Suchergebnisse

Abstract From the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway in the 1970's to the current construction of the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world at Belo Monte, the Brazilian Amazon has experienced the impact of large-scale infrastructure projects. When announced, all these projects purported to be the means to achieve progress, national integration, and economic development. The outcomes after several decades are less clear: national indebtedness, significant social and environmental impacts, and regional development taking second place to other goals such as energy production and national GDP. Solutions are suggested to reduce the negative impacts and achieve the goal of improved livelihoods and sustainable development without giving up on national development goals.

Rainforest Cities: Urbanization, Development, and Globalization of the Brazilian Amazon. John O. Browder and Brian J. Godfrey. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 429 pp.From Principles to Practice: Indigenous People and Biodiversity Conservation in Latin America. Andrew Gray. Alejando Parellada. and Hellen Newing. eds. Copenhagen, Denmark: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 1998. 303 pp.

Place against Time: Land and Environment in the Papua New Guinea Highlands. Paul Sillitoe. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996. 438 pp.

Blackwater ecosystems of Amazonia represent extreme nutrient‐poor conditions that differ from those found in other regions of the Amazon. The tendency to contrast mainly the floodplain (várzea) and the upland forests (terra firme) has made it possible to overlook significant differences present within the Amazonian terra firme. These differences can be important in understanding human adaptation, particularly at the extremes of the nutrient‐poorl‐rich gradient. Human populations inhabiting blackwater areas have adjusted to the low productivity of the environment through complex forms of exchange and subsistence specialization, inherited and hierarchical control over the more productive fisheries, segmentary lineage organization, very small settlements at considerable distances from each other, and dependence on bitter manioc for the bulk of their calories. Analytical recognition of ecosystem heterogeneity in Amazonia is likely to lead to reinterpretations of several human/environment processes that have interested anthropologists, such as the protein debate and the role of environmental characteristics on the development of culture.

The Amazon was, until recently, one of those distant and unknown regions that excited the imagination but was largely irrelevant to the daily lives of scholars, policymakers, and the majority of Latin Americans. This is no longer the case. Developmentalists and disenfranchised people alike look to it as a vast resource area capable of yielding mineral, forestal, animal, and agrarian riches. Ecologists warn against the potential devastation of an environment that is still poorly understood. Agronomists are challenged by the variability encountered at every turn and the diverse responses of crops to standard management practices. Anthropologists and sociologists decry the lack of a social consciousness in the development of the Amazon and try to assess the human costs of this development paid by native and peasant populations. Many other specialists also have found the Amazon an important natural laboratory for their research skills. Yet much of this research remains inaccessible in specialized disciplinary or regional journals and unrelated to the central problems that are, fundamentally, multidisciplinary.