Everyday Forms of Empire - The Scramble for the Amazon and the Lost Paradise of Euclides da Cunha - page 333

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Everyday Forms of Empire
The Tropicalist Ethnography of Euclides da Cunha
Euclides da Cunha, Amazon Tropicalist
Da Cunha's influence on Brazilian nationalist and imperial thought was durable. The
Brazilian sociologist GilbertoFreyrepronounceddaCunha“theFirstTropicalist.” Freyre
could claim early usage of the terms tropicality (essentialisms about the tropics), trop-
icalism (ideologies that informed the practices of tropical imperialism), and tropicology
(studies about the tropics). 1 For Freyre, a major mid-twentieth-century international pub-
lic intellectual, Luso-imperialism was the ideal form of colonial practice because it could
integrate autochthonous cultures into global economic systems in a mercantilist, misce-
genated, and multicultural way. It was based on the concept of hybridity in all its forms,
well before that term had become a cliché in colonial studies. Freyre used these ideas to
promote António de Oliveira Salazar's vicious dictatorship (1932-74) and its Portuguese
colonialisminoneofitsespeciallybrutalphases.Thisstance(andhissupportforBrazil's
authoritarian regime) did much to discredit him, but his insights were perhaps better than
his politics. 2
Freyre, a Northeasterner, yearned, like da Cunha, for a Brazilian national identity
rooted in racial blending, as opposed to southern Brazil's proclivity for European preem-
inence in blood and culture. Like da Cunha, he saw the adaptation of the Luso-tempera-
ment and organism to multicultural hybrid equatorial environments as part of an emer-
gent non-European civilization, a “New World in the Tropics.” Freyre took a great deal
of inspiration from the way da Cunha deployed frameworks for the biosocial dynam-
ics of place, temperament, and culture that produced a uniquely adapted tropical Man.
Da Cunha's views on miscegenation and syncretism, on creolizing cultures in producing
“tropical citizens,” as well as his devotion to the idea of progress, were hallmarks for jus-
tifying elements of Brazilian Amazonian imperialism. These approaches were marshaled
by Freyre in his writings on Luso-imperialism. 3
Da Cunha's culminating essays comparing Peruvian and Brazilian tropical imperial-
isms framed a substantive, “scientific,” and “moral” landscape for Brazil's assertions of
territorial rights and a rhetorical intervention that would link Amazonia to a mythical col-
lective Brazilian past, a “people,” and an imagined project of the future. The Amazon
question was not strictly a matter of who was able to “tame the heathen and the wild”
but part of an ethical and political ecology. What emerged from this exercise were
“homegrown” tropicalities and tropicalisms that challenged both European and Peruvian