Who is Amazonia? The 'salt of the matter' for indigenous sustainability

The Amazon is fairly well known to most readers. The globe's vast tropical green is firmly rooted in the Western imagination as the quintessential example of exotic, primordial nature. It is a global icon of ecological well being, home to remarkable biodiversity, and even a 'tipping zone' in Anthropocene climate change. Everyone is aware that the area is acutely threatened by the rapid conversion of tropical forest for agri-business, urbanism and energy. Today, anyone can witness the destruction 'first-hand' as cyber-voyeurs on Google-Earth. Most see it as a tropical wilderness, and most of it sure looks like it, up close and remotely (Mittermeier et al 2003). Centuries of natural history have trained us to believe that people, real impactful people and dynamic historical change are a thing of the present, even though a huge area (>20%) is dominated by indigenous peoples, who face these challenges in their daily lives. Most know fairly little about these people, 'the salt of the Earth'. At the ground level, the Amazon is filled with people, social networks, the 'salt of the Earth', and that contemporary questions of sustainability must also attend to global poverty eradication, but the question remains: who are these marginalized people, who is the Amazon?

The long-held assumption of broad socio-ecological uniformity in Amazonia underpins much of the scientific work conducted in the area. Sampling is quite limited, typically the absolute bare minimum, and scientific expeditions routinely swoop in, grab samples, and extrapolate, going solo. No surprise, these commonly reify entrenched stereotypes and polarize debate by neglecting an old scientific skepticism of views that equate an absence of evidence with evidence of an absence. Still more problematic, this implies that there is no need to look carefully at local and regional variation in coupled human–natural systems. Specifically, recent claims that vast portions of western Amazonia were sparsely populated by indigenous peoples do not refute emerging images of an anthropogenic Amazon, as some suggest, but they do complicate things (Barlow et al 2011, McMichael et al 2012). They remind us of how much we don't know, which must be kept firmly in mind to avoid perpetuating views of uniformity, the standard 20th century model (Meggers 1996), otherwise we risk further marginalizing the admittedly small and marginal groups that live there today. Most anthropologists see the Amazon as quite culturally and historically complex, with change in human–environmental systems no less dynamic or remarkable than other major forested areas of the globe (Balée 2010, Neves 2006, Rostain 2012, Schaan 2011). As the researchers most closely involved with local people in international contexts, they also view these people, 'their' people, as legitimate stakeholders and partners. The paper by Juan Alvaro Echeverri, a Columbian anthropologist, and Oscar Enokakuiodo Román Jitdutjaaño, a native Witoto (Echeverri and Román-Jitdutjaãno 2013), reflects the complexity of indigenous systems and their place in the contemporary world.

The 'People of the Centre', as the Witoto think of themselves, lie at the margins, as we see it. Witoto refers to related groups of shared ancestry and language who occupy the lands at the edge of the Amazonian and Andean world, along the borders of Columbia, Peru and Brazil, and likely have so since well before European conquest. This area is known for its complex cultural heritage, including settled riverine groups, whose ceramic artistry rivals the better known great styles along the middle and lower reaches of the Amazon River in 1492, linked to smaller-scale upland and riverine groups (Heckenberger and Neves 2009). Predictably, they had a rough go of it over the past five centuries, including the violence of resource extraction in this geo-politically volatile area at the edge of Spanish–Portuguese, later national competing interests and globalization, which, who can help but notice, is still a fight for their lives with contemporary developers and the law (Hecht 2013, Santos Granero 2009, Taussig 1991). These western Amazonians, at least, cannot be measured against the Procrustean bed of tropical forest culture (read sparse population) predicted by the 'standard model' (Viveiros de Castro 2002). Needless to say, there was much trade and mixing across this frontier, woven into in complex socio-political and techno-economic networks and hybrid local knowledge systems. These reflect the unique conditions at this edge of colonial and globalized political and knowledge systems, which today, like many other parts of the region, seem to be exploding in the face of agricultural, energy and carbon markets.

