The term origin does not mean the process of becoming of that which has emerged, but much more, that which emerges out of the process of becoming and disappearing. The origin stands in the flow of becoming as a whirlpool. .. .
-Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic DramaLike nature, culture, and its glamorous sibling global, local is one of those deeply compromised words our language will not relinquish. So central to so many anthropological projects, it is unlikely to be transcended; instead it continues to be both fought over and reinvigorated. In this article, I imagine the topography of what we might call a methodology of locality. In trying to understand how we can do our thinking about the local, I begin with a disarmingly transparent question: How, in all its specificity, does this place that holds our attention come into being? Pursuing this puzzle provokes ripples of association that shape interpretation like contour lines on a map, destabilize naturalized binaries, and shadow the unruly series of concentric circles through which a place is tied into multiple worlds.The most proximate circles are also, as Walter Benjamin suggests, immediate sites of danger and confusion. One finds, for example, a dark confluence of whirlpools at the very heart of the story of Igarape Guariba, the small place in the Amazon estuary I describe in what follows (see Figure I). 1 There is, for one, the giddying vortex of Brazilian national politics during the 1960s, a trauma that produced the regional dislocations of modernist highway construction, the violating histories of land conflict and expropriation, and the eventual fluorescence of international deforestation discourse.
In this article, I examine the life and career of Henry Walter Bates, both for its intrinsic interest and in an effort to understand some of the scale-making activities through which Amazonia became a region. Bates, a distinguished entomologist who spent the years 1848-59 in the Amazon basin, returned to Britain to write the most famous of the 19th-century accounts of regional life. Examining Bates's intellectual and philosophical formations, his fieldwork experience in the context of a turbulent Amazonian politics, and his relationships with metropolitan and colonial natural scientific institutions, I offer a thick history of practice as a strategy for analyzing the complex productivities of Victorian traveling science. [Amazonia, collecting, colonialism, fieldwork, natural science, region, space] History begins at ground level, with footsteps.- Michel de Certeau (1985:129) American Ethnologist 28M):51 3-548.
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