Avatar in the amazon-narratives of cultural conversion and environmental salvation between cultural theory and popular culture

Abstract

In 2010 the New York Times reported that '[t]ribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of "Avatar"', James Cameron. The alliance was against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectric-dam in the Xingu River in Brazil. Cameron made a documentary about Belo Monte, A Message from Pandora. Here he states that Avatar becomes real in the struggle against the dam. This appears to confirm U. K. Heise's obser-vation that the 'Amazon rainforest has long functioned as a complex symbol of exotic natural abundance, global ecological connectedness, and environmental cri-sis'. This construal, however, downplays the 'symbols' cultural components. In this article I show that the image of an ecological 'rainforest Indian' and a particular kind of culture constitutes a crucial part of the Amazon as 'a complex' cross-disci-plinary 'symbol'. Firstly, I examine how an Amazonian topology (closeness to na-ture, natural cultures) is both a product of an interdisciplinary history, and a place to speak from for ethno-political activist. Next I analyze how Amazonian cultures have been turned into 'ethnological isolates' representing a set of grand theoretical problems in anthropology, not least concerning the nature/culture-distinction, and how environmentalism has deployed the same topology. Finally I examine how Av-atar and one of its cinematic intertexts, John Boorman's The Emerald Forest, is used as a model to understand the struggle over the Belo Monte. In a paradoxical way the symbolic power of indigenous people in ecological matters here appears to be dependent upon a non-relation, and a reestablishment of clear cut cultural bound-aries, where 'the tribal' is also associated with the human past. Disturbingly such symbolic exportation of solutions is consonant with current exportations of the so-lution of ecological problems to 'other places'.