Amazonia Expanded:
Candace Slater takes readers to the rainforest and beyond

The class was called “Images of Amazonia.” It was 1988, and Professor Candace Slater had just come back from the first of what would become a long line of research trips to the Amazon. She’d gone with the purpose of challenging stereotypes, seeing beyond the rain forest scenery, and now she wanted to share her findings with her students. She began the class by questioning ideas and rattling off sets of facts. When asked how many people lived in the Amazon region, students' guesses ranged from 200,000 to 2 million. No, Slater told them, 23 million people made their homes within the nine countries that comprise the Amazon.

A McDonald’s ad uses what would appear to be familiar rain forest imagery, though the site is not a rain forest

As she continued to dismantle popular conceptions, one undergraduate stood up and slung his backpack over his shoulder with a thump. “Okay,” he exclaimed. “It’s all mud, misery, and mosquitoes!” And he went storming out of the room.

“I was as stunned as the remaining students,” recalled Slater, a professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and director of the Townsend Center for the Humanities. “But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it doesn’t help to begin by telling people that their most cherished ideas of nature are wrong. You have to get them to want to examine their own assumptions. That moment really set the stage for much of my writing on the Amazon.”

Slater’s book Entangled Edens was published in December 2001 by the University of California Press. Like her earlier class, the book attempts to take readers beyond rain forest stereotypes. However, its opening chapter begins with precisely these stereotypes by describing an IMAX movie bursting with flowers, wildlife, lush greenery, and colorful natives.

Descendants of runaway slaves in the community of Boa Vista, Tapajós River, Brazil (photo by Candace Slater)

From this starting point, Slater goes on to lay out her own vision of the various ways that different people have understood the Amazon. “The good thing about the IMAX movie is that it does indeed create concern for environmental issues,” Slater said. “The problem is that the kind of consciousness it generates tends to be quite narrow. The book is not an attack on the Rainforest with a capital “R” but rather, an interrogation of how this Forest relates to individual forests in many different corners of the world.”

Slater’s book expands almost immediately into the different people of the Amazon. Some of these, like the descendants of runaway Black slaves, get little media attention. Others, such as gold miners, are usually cast as stock environmental villains. While her discussion does not shy away from serious problems of exploitation and violence, her approach to both the slave descendants and the miners is strikingly sympathetic.

A gold miner (photo by Candace Slater)

“You can bomb as many airport runways as you like,” said Slater, referring to previous government attempts to stop the miners’ encroachment on the rivers and the forests. “They’ll be back, if not in two weeks then in two months or two years. But an educational campaign that focuses on the miners’ ambivalence toward nature, their sense of respect for gold as a living being at the same time that they’re polluting rivers with mercury, is going to be a lot more successful.”

The word “nature” has multiple meanings in Slater's book. She dwells at length on widely-told stories of the Encante, an enchanted water world that is home to dolphins and anacondas with the ability to transform themselves at will into human form. “The Encante is really a vision of a nature that doesn’t hold still,” said Slater. “It is a state in which there is no defined boundary between the human and the non-human, in which the world is always shifting and one can’t rely on appearances. The stories made me question the whole vision of what nature is. I had never really given that a whole lot of thought.”

When Slater first visited the Amazon, local stories and oral histories provided an important entrée into her new research. She often found herself overhearing conversations like the one she recounts between an old man named Raimundo and a young college student named Davi. Raimundo insists on a literal interpretation of the Encante tales while Davi prefers a figurative interpretation of these same stories.

A woman tells stories of the Encante (photo by Candace Slater)

Slater herself is hesitant to come down on either side of this debate. "Amazonians live a very different kind of life," she said carefully, "and one would be attuned to much different kinds of natural phenomena, let's say. They would necessarily see and explain the natural world in different ways. So, without trying to avoid the question, I think it’s a very complicated one.”

Perhaps because of the value Slater has found in these stories, she is critical of documents such as a 1992 United Nations report called “Amazonia without Myths.” “The whole idea of stripping away myths to get at some fixed truth that lies beneath them seems very suspect,” Slater said. “I don’t think we ever dispel myths, we illumine them. And that report had a very definite sustainable development agenda. I have nothing against sustainable development—it certainly beats environmental destruction—but I think that the premises that underlie our own enthusiasm for it have to be examined.”

In the classroom, Slater has changed her approach over the past decade, encouraging students to expand their existing visions of the Amazon. But her aim is still to present the region as a stage for the entangled dramas of different peoples within and outside the Amazon. Her students come not only from the Spanish and Portuguese department but from other majors such as Geography, Anthropology, and Political Economy of Industrialized Societies. Slater hopes her classes will give students interested in public policy a chance to immerse themselves in the complexities of the Amazon, helping them to later make more informed decisions.

“I’ve had endless numbers of people say to me, ‘Look, what’s happening in the Amazon may be complex but it’s urgent, and what are you going to do now?’” Slater said. “I think that there are various levels of action. Sometimes you do have to make snap decisions and package things in sound bites. But those aren’t the kind of moments to which one is accustomed in a classroom. That’s one reason I’m a professor instead of an ad writer or a politician. Universities are places where you get to tell the bigger story.”