Utopias and dystopias in the Amazonian social landscape

Abstract

This chapter starts by relating the invisibility of caboclo societies in the anthropological literature of the 1960s and 1970s. The invisibility of caboclo (or, to use Nugent's terminology, historical peasant) societies was grounded on four main reasons: the idealisation of the Amazonian landscape as strictly natural; the fact that the historical Amazonian peasant has never been incorporated by the plantation; Amazonia's frontier character; and last but not least, the fact that caboclo agrarian systems are neo-colonial 'experiments', significantly based on immigrant practices. Regarding a central point appearing in various degrees in a number of the articles brought together in this volume, Nugent discusses, the a-historicity that typifies a large portion of anthropological production on Amazonian societies, including caboclo. Nugent argues that the central element behind this Amazonist anthropological tradition is the ideological naturalisation of which the local human populations are victims. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009.