Saturday, January 22, 2005

In Amazonia

I finished reading In Amazonia: A Natural History by Hugh Raffles. The book deals with the Amazon River, and a particular village within the Amazon as both physical spaces and cultural concepts.
The parts of the book dealing with the physical river were fascinating. Raffles explains how the Amazon River has been physically shaped by constant human endeavour. I had no idea how much engineering has gone on, often by native individuals.
The cultural sections of the book are pretty standard cultural history. These things are often written the same way. First, the author takes an item X. Then, he or she says that "X is a site." What sort of site? Well, a "contested site of conflicting cultural and discursive meanings". What does that mean? Basically, that different groups have different concepts of the River and these different concepts come from outside historical factors, sometimes their race, gender, or class, but inevitably politics. Everything is political to the cultural historian. So, do cultural histories reflect reality? Sometimes.

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