Brazilians, channeled such a wide range of protest. The emancipation project was duly dropped, although it has since resurfaced under different guises. But the anti-emancipation protest campaign was to be the start for a decade of intense mobilization around indigenous struggles. The first pan-Brazilian indigenous organization was founded3, as well a significant number of advocacy NGOs, joined on a voluntary basis mostly by anthropologists and lawyers. A branch of the powerful Brazilian Catholic Bishops Council, the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), was strengthened to include not only missionaries but very active lawyers as well. The Brazilian Anthropological Association, which at the time numbered around 600 members, was also to become quite active on the issue of indigenous rights. The major foundations that supported such work were ICCO, a Dutch organization of protestant churches, the Ford Foundation, based in Rio de Janeiro, and to a lesser extent, some German NGOs and British Oxfam. A good deal of judiciary processes were fought and mostly won. There were campaigns for the demarcation of indigenous lands and for their effective protection.
Although the results of such campaigns were unequal, they had very important outcomes. For one, they helped to clarify the major threats faced by indigenous people. And then, they built some unexpected coalitions on very solid grounds, namely on the trust that resulted from shared studies, goals or campaigns. We would stress only two examples.
The first example is the alliance between anthropologists and federal prosecutors, built around the need by the government to defend itself from mostly fraudulent claims for indemnification by alleged land-owners in indigenous territories. Having lost case after case in court, and dissatisfied with the assistance it got from the official Indigenous affairs agency, FUNAI, the Federal Prosecutor’s office called on the Brazilian Anthropological Association to help
3 This was UNI (Union of Indigenous Nations), that was to play a significant role in the eighties despite or maybe because of its urban origins. It was to be followed in the late eighties and the nineties by active indigenous organizations either ethnically or regionally grounded.
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establishing facts in court. The good results that were obtained cemented an enduring relation of mutual trust that was to bear fruit in the 1988 Constitution.
The other example is the support of a ban on mineral prospecting in indigenous lands by the Brazilian Association of professional geologists whose agenda was to maintain Brazilian mineral reserves against a very powerful lobby of multinational mining corporations. This support was also built over a joint project launched by an NGO, CEDI, to map the overlap of indigenous land and requests for mineral prospecting. A radar survey of the Amazon had been conducted in the mid-seventies, raising big expectations in mineral riches, and a scramble for concessions for research and for extraction had ensued. Since property of the soil and property of the subsoil do not coincide under Brazilian law –subsoil resources being vested on the Union - there was a bitter battle about whether mineral research and extraction could be launched beneath indigenous land.
By 1987, when a democratically elected Constitutional Assembly started debating a new Constitution, a muscled and effective coalition of indigenous leaders, anthropologists, lawyers, and geologists had consolidated. Legal shortcomings impairing indigenous rights had become quite clear, and the aims for Indigenous rights in the new Constitution were well defined. With a partial exception by CIMI who ultimately pursued its own broader Latin American policy, the agenda for the Constitution was largely consensual in the coalition.
Not surprisingly the most controversial issues revolved around rights by non-Indians to build hydroelectric dams and to have access to the subsoil of indigenous land. Private corporation’s stakes were particularly high in regard to minerals. As a preliminary draft Constitution came out as a result of different committees, in which access was barred to indigenous subsoil, a press campaign of surprising dimensions was orchestrated against indigenous rights. A few days before the rapporteur was to submit a new draft, five major newspapers in five different State capitals gave one week long full front pages to an alleged conspiracy. In order to keep tin prices high, tin mining companies would be conspiring to prevent Amazonian tin to reach the market, by barring cassiterite extraction in indigenous land. Another line of accusations was directed at CIMI, who had insisted on the use of the term “nations” for indigenous societies. This term, ironically a very archaic one found in historical documents up until the late nineteenth-century, when the word “tribe” replaced it, was used to raise alarm. Nations, in contemporary jargon, might entail a claim to autonomy. The signing of a petition by young Austrians on behalf of indigenous rights was used as evidence of foreign conspiracy lurking behind indigenous rights. Those and other similarly creative conspiracy charges, and the publishing of forged documents kept the momentum until the new Constitutional draft came to light. Not surprisingly, in this version, indigenous rights had been drastically mutilated. The step by step recovery, in the final Constitutional text, of most of these rights, was an extraordinary tour de force. Indigenous and particularly Kayapo massive
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presence, the negotiating skills of late Senator Severo Gomes and the efficacy of a large group of NGOs are to be praised for it.
