Syllabus
Lecture 1: How to conceptualize the Amazon? From the imagination of novelist, travellers’ notes, naturalists and ethnologists’ surveys to a geographical space production and idea
Lecture 2: Indigenous cosmologies and land rights
Lecture 3: Ecological organization of the rubber economy: the case of Fordilândia
Lecture 4: Amazon as a cultivated forest in face of its resources exploitation
Lecture 5: The interplay of large agricultural properties, roads, mining and energy production
Lecture 6: Documentary: Serra Pelada The legend of the golden mountain (2016) and discussion
Lecture 7: Documentary: Belo Monte: After the Flood (2016) and discussion
Lecture 8: Ecology and climate control: a new regionalization?
Lecture 9: History and stories of the protected areas
Lecture 10: The Amazon as place for the global drug traffickinge, money laundering and violence
Lecture 11: Film: Xingu (2011)
Lecture 12: Modernization and Devastation in Brazilian Amazon
Lecture 13: Program collective evaluation, feedback, reflections on learning and thoughts
Annotation
How do we refute the notion that the Amazon should be explored?
Indigenous peoples, the first inabitants of the region, are offering different perspectives: there is no separation between man and nature as modernity imposes, as the contemporary world still maintains.
Amazon studies offer alternatives to what appears to be a unilinear and unstoppable march of progress.
These perspectives lead to alternatives in a world where cultural diversity is eroding or, at the very least, civilizations are being homogenized.
In Brazil, in addition to Portuguese, around 300 additional languages are still spoken.
The majority of such diversity is in the Amazon, home to more than half of the 2.7 million people who identify as indigenous in the country, and this population is increasing.
Despite the fact that indigenous thought is now being discovered and the knowledge of the region has improved immensely, possibly never in Brazilian history has there been such an open and targeted attack on the Amazon as in the last few years.
The region was seen only as a source of wealth, not a locus for the traditional communities and peoples or of biodiverty.
Not even during the military dictatorship (1964–1985), when the region began to officially fulfill a role in the national economy and integration plans, a period in which environmental movements were appearing.
The Brazilian Amazon is now home to almost 30 million people, although it was just a few decades ago that it surpassed the 8 to 10 million estimated inhabitants when the Portuguese arrived in the 16th century.
Inferring that it has been centuries of annihilation. Inferring as well that for such a large population to live in the region, it takes skill and knowledge in managing the species of the forest.
A timeline of around 12 million years can already be traced. Yet the devastation of ways of life and of the Biome occurred mostly throughout the second half of the 20th century and on.
Therefore, the central concern of the course is with this recent period. Aiming to analyze projects that were carried out by ensuing a logic of exploitation and backed by an effective discourse of the modernity and development.
Parallel to this objective, the intention is to align the contributions of current scholarships with a bibliography on socio-environmental issues produced and published in English.
In view of a growing social and ecological crisis and the concern with climate change, this part of the planet is central.
The advancing exploitation of limited natural resources and the growth of social and spatial inequalities are also reasons to think over the history of the region.
Overall, the curse intends to approach how the Amazon can be understood in such a socio-environmental equation, understanding the history of its biome and people, between modernization and devastation plans and actions.
These subjects will be addressed in the format of lectures, and participation and discussions will be stimulated.