The Witoto area of the western Amazon was a powerful center in broad regional spheres, well populated in the past and is still filled with people today. Climate, biodiversity, economic development are all drivers, but in the final analysis these are about people and what they do on the ground, including how scientists and other outsiders conduct their research. These questions are widely seen as bio-social, bio-cultural and bio-political, and prompt novel premises about the ecology of belief and value, landscapes of knowledge, and how people dwell upon the land. It is this coupling, or dialog, that needs to be addressed, which in terms of indigenous Amazonia, amounts to a wholesale difference in world view: differences we see as natural they see as social. For the Witoto, the 'salt of the matter' is about bodies and how they are composed and affected by the sensible world. Environmental knowledge is thus about bodily affects and as such is a form of sexual education, how people interact with other people. They share something of what Medieval alchemists viewed as the 'salt of the matter', affecting bodies and changes in them, as with many 'traditional' societies, as Diamond, also quite interested in salt in world history, suggests in his latest bestseller The World until Yesterday (2013). Their knowledge is different, we all agree, but past Amazonian peoples and forests underwent significant change, including climate–human relations, major production systems and human resources.

The Witoto do see things very differently than Western scientists, in a way most anthropologists agree is uniquely Amerindian (Lévi-Strauss 1966). The first task to understand nature, as indigenous peoples in Amazonia understand it, is to deny it exists. In other words, not only do they see it differently than we do but they do not seem to see it as something separate from humans or culture at all (Kohn 2009). This general view, called Amerindian perspectivism or 'multi-naturalism', is widely recognized as critical to understanding bio-social diversity (Descola 2005, Ingold and Pálsson 2013, Viveiros de Castro 2002). It is supported by substantial state-of-the-art ethnography from across the region. Most practicing anthropologists recognize that this also means something very real and important about the different ways people dwell in Amazonian landscapes and what this says about the past and future. The Witoto case is rich in ecological knowledge, including sophisticated systems of river and forest resource use and agroforestry (Denevan and Padoch 1988), which here as elsewhere in indigenous Amazonia is question of relations between people, including researchers.

The paper is about inter-subjectivity, as seen by Enokakuiodo Jitdutjaaño, a knowledgeable person occupying an important local position, and the intercultural sharing of knowledge in global networks precipitated by Escheverri. The paper combines symbolic ecology—how Witoto conceptually order nature—with careful ethno-botany about how local people classify, use or otherwise interact with the natural environment. The paper 'Jöti Ecogony, Venezuelan Amazon' (Zent 2013) is another equally remarkable example. Together they mark a benchmark in the expanding scope and reach of Amazonian ethnoecology. The Witoto collaboration collected data on 62 species used to produce salt, which is testimony of the importance they attach to it. These socialized commodities are the legacy of complex interaction networks of the past where salt was a principal product in trade networks. They 'gathered botanical samples, identified the species, prepared ash salt from all of them, recorded the whole process of making salt, analyzed the chemical composition of the salts and recorded the indigenous discourse on salt in the Witoto language'. They divide this knowledge along three primary axes: existential, symptomatic and designative indices of ash salt species. The first 'connect a plant species with another entity by trophic or ecological continuity, instrumental relationship or cause and effect'. The second are based on shared formal or sensory characteristics. The last are defined by their lexical, taxonomic or mythic bonds. Plants and other things have inherent agencies in these conceptual schemes, or more appropriately are given or imbued with agencies in the local eyes, and, by extension, researchers working with them.

Ash salt becomes environmental knowledge through education in the appropriate way to be social, which is seen in terms of bodily affects, in this case in a very basic form, as sexual education. Taking indigenous knowledge seriously therefore means taking bodies seriously: What are they? Who are they? Where are they? What do they do, and with who? And, most importantly for many environmental researchers, how do they dwell together in larger social bodies on the skin of the land? Asking how bodies intermingle or 'mix it up' raises a lot of unanswered questions about what are human and natural resources and how are things imbued with agency in these interactions as reflected in real technological and dwelling landscapes. Sustainability for indigenous peoples is about human bodies, which is a world of fondling, nurturing and coupling, or sexual education. But, what exactly are bodies? According to another skilled ethnographer of the Wa'ri in southwestern Amazonia (Rondônia, Brazil): 'tradition is bodily substance (that is internalized) not as a belief, as an attribute of the spirit, but as food, as body fluids, and as clothing that, along with affects and memory, constitute the body (Vilaça 2010)'. This definition works broadly across indigenous Amazonian peoples, capturing that distinctive monism of Amerindian perspectives, which do not split nature from culture, that in composite are a particular type, a 'relative universal', of human societies (Descola 2005). As such, they offer us a radical alternative (and critique) to Western scientific knowledge, which moves us beyond academic goals of classification to public debate about politics, models and policies. It is a question not only of resolution, or perspective, but complication, complexity and multiplicity, including desire or even schizophrenias, no less 'hot' there than here.