Eventually, indigenous rights were included in a whole separate chapter in the 1988 Constitution. The definition of Indian land explicitly included not only dwelling spaces and cultivated areas, but also land required for the preservation of environmental resources necessary to indigenous peoples’ well-being as well as land necessary to their physical and cultural reproduction, according to their usage, customs and traditions (art 231 &1).
Indigenous land rights were declared ‘originary’, a legal term that implies precedence and limits State role to recognizing rather than granting rights. This phrasing had the virtue of linking land rights to their historical foundations (rather than to a cultural stage or an awkward ward status). Indigenous groups’ and associations’ legal personality, in particular their capacity for suing on their own behalf was recognized, independently of their tutor’s opinions, and an obligation to assist them before the Courts was vested on Federal Prosecutors. All this amounted to secure basic instruments for upholding their rights (M.Carneiro da Cunha 1989).
In the process, the visibility and success of indigenous claims on land were enhanced, with the unexpected and paradoxical result that some other dispossessed sectors of society, such as communities of maroon descendants, and as we will shortly see, rubber-tapers, began to emulate them.
Rubber tappers as environmentalists.
By the mid-eighties, rubber tappers took the lead in establishing a link between their struggle and ecological concerns. Indigenous titles to land in Brazil, as mentioned, are grounded in indigenous people’s precedence on Brazilian territory (Joao Mendes Jr. 1912) and are not predicated on conservation. But once the link between rubber-tappers and the defense of the forest in the Amazon was made, Indigenous people followed suit. By late 1988, in the state of Acre, a coalition for the preservation of the Amazonian rainforest was active under the name “Forest People Alliance”, covering both rubber-tappers and indigenous groups. The Altamira rally, led by the Kayapo against the projected Xingu dam, had itself explicit environmental concerns. By the end of the eighties, the connection was a matter of course. As against the Yellowstone model that evicted indigenous tribes in order to create a pristine North-American environment (Cronon 1997), here the vindication was that local communities, who had conserved and relied on their environment, should not become victims of ecological concerns. Rather, in order for the environment to be conserved, they should be in charge of management and control of the resources they depended on. What was novel was the agency that should be imparted to local communities. The explicit connection between indigenous people and Conservation was to gain international scope in early 1992, with the creation of
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the International Alliance of the Indigenous-Tribal Peoples of the Tropical Forests, in which COICA (Association of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin) was one of the founding members. The Convention for Biological Diversity and Agenda 21, approved during the Rio Summit in June 1992, explicitly acknowledged the major role to be played by indigenous and local communities. It would be incumbent to Colombia to implement on a huge scale, by 1996, the idea of putting indigenous populations officially in charge, over a whole region of tropical rainforest. In Brazil, as we shall describe below, the same idea was put to the test six years earlier than in Colombia, on a somewhat smaller but quite significant scale, in ‘Extractive Reserves’. Rubber-tappers, and not indigenous people were the first protagonists of the experiment.
Indigenous land and conservation areas.
Brazil indigenous population is estimated at roughly 300,000 people of which 280,000 live in indigenous areas. While this is a small population, there is a great wealth of diversity among it. There are 206 indigenous societies of which 160 are in the Amazon, and roughly 190 different languages In addition, an estimated 50 indigenous groups in the Amazon still have no contact with the outside world.
The Amazon remained, with the short exception of the rubber boom that lasted from the 1870s to the 1910s, relatively aloof from European occupation. As a result, most of the Indigenous groups that have survived and most of the land that they have been able to retain are in the Amazon. This history accounts for the large Indian areas in the Amazon, where nearly 99% of Brazilian Indian land is located.
As a whole, the extension of Indian land is striking. Indians have constitutional rights to a little less than 12% of Brazilian territory, distributed in 574 different areas, and 20% of the Brazilian Amazon. Conservation areas in the Amazon where human presence is permitted add up to another 8.4% of the region.
In the eighties, the size of Brazilian indigenous land seemed astounding: too much land for too little Indians. That perspective is changing: the cover story of Veja, a major Brazilian weekly journal, on June 30, 1999, was about the 3,600 Xingu Indians who were ‘preserving an ecological paradise’ the size of Belgium. The point was that very few Indians could take sound care of a large territory. That conservation might best be undertaken by people who have sustainably lived in the areas is also the premise for the creation of extractive reserves.
