Maps, Texts, and History - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 279

a fusion of races, peoples, a legacy of memories, a moral consciousness that gains
strength through sacrifices in the common work of civilization. Rénan's further point
about resolving boundary difficulties by consulting the populations was a “modest em-
pirical solution” that da Cunha would use in shaping his arguments. 3
For the imperial claims directed against Peru, the narrative logic would revolve
around the colonial axis of Civilization versus Barbary, embellished with the usual
tropes: improvement versus nomadism, political cultures (modern republicanism versus
revanchistcaudillism),socialcohesionversusspatialdispersion,andtheotherweaponry
of the imperial ideological arsenal, namely comparative patterns of discovery, historical
cultures, nature, morality, and social evolution, and finally social ecology. The map, the
travelreports(officialandotherwise),andtheadditionalcommentarywouldbecomethe
sinews of a spatial history and narrative of the “Brazilianness” (as opposed to Peruvian-
ness) of the Amazon. Historical cartography, settlement history, folklore, and distinctive
activities of daily life in the region would infuse the place with traditions, institutions,
and peoples that reflected Brazilian pasts and futures. The geopolitics of these forests
wouldhaveeffectsonrubbersupply,futurediplomaticconditions,andeconomicpossib-
ilities in the rich Upper Amazon. Railroads and ports were being built, and the throngs
of upriver travelers had reported many other kinds of resources and potentials.
Patriotic Epistemes and Tropical Statecraft
DaCunha'staskwastocreatea“patrioticepisteme”formedofCreoleandnativesources
to fashion a nationalist narrative for the settlement of the Upper Amazon. 4 His job was
to recast the political economy and ecologies as part of an authentically and historically
progressiveBrazilian“MarchofHistory,”butinanAmazonianregisterthatcoupleditto
and echoed the rest of the nation. Da Cunha's emphasis on Brazilian sources and actors
was a way of valorizing local knowledge and histories and highlighting the lineages of
administrative action in Amazonia, as well as expressing his own populism. Rather than
constructing an exotic backdrop for European explorers, he locates the “natural” act-
ors of Amazonia within it, shaping its history in knowledgeable, familiar, and practiced
ways. He was not interested in exotification, whether in the modes of Brazilian nativism
or the essentialisms that infested writings about Amazonia, but rather sought to portray
its inhabitants as naturals to it, outcomes of its history and localities, modest bearers and
creators of a distinct, but Brazilian, tropical civilization, and one intellectually on a par
with the highest levels of colonial science.
The international questions were of import, but creating an analysis that would shape
national publicopinionabouttheBraziliannessoftheregionwasalsoaserioustask.The
political and cultural distances between northern and southern Brazil were enormous.
From the optic of the industrializing South, the Amazon, with its dark populations, In-