Sustainability for indigenous peoples is clearly about their connection to the land: memory, place-making and land management. Their practices, past and present, provide critical information for understanding and managing climate change and economic development. It is also provokes questions of land rights, cultural heritage. For some people, indigenous Amazonian peoples seem to be a thing of the past (Chagnon 2013, Diamond 2013). This view not only perpetuate the 'willful ignorance' of indigenous peoples and their histories' (Ramos 1998) but is simply wrong. Indigenous populations are in fact growing across the region, sometimes rebounding precipitously. Furthermore, 'indigeneity' must be conceived not only as certain type of people who have direct relations to ancestral land but also as larger social bodies encompassed in global networks. Demarcated indigenous lands alone constitute over 20% of the forested Amazon and are the most important barrier to deforestation (Nepstad et al 2006). Not surprisingly, participation by indigenous groups is a prerequisite to research in these areas, although the dialog remains fairly one-sided (Brondizio et al 2009; cf Chapin 2004 and Schwartzman et al 2013).

The rich Witoto detail from years of field research is a counter-measure, deployed to ask another question of global importance: what is the place of indigenous heritage and people in debates about the future of the Amazon. How exactly can we take them—indigenous Amazonian viewpoints—seriously? The first step is knowing them, not simply as additives, capitalizing on indigenous knowledge to improve science, or as museum pieces, our contemporary ancestors, but as alternatives and partnerships. Context-sensitive research is often unsettling for established or foundational rules, feeding on the science friction (Tsing 2005). In the Amazon, at least, it is often anti-establishment. This is a good thing, since it is as much about values as facts, and there is articulation and partial agreements between viewpoints, common ground. In the doing Amerindian perspectives become not only mirrors to contemporary science or its application but partners in its design and outcomes. It is more than a plea to 'up' the players, Latin America or the Witoto, aiming to democratize knowledge and eradicate poverty (read powerlessness), but is good research. It does not dilute science, making it hard to know anything, but strengthens it by linking real human actors and agencies with more general principles and mechanisms, drivers.

This does imply a different type of research plan. It is truly the journey that matters, towards but not necessarily reaching the destination, for instance, a mutually acceptable definition of sustainability. Pure induction or relativism, extremists perhaps as fairy tales, just-so stories from a few well culled cases, still others as purely relativist, but not part of the hard work of science. Amerindians also share this with Zen Buddhists: 'to know but not yet to do is not to know', which is indigenous knowledge, at least, means the science or logic of the concrete, the sensible world described in sensible terms (Lévi-Strauss 1966). Ash salt becomes environmental knowledge through education in the appropriate way to be social, in this case in a very basic form, as sexualized intercourses, as desire and passion, sustenance and pollution, health and well being and, of course, violence.

Anthropologists, particularly those deeply embedded and emplaced in the local, agree with the general idea of Amazonian 'multi-naturalism'. This is a very different logic, and needs to be understood and respected as such, but not as disembodied knowledge, what people think, but as living and problem solving on the ground. What are or were practicing bodies doing, in certain places and times? What technologies are deployed, by who and how? What couplings animate human–natural systems, whether seen as social or natural relations? How do these relations articulate with what we—researchers—see as nature or natural resources and how does this resonate in larger global debates? These are a few of the questions we must ask, and we should do so through dialogs with diverse local and international partners. It is vital to understand how such collaborations work, which often involve very substantial time and/or money, and Escheverri and Jitdutjaaño is an excellent primer.