Not all conservation areas, of course, can be managed by their pre-existent human population. But it has also become clear that a sound and viable ecological policy in Brazil has to involve local communities. Moreover, to evict
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people from conservation areas without offering them alternative means of subsistence is a secure path for disaster.
Just how conservation-oriented are traditional people?
Opponents of traditional peoples' involvement in conservation argue that 1.not all traditional societies are conservation-oriented 2. Even those who presently are might change for the worse when entering the market sphere.
For a long time, there has been, among anthropologists, conservationists, policy makers and traditional peoples themselves, what Paul Bohannan in another context has called a 'working misunderstanding'. It revolved around what one could call the essentialization (something that anthropologists nowadays seem fond of detecting) of traditional peoples' relations to environment. A cluster of ideas representing indigenous groups as naturally conservation-oriented resulted in what has been labeled "the myth of the ecologically noble savage" (K.Redford and A.Stearman 1991, 1993; A.M. Stearman 1994). Of course, there is no such thing as natural conservationists, but even if one translates ‘natural’ into ‘’ ‘cultural’, the issue remains: can traditional peoples be described as 'cultural conservationists'?
Environmentalism can refer to a set of practices and it can refer to an ideology. There are therefore three different situations that tend to be blurred by using a single term to cover them all. First, one can have the ideology without the actual practices, a case of lip-service to conservation.
Then, one can have the case where sustainable practices and cosmology are both present. Many Amazonian indigenous societies uphold a sort of lavoisierian ideology in which everything, including life and souls is recycled. Theirs is an ideology of limited exploitation of natural resources, and of the role of men as sustainers of the equilibrium of the universe, nature and supernature included. Values, food and hunting taboos, institutional or supernatural sanctions, provide the instruments for them to act according to this ideology. Such societies could easily fit into the category of cultural conservationists. The Peruvian Yagua (Chaumeil 1983) example comes immediately to mind.
Lastly, one can have cultural practices without the ideology (N.Gonzales 1992). In this case, one can think of people that, although lacking an explicit conservation-oriented ideology, follow cultural rules for using natural resources that, given the population density and the territory in which they take place, are sustainable. It is worth observing that in order to conserve resources, a society does not have to avoid any waste. It has just to keep it within limits. If a society approves on killing a whole group of monkeys, females and offspring included, and if such massacre, however distasteful, has no consequence as far as resources are concerned, then this society is not infringing conservation practices. All one can ask is whether such habits are compatible with sustainable use, not whether they are morally wrong. We might object on sport hunting in our
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society, yet it is a fact that North American hunters associations such as the Wildlife Federation have had a strong concern with and results in conservation. Indigenous groups might similarly conserve and manage their environment with much ingenuity and knowledge,( W. Balee 1989, W. Balee and A. Gely 1989, A. Anderson 1991, H.Kaplan and K. Kopischke 1992, etc.) particularly when soil is poor, yet this is not necessarily performed under a conservationist ideology (A.M. Stearman 1994, K.Redford and A.M. Stearman 1991). Management of a more bountiful environment might be much less commendable, but low population density will still makes it sustainable.
Indigenous groups and even some migrant groups such as rubber-tappers have indeed preserved and possibly enhanced biodiversity in neotropical forests. Amazonian forests, as botanists put it, are oligarchic with ‘subaltern’ species being oppressed by dominant ones. These societies seem to have, just by making small clearings in the forest, acted as revolutionaries: oppressed species would be given a new chance for outrunning their competitors. Balée (1994: 119-123) for his part, provides a detailed review on the evidence of Amazonian Societies enhancing environmental resources, be it rivers, soils, wildlife or plant diversity.
The second argument suggests that, although traditional societies might have exploited their environment in a sustainable manner, frontier population which comes into contact with such societies will induce a short-sighted strategy for utilizing resources. There will be a lack of adequate institutions and little information about alternative opportunities. Anomy will morally dissolve groups, as young entrepreneurial people will clash with old customs and reciprocity values (R. Chase-Smith 1994).
So, goes the argument, although 'traditional culture' might once have fostered conservation, the induced needs and the link with market economy will inevitably lead to changes in culture and over-exploitation of natural resources. It certainly will lead to changes, but not necessarily to over-exploitation. For what the pre-contact balanced situation also implies is that, given some structural conditions, traditional peoples might play a central role in conservation.
