Communities of Ruin: Humanitarian Violence and the Amazon's Uncontacted Tribes

ABSTRACT

This essay investigates portrayals of ‘uncontacted tribes’ of the Amazon by the humanitarian organisations and the popular texts that aim to study and save them. These portrayals rely upon a convergence of figures of racial, gender and sexual deviance recuperated from the age of high imperialism, with newer configurations of the human which emerged in the wake of the Second World War. How might we account for the fact that these objects of preservation are presented – save for a few crucial exceptions – as degraded, almost dead or simply not there? By way of addressing this question, I offer the production of the ‘uncontacted’ as one site for examining the imbrication of humanitarianism and violence.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Note on contributor

Danielle Bouchard is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She earned her PhD in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2006. Her first book, A Community of Disagreement: Feminism in the University (Peter Lang 2012), uses the philosophical concept of disagreement to provide alternatives to the most common ways in which feminism's place in the modern US university is imagined. She is currently working on a new book project that examines the role of visual tropes, texts and technologies in hegemonic articulations of human rights.

Notes

¹For example, see (Grann 2005; Preston 2013).

²One example is the controversy generated by Patrick Tierney's book Tierney 2000. The accusations Tierney makes in the book regarding several individuals known for their work with Amazonian peoples prompted a formal investigation by the American Anthropological Association (Hill et al. 2005). I note this example not in order to weigh in on the controversy but to draw attention to the cultural capital it generated for the participants in the debate – making it, on some level, more about the debate than about the peoples whose treatment was being considered.

³An exception is Heckenberger et al. (2003). Two of the co-authors are identified as members of the Kuikuro people of the Upper Xingu region of the Brazilian Amazon. The piece references ‘indigenous knowledge systems’ which have identified areas that coincide with the sites of ‘mapped archeological features’ (1711–1712), although the emphasis in this essay is on the latter process of mapping using satellite imagery.

⁴William Balée notes that ‘awá’, which means ‘people’, is a name used by multiple groups who speak different languages within the Tupí-Guarani family (2013: xi). In the texts I examine here, that specificity is not acknowledged.

⁵As brilliantly researched and analysed by Donna Haraway (1989).