The view of an anthropogenic Amazon suggests that things are clearly far more complex than many natural scientists and policy makers would like. Taking the social seriously in our tripartite schematic of sustainability, the 'sweet spot' of environmental, economic and social well being, requires indigenous voices, logics and desires. Seeing environmental knowledge as sexual education, makes sustainable development as above all else a socio-political question. In this sense, scientists are a fairly hard-nosed lot, as seen by locals, simply there to get something out of them and with few local pay offs. Reciprocity is limited to payment for assent and labor. In the past, many indigenous people accepted only because they thought they had to or, in fact, were coerced one way or another. The important point here is that some things only come into focus after talking and living with the same people for months, years and even decades, which involves a lot of reciprocity.

My own collaborations with indigenous Xinguano peoples and others in Amazonia over the past two decades, at least, lead me to this same conclusion (e.g., Fausto et al 2008, Heckenberger 2007, Heckenberger et al 2003, 2008). Indigenous peoples and heritage are very complex, they have much to teach us about managing and monitoring the environment, providing home-grown alternatives, and most collaborators are keen to learn everything they can. Here I must admit a certain anarchist stance, a critical political ideology, which takes models and definitions as the starting place of a dialogue not a destination. This, in part, is surely motivated by a desire to 'rub salt into the wound': to remind ourselves that the promise of sustainability, the targeted balance, is still far off and often a little light on the social side. The longer our journey takes is into other places and lives, the more 'they' become friends and families, brothers and brothers-in-law, and, most critically, partners who are no less part of global communities, social networks and contemporary geo-political economies than I am. Indigenous peoples are not merely impacted by the global economy, but are active agents and participants in its future, as commonly seen in political rallies, news stories, on the internet, or social media. What is most novel and important here is how the local, like Witoto, achieves voice, which also brings us into the fold. This familiarity or 'folding' particularly is woven into broader knowledge networks in the urban or global fabric. At the very least, it also puts a very clear face on what we call 'the Amazon', and how we deal with the acute threat to it in the world today.

What every environmentalist should know about indigenous people, the take home message, is that local views are not only a radical comparison, a mirror, or a complex and violent history, but also an imperative for contemporary research. Listen closely to indigenous voices, Escheverri and Román Jitdutjaaño's paper reminds us, which is the necessary starting point of a dialog that brings them into the fold of Western knowledge, just as it weaves us into their lives. More generally, this reflects changes in 21st knowledge production, from science to a world of more inclusive research, wherein overcoming uncertainty and difference, as often as not, involves embracing it, making things familiar, and in so doing expanding its reach (Gibbons 2000, Latour 1998)¹. In this sense, the idea of Amazonian multi-naturalism is an 'incendiary device', a bomb (Latour 2009, Viveiros de Castro 2002), which resonates with critical feminist, post-colonial and post-humanist strands of political ecology (Biro 2011, Slater 2003, Whitehead 2009, Wolfe 2009).

Most contemporary Amazonian researchers agree that global debate on sustainable development in the face of climate change concerns diverse people, notably in this case the heritage and cultural rights of indigenous peoples. Working with indigenous peoples or knowledge is not a choice but an imperative of 21st century science, at least as mandated by global initiatives, such as REDD+ or Rio 20+. A message one hopes that every Witoto, or Jöti, Wa'ri, or Xinguano can take away is that researchers are willing to take them seriously in the social life of research and the politics of nature. The research 'agreement' that needs to be made, as both authors see it, the real salt of the matter for environment and economic resources, eco-services and ecological resilience or, in a word, sustainability, is human bodies, measured in terms of the growth, well being and public health of larger social and natural bodies. Needless to say this is always political, about what bodies most need or deserve nurturing or sustaining, and: what is the value of (a) human life or well being. In the Amazon, at least, indigenous peoples are demonstrably good for the environment, so preserving well being is an important eco-service. In social terms, this means sitting down with real people and, in turn, insuring their place in global forums by creating a mechanism for the local to speak back to the global through representatives, scientific locals, like Juan Carlos Escheverri and Egleé Zhent, and local scientists or educators, like Oscar Enokakuiodo Román Jitdutjaaño. Getting this dialog really going, linking real bodies in research agreements that include rather than exclude indigenous peoples, and linking these to global things like debate over 'sustainability', well, that would be the bomb.