What one fails to recognize in this scenario is that the situation has changed and the validity of old paradigms has changed along with it. Traditional Peoples are neither outside the central economy, nor are they any longer simply in the periphery of the world system. For traditional peoples and their organizations are not any more dealing solely with frontiersmen. They have become partners to such central institutions as the UN, the World Bank and first-world powerful NGOs.
Nor is the market in which traditional people now can move the market of old. Indigenous societies until recently could only get cash from first-generation commodities (raw materials such as rubber, nuts, minerals, etc.). They are now
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starting to participate in the information economy (the so-called third-generation commodities) through the value attached to indigenous and local knowledge (Cunningham 1991, G.Nijar 1996, St.Brush 1993, M. Carneiro da Cunha et alii 1998 and 1999). They have even entered the emerging fourth-generation market of 'existence values'. These are things such as biodiversity and natural landscapes whose existence some people deem to be valuable in themselves. In 1994, there were buyers of one acre of Amazonian land, through an NGO “Nature Conservancy”, who were paying not for using or even seeing that acre, but rather for it to be preserved.
The major real bottleneck in involving local communities in conservation plans and putting them in control is for these plans to make or acquire local meaning. Agendas have to merge, benefits have to reach the communities, training and techniques have to be provided. In what follows, we will summarily chronicle the process of merging conservation and land reform issues that resulted in the invention of extractive reserves. By going into minute details, am evidencing the role played by local initiative and by Brazilian as well as foreign academic and NGO assistance.
How does conservation acquire local meaning? A case study.
On January 15, 1990, the Juruá Extractive Reserve, in the Brazilian Amazon, was officially founded. It was the first of its kind, that is “a conservation area managed by its traditional population”. The creation of the Juruá Extractive Reserve, with its 500.000 ha, was largely the result of a well-oiled coalition of people and organizations at different levels, ranging from grass-root unionists, national rubber tapper’s council (based in the capital of Acre state), academics, the Brazilian Development Bank, Federal Prosecutors, as well as Brazilian and foreign-based NGOs. It was also the outcome of unexpected events and contingent links and considerations (M.Almeida 1996c).
Extractive Reserves were to know a rapid success in Brazil4 but also internationally, where the idea actually caught the imagination and was articulated with community-based sustainable programs (M.Alegretti 1990, St.Schwartzmann 1989).
The term Reserve first came into the scene in October 1985, at the first national rubber-tappers assembly in Brasilia, organized by anthropologist Mary Alegretti. A delegation of rubber-tappers from the state of Rondonia made the remark that no one was (in principle) allowed to mess with indigenous reserves. Why couldn’t rubber tappers’ areas be protected by law in a similar way? Why couldn’t they
4 Eleven other such units had been created by 1997 and two others at least are in the process of being created.
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themselves have ‘reserves’? Reserve at that point had no specific meaning other than a protected area.
The term was only to acquire a more specific meaning late in 1986. An anthropologist had just explained to an assembled team of rubber-tapper leaders the statute of indigenous land. Indigenous land, as mentioned above, is specially protected and the only case in which collective rights over land are acknowledged under Brazilian law. At that point, the term ‘reserve’ began to sound indeed interesting to some socialist rubber-tapper leaders who might have seen it as a collectivization of sorts. After a closed door deliberation of which the anthropologists were excluded, this inner cabinet chose to claim collective possession of the land.
As Mauro Almeida stresses (e.g.1996c), rubber-tapper leaders, in the eighties, were convinced of the importance of their contribution to the economy. This could well be the legacy of the World War II American and Brazilian effort to resuscitate natural rubber production in the Amazon for strategic reasons. At that time, following a massive propaganda campaign and offered the alternative of being sent to the battlefields in Italy, a new wave of immigrants was taken to Acre, under the resounding name of rubber soldiers. At the same meeting of late 1986, Almeida was put in charge of explaining that Amazonian rubber had been subsidized for decades, since its prices were higher than international prices. Besides, natural rubber from the Amazon barely provided 10% of the Brazilian demand, not to mention the world market5. Subsidies had been established and maintained because of the landowners’ political power in Congress and for their sole benefit. Once this oligarchy sold its estates to southern companies, subsidies themselves subsided. No one seemed interested in incentives for rubber-tappers.
