In Amazonia: A Natural History [Paperback]

Nature in this account is not a primeval zone either threatened or threatening, but rather a dynamic and heterogeneous web of places and relations, saturated with the affinities and intimacies, the memories and yearnings, of everyday life. Tracking back and forth between multiple sites and scales, In Amazonia takes up a series of human engagements through which the very nature of the Amazon has been elaborated-exploratory expeditions, natural history collections, ecological experimentations, and embodied practices of occupation and development.

Raffles writes both with and against the literary traditions of Western naturalism, suggestively presenting the Amazon itself as an assemblage or collection of living objects. The result is a novel and enlightening mode of "natural history," one that places at center stage both the accidents and the affects that have made modern Amazonia.

Ultimately it is the quality of Raffles' writing that makes this volume such a captivating and enlightening read. With great skill and delicacy, Raffles spins out a narrative that turns at every turn on contingency-on the myriad and unpredictable accidents of biography, politics and philosophy that lend to places their significance and texture.

It is in such workings that nature itself finds a measure of agency, ecological chains of consequence turning fields to swamps, dropping houses and fruit trees into river beds, forcing fish to move from one place to another. Raffles is candid about the contingencies that led him through the path of his own writing, from the seductions of his characters to the personal traumas that directed him to the question of Amazonian passions in the first place.

As an heir to the vexing legacies of Western environmentalism myself, I found that In Amazonia struck many an unanticipated chord. How many of us have shared Amazonian dreams unknowing?

"In Amazonia" is a book on how the Amazon, as a river, a region, and a panacea, emerges and disappears from the imagination. Raffles takes extreme care to analyze European and American interests in the region since it was colonized and its abundant plant and animal populations overwhelmed civilized sensibilities.

The Amazon is a geographical location where struggles, even over its very cartographic boundaries, take place against different backgrounds and in the imaginations of people with different goals. Globalization over the ages has gone in and out of the region just as the river tides ebb and flow.

"In Amazonia" is a worthwhile work since Raffles has taken care not to allow the Amazon to appear singular or homogenous. The lack of integration of the book is intentional and effective, and reveals conflicts that exist in representing any region of world. This book is valuable to readers interested in Amazonia particularly, and to anyone who views nature and culture as more than simple entities generally.