By late 1986 the alliance between rubber tappers and environmentalists was launched and one year later, Chico Mendes would have articulated and made it operative (Mendes 1989, S. Hecht and Cockburn 1989, Shoumatoff 1991). At that point no one except one anthropologist, Mary Alegretti, was thinking of defining the reserves as conservation areas. Rather, well in the tradition of these unionists, Agrarian Reform was the motto. Rubber tappers defined themselves as landless peasants of the forest (M.Almeida 1996c).
In October 1989, the left-wing Worker’s Party lost the Presidential elections by a close call. Given the political basis of the newly-elected president, hope for Agrarian Reform faded. There was a window of opportunity, though, to have reserves declared as conservation areas. Legal technicalities such as not having to previously indemnify the land owners (as would have been the case in an
5 The Amazonian forest annually produced around 20 thousand tons of rubber and its peak production ever had been 40 thousand tons; Brazilian industry imported 80 thousand tons of
natural rubber; and used an additional 200 thousand tons of synthetic
rubber
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Agrarian reform) made it expedient to have the reserves defined as conservation areas. Land owners, in this case, would have to seek indemnification in the courts, but this was no prerequisite. After the Jurua Extractive Reserve was created as a conservation area in January, three other projects were rapidly presented and approved before the deadline of March 15, when the new president was to take office. After a long interview with some members of the Rubber Tappers Council and their counselors, the military gave its authorization to proceed.
To rely on a conservationist alliance was thus a strategy. To constitute the reserves as conservation areas was a tactical choice. To say that this was strategic does not mean that it was a deception, a scam, a forgery, neither in substance nor in project. The project itself is still being translated into local significance, and this is what we will go on to show below. As for substance, rubber tappers had indeed been conserving biodiversity. In the upper Jurua, as mentioned above, rubber had been exploited for over 120 years, and yet the area was proven to be a diversity hot spot, with 549 bird species, 103 amphibians, 1536 butterfly species (K.Brown Jr. and A.V. Freitas in press).
True, rubber tappers, like Monsieur Jourdain, had been only unknowingly conserving biological diversity. They thought they were producing rubber, not diversity. Rubber was tangible, individualized, distinctive since it could be of a better or worse quality and concretely linked to its producer who signed his name on his product before it was sold to the estate store and was sent drifting down river to the market. Despite price oscillations, it had a relatively permanent value. When inflation was raging all over the country, and people’s wages, at the end of the month, were worth less than half what they had been at the beginning of the very same month, rubber tappers could still measure the worth of their labour in a steady currency. A daily wage had to be paid 10 kgs of rubber. As compared to the rest of the country, this was expensive labor. It did not imply that every rubber tapper would produce ten kgs of rubber every single day. An average rubber tapper will exploit two trails of rubber trees, each one being tapped two times a week and then only for a maximum of 8 months. He will be expected to work on rubber around 4 times a week, the rest being mostly used for hunting in the wet season and fishing in the dry season. 10 kgs of rubber a day, moreover, is not likely to be obtained everywhere in the area. It is a standard set in very productive areas. As a daily wage, therefore, this 10 kgs standard stood for a man’s dignity and independence, what he could achieve in a day if only he wanted to, the monetary dimension of which is what the economists call the cost of opportunity.
An average rubber tapper household relies at once on rubber extraction (for cash), swidden agriculture (for basic foodstuff), if possible, some sheep and a few cows (for hoarding), while meat and fish come from the forest and the river. Seasonal foraging of wild palm fruits and honey is also appreciated and many
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more items from the forest are used for house and canoe building, medicine, fish-poisons, etc.
It is well known that due to the presence of a leaf disease, rubber in the Amazon cannot prosper in plantations. Trees can only remain healthy when dispersed in the forest. A rubber trail will consist of around 120 rubber trees, of the Hevea genus. A household will rely on an average of two such trails, and the total area will cover something around 300ha (741 acres) or 3 square kilometer (1.6 square miles). This is the minimum surface needed. As an average, households used up around 500 hectares (1200 acres) or 5 square kilometers (1.9 square miles). This accounts for the very low density of occupation in a rubber estate, around 1 to 1.2 persons per square km, a density that seems optimal for conservation.
As could be expected, how conservation was translated varied according to local situations and agendas. In the eastern part of Acre, rubber estates had been sold in the seventies mainly to southern corporations or private investors. This was done with governmental incentives, in order for the area to be turned into cattle ranches. Some of the investors actually started cutting down the forest for pastures or simply for expelling rubber tappers and consolidate their legal titles. Rubber tappers, in this predicament, started defending their livelihood. They would form human barriers to stop wage laborers from cutting down trees. This form of pacific resistance called the attention of the media and of ecologists.
In the western part of Acre, the old system of rubber estates still prevailed. True, corporations had also bought land there, but they were speculating and waiting for roads. Except for some attempts at extracting mahoganny, the lack of any road made the region unattractive to new ventures. In the mean while, the new land owners let the traditional system continue. Local bosses (sometimes the previous landowners themselves) would lease the estates and sublease them according to the century-old system. A pyramid of stores would be set at each river and tributary mouth, provisioned with goods on credit. Store keepers tried to control all the rubber production along the rivers and prevent it from being smuggled before debts were offset. The rubber tappers of the Jurua, in contrast to the more “modern” area to the east, were considered ‘cativos’, a word that means captives and in a more archaic sense that resonates to this day, also means slaves. The rubber tappers in the east, abandoned by their bosses and land owners, were in contrast libertos, freed, manumitted. Although there is much literature on debt slavery in the Amazon, it is quite doubtful whether the system really qualified as slavery, at least as known in Brazil until 1888. In the absence of any effective control over people spread out in the forest, monopoly over their product was achieved by advances in goods at the river mouth stores. In fact debit was the rule of the whole system, from the merchants in Belem who took advances from their clients in Liverpool to the very last tributary up river. As one writer put it, one’s worth could be measured by the extent of one’s debts
Land owners in Acre had a very flimsy legal basis to the estates they claimed. In fact, if there was any legal title at all, it would most likely cover but a fraction of
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the total estate. An annual fee of 30 kgs of rubber per trail was paid by the rubber tapper to the estate owner as a rent or rather a tithe. This fee amounted to circa 10% of the annual production (which was estimated at 600kgs over two trails). Again, it had a symbolic rather than an economic significance: it sanctioned the recognition of rubber tappers as tenants rather than proprietors of the forest and reinforced the bosses’ dubious claims over the land. The rubber tappers of the Jurua river had no cattle ranchers to fight against. What they did have was what they thought of as a degrading state of serfdom. Manumission was their primary agenda. The first sign, long predating the extractive reserve project, were several attempts at disrupting payment of the annual 30 kgs of rubber. The message was clearly understood: to this day, refusing to pay the annual rent amounts to open defiance of the rubber estate system. It directly challenges landowners claims (M.Almeida 1993).
When rumors of the extractive reserve were in the air, rebellion against rent started all over again. Then, in a spectacular move, a cooperative store was founded, with a grant from a Federal Development Bank, this time challenging land owners’ monopoly over trade. Overcoming conflicts, arrests and threats from local authorities, several boats triumphantly entered what was to become the Reserve, loaded with blue jeans, watches, radios, motors for canoes, etc. in a truly apotheosis of cargo. The cooperative went bankrupt in little more than a year (among other reasons, because no one would understand money and inflation), but the significance of these two initiatives was not lost. At that point the Upper Jurua Extractive Reserve was founded by the Federal government and put under the jurisdiction of the Brazilian Environmental Institute, Ibama. It was grounded on expert advice and reports by biologists and anthropologists on the biological importance of the area, its high incidence of endemisms, and the serfdom in which rubber tappers were kept.
Contrary to the struggle for preserving trees in the Xapuri region, there was nothing at first that could be called ecological mobilization in the Jurua. After these heroic times and the initial exhilaration of freedom, a set of institutions started to take root in the area. This was the time when a large research project was launched, involving a great number of local people, anthropologists, biologists, geologists, and many others, funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This project had political aims: it was set out to prove, through a successful example, that under adequate conditions, so-called traditional people would manage a conservation area. Adequate conditions, in our view, included clear legal rights, quality of life, democratic institution-building, access to scientific and technological resources. A number of different tasks were achieved, many of which were directed at shaping a conservationist set of ideas in the reserve. Conversely there was an effort to persuade the public, environmentalists and the government of the viability of putting traditional people in charge of conservation areas. Evidence for the high biological diversity of the area was collected by the biologists. Reliable and simple methods for the rubber tappers to monitor degradation as well as quality of life were devised. A “code of use” of the area
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was discussed and adopted in an assembly of the Association of rubber tappers. A project for zoning the area combining local exploitation patterns and ecological significance was set up. ‘Democratic’ institution building and administrative training took place. Studies of patterns of settlement, mobility and conflict resolution were undertaken. There was a census, and a registry of land (actually rubber trail) rights. A study of local knowledge and practices related to the use of the forest and its resources was prepared. Research was carried out on new or enhanced old products with more aggregated value. And links were strengthened with the Brazilian Environmental Agency (Ibama), trying to have them delegate some responsibilities to the Association and a body of local “environmental overseers or inspectors”. Ibama also channeled G-7 funds to the Reserve.
The impact of these policies on all aspects of life in the upper Jurua was quite remarkable but not surprisingly very different from what had been expected. For one thing, the Jurua people developed their own version of Conservation. While their adult children would tend to enter the political dispute for the board of the Association, a group of mostly mature men, men of consequence, became part of a body of “environmental inspectors”. The kind of policing they undertook was closely modeled on the old “mateiro” or woodsmen role. Mateiros were specialized workers in the rubber estates of old, who opened up new trails and took sanctions if rubber trees were over exploited or damaged. The ‘environmental inspectors’ received a measure of power, but were not allowed to take sanctions. They should merely counsel the culprits and report infractions to the official bureau in Brasilia or in Cruzeiro do Sul, three days down river. They pointed out that if given no real power, they would not engage in explicitly blaming their neighbors and just get bad blood out of it. They nevertheless went at their job with self-righteousness. The major infractions were related to hunting. Until last year when a new bill was passed, hunting was strictly forbidden under Brazilian law. Prison without bail was the sentence for hunting, whereas primary culprits of murder could be released on bail. This strict law was translated in local terms not as a conservation policy but rather primarily as a matter of equity. In the officially approved Use Plan, after much deliberation, two practices related to hunting were banned: one should never hunt for the market (and indeed there was a market for game meat in a nearby village, adjacent to the Reserve) and one should never use dogs. There are two kinds of dogs in the area: native dogs and the valued paulista dogs. Paulista stands for someone from Sao Paulo, the big industrial town. It is uncertain whether these dogs, that entered the region through trade with another river valley (the Tarauaca) were indeed from Sao Paulo or whether their species name was a reference to their superior predatory abilities. In any case they were excellent hunting dogs, who would not lose a prey, once they had tracked it. The problem, according to the Jurua reasoning was they would frighten the animals and that game would desert the area, not only their owner’s area but also a much larger one, thus diminishing hunting returns for neighbors who had no paulista dogs to compete. Paulista dogs were forbidden in the reserve according to the use plan. Now, the ban on dogs
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became the touching stone of local Conservationism. Not to have dogs became the external sign of adherence to the Reserve project.
I cannot deal here with all the consequences of what went on. One aspect we would like to mention is the invasion of numbering, chartering, and writing, which met a great success. In order for them to appraise quality of life and environmental deterioration, around thirty men and women all over the reserve were asked to write diaries of various sorts. Hunting and animal viewing along expeditions, fishing returns, rubber production, meals, infant weight, expenditures, viewing of indicator species such as butterflies (heliconiidae), amphibians and birds. People were encouraged to add whatever they thought would be interesting. At first, the rubber production diaries followed the model of the old estate store account, and people relished in their mastery over numbers. But these and other diaries grew into very rich narratives, full of significant details. Counting but also writing is becoming a major activity. As women are generally more literate than men, men mostly excel at counting whereas women excel at writing and drawing. These descriptive techniques have been associated historically and also in the literature to domination practices, and indeed they were. What happened here, we think, was a creative seizure and reformulation by local people of such techniques.
One important dissonance has to do with the very notion, introduced with the reserve, of producing and maintaining biodiversity. As mentioned above, what rubber tappers thought they were producing was their own sustenance and then rubber for the market. In relation to what is in the forest, the general rule was restraint, no over exploitation, social sharing, magical precautions and pacts of several kinds with the keepers or mothers of what we could call wild realms, such as a mother of rubber trees, a mother of game, etc. Agriculture, on the other hand, has no mother. People are thought to control the whole process, notwithstanding the well-known fact that results are uncertain. There is thus a radical separation between what is exploited from nature and what is controlled by men and women, a sharp disjunction between the domestic and the wild. This can be sensed, for instance, in the fact that there is no category corresponding to what we call ‘plants’. The word ‘plant’ (planta) does exist but it only refers to what we would call cultivated plants. This meaning appears to be self-evident to people who derive the noun from the verb ‘to plant’. ‘Plants’ are necessarily ‘planted’. Since savage species by definition are not, how could one ever call them ‘plants’?
Another clue in the same direction can be drawn from the distinction between brabo/manso. In its regional usage, brabo could approximately be rendered by ‘wild, savage or uncivilized’ as opposed to domesticated. It can also more generally refer to the contrast between creatures who flee men and those who are unafraid of him. In the more restricted sense of uncivilized, the word brabo is applied to those unfamiliar with work and survival in the forest. During World War II so-called rubber soldiers were somewhat surprisingly called ‘wild’, brabos.
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They were commonly left in the forest with basic foodstuff and instructions, sometimes under the guidance of more experienced rubber-tappers to be ‘domesticated’.
The opposition between the wild and the domesticated is a pervasive and radical one. “There is both a wild (brabo) and a domesticated (mansa) variety of everything in this world: the tapir and the cow; the deer and the sheep or goat; the squirrel and the rat; the nambu bird and the chicken. The same is true even for people: there are tame (manso) people and there are wild (brabo) people, namely the Indians (Lico, personal communication)”.
Producing biodiversity, producing nature is therefore an oxymoron, a contradiction in (local) terms. Yet this is precisely what the G-7 funds are actually rewarding. How is one to handle this in terms of policy? A straight economic response would be to pay rubber tappers directly for what the market is actually interested in, namely biodiversity. Yet this runs counter the local perception. Biodiversity is a by-product of a form of life, the equivalent of what economists call an externality. Externalities are products that result from other processes and are not taken into account by the market. They carry no price-tags. Biodiversity and environmental services (or disservice) are presently beginning to be taken into account, their costs or benefits are starting to be internalized, and so they should be. This is the consequence, by the way, of an expanded notion of the total system. If environmental services were to be directly paid for in the reserve, it could mean inverting ground and figure: what was a by-product, an unintended consequence of a way of life, would presently become the product itself.
On the other hand, Ibama, the environmental agency, has concentrated on enhancing the value of so-called sustainable products from the forest and expects the reserve to be economically viable on those grounds. But Ibama too does not include in its accounting conservation services.6. The conundrum might be solved by a judicious mixture of enhanced rubber products that would provide cash to individuals and households, in conjunction with a fund that would globally reward maintenance of biological diversity by providing general benefits (such as education, health and transportation services) and finance environmental-friendly initiatives. This is somehow already taking place. Conservation was initially a political weapon in a fight for freedom and entitlement to land rights. Presently, Conservation money is being used for obtaining motors, for boats, for schools, for health facilities. Conservation is becoming embedded within local projects and expanding its relevance.
Traditional people revisited.
6 Nor did Ibama, until recently, relying on the old naturalized idea of forest people being by their very essence, conservationists) reserve funds for the administration costs, providing for the local government of the reserve. Yet rubber tappers who sit on the board have to travel quite often and cannot maintain a normal schedule of activities
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We have started with a definition by extension and suggested that some analytic definition would emerge. From what we have described, one could take some steps in that direction and state that traditional people are groups that have conquered or are struggling to conquer (through practical and symbolic means) a public identity that includes several if not all of the following characteristics: use of low environmental impact techniques; equitable forms of social organization; presence of institutions with legitimate enforcing power; local leadership; and lastly cultural traits, selectively reaffirmed and enhanced.
Thus, while it is tautological to say that “traditional people” have a low destructive impact on the environment, it is non-tautological to say that a definite group such as clam collectors in Santa Catarina have become “traditional people”, for this is a process of self-constitution. Internally, it requires conservation rules to be established and legitimate leadership and institutions. Externally, it requires making alliances with non-governmental organizations and academics as well as with governmental institutions.
It should be clear by now that the category “traditional people” is occupied by political subjects who are ready to give it substance, that is to enter into a covenant. They will commit themselves to a number of practices in return for some other kind of benefit, foremost of which are land rights. In this perspective, even the most culturally conservative and most conservationist of human societies are nonetheless always in some sense neo-traditional or neo-conservationist.
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Acknowledgements: We would like to acknowledge the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (Award Number 92-21848A), the CNPq (Brazilian National Research Council), and the Lichtstern Fund (Anthropology, University of Chicago) for research support. We also thank Fany Ricardo (ISA) for providing accurate data, Paul Liffmann for editorial help and all participants in this issue of Daedalus who discussed and helped clarifying some of the ideas in this essay, the shortcomings of which are our sole responsibility.
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