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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful writing; compelling anthropology
Review: "In Amazonia" tells an engaging and well-researched story of epic proportions. Raffles' lyrical style draws the reader close to the narrative but stops short of romanticizing. Appropriate for academic research or an interested layperson. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful writing; compelling anthropology
Review: "In Amazonia" tells an engaging and well-researched story of epic proportions. Raffles' lyrical style draws the reader close to the narrative but stops short of romanticizing. Appropriate for academic research or an interested layperson. Highly recommended!
Rating: 
Summary: Representative Imagination
Review: A difficult but important book that breaks with cold objectivism."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.
Rating:
Summary: Natural history for the 21st century
Review: Amazonia is arguably the heartland of modern Western environmentalism-the region where many fundamental ecological insights were first proposed and honed, the site of some of the most violent and wrenching contemporary conflicts over natural resource exploitation and conservation, and the beloved core of a planetary nature conceived all too often as a battered and sputtering "spaceship Earth." In Amazonia casts a fresh and provocative light on this vital and contested terrain. 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?
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but a tough read; recommended for college profs.
Review: From the first chapter: "I am preoccupied by a range of questions in the politics of nature that draw me to explore the fullness and multiplicity of nature as a domain marked both by an active and irreducible materiality and by a similarly irreducible discusivity-a domain with complex agency. In addition, this is a book of intimacies, an account of the differential relationships of affective and often physical proximity between humans, and between humans and non-humans. Such 'tense and tender ties' are themselves the sites and occasions for the condensations I examine here. Indeed, they are the constitutive matter of these locations" (p. 8). The author, Hugh Raffles, apparently has three main goals in this book. The first is to discuss the significance of man-made canals in the Brazilian Amazon. Many of these canals were cut and dug by hand, and they opened up areas for settlement and trade that otherwise wouldn't have been so open. What appeared to 19th century explorers and naturalists to be "nature" was actually nature modified by man well before the era of steam powered ships and digging machines. A second goal, related to the first, is to give a fairly detailed example of the history of a particular man-made canal area, Igarape Guariba, that illustrates the idea of "natural history" in the sense of the history of a local natural area that has been changed over time through complex interactions between humans and nature and between humans and other humans. Such details provide an intimacy of acquaintance with Amazonia that is missed in larger-scale histories. A third goal is to discuss historical changes in European views of the relationship between man and nature, and the issue of environmental determinism of culture. The book was of interest to me since I have visited the upper Amazon in Peru, and paddled through man-made canals similar to those that Raffles describes. And I am generally interested in Amazonian nature and native cultures. As it turned out, I was not as enthusiastic about this book as I had hoped to be. On the plus side, Raffles' narrative description-based on interviews of natives-of the history of a particular Amazonian tributary and its canals, and the families that made them, was written clearly enough, and was interesting. His discussion of trading patterns and land use in Amazonia was also interesting. On the negative side, Raffles' theoretical interpretations and discussions were often quite tedious and hard to understand. He uses lots of rare words and complex sentences, and comes across as a stuffy, pompous academic. I am not unaccustomed to reading academic writing. In fact, I have done quite a bit of it myself. But if a doctoral student had turned in this manuscript to me as a dissertation, I would have required many parts of it to be re-written in plain English before I would have approved it. If you are interested in Amazonia and you have a very large vocabulary and like to use it to decipher sentences that most people would not understand at all, then you might like this book. In my view, if I have to read a sentence more than twice to understand it, then the sentence was badly written. There were many such cases in this book. This book has a number of interesting ideas. It is too bad that one has to work so hard to get them. If you want to read a really interesting book about the Amazon as it was 150 years ago, I highly recommend A Naturalist on the River Amazons, by Henry Walter Bates. Bates was an English naturalist who spent 11 years exploring and collecting plant and insect and animal samples on the Amazon in the mid-1800s. His book is interesting for his interactions with the local people--both the natives and the Portuguese colonialists--as well as for its discussion and drawings of tropical nature. Bates' book is a major historical document of the Amazon, and it is quite interesting and well-written. After you have read Bates, you might want to read Raffles' Chapter 5 on Bates, titled "The Uses of Butterflies." Raffles discusses the historical context and significance of Bates and his work, which will add to your appreciation of Bates' book. However, be warned, to get through Raffles' chapter on Bates you will have to get through passages like this one: "Scientific practice turns out to be a conjunctural negotiation of emergent and relational knowledges. Amazonians' understandings of the forest mediated by their assessments of the institutional resources and priorities of the visitor enter into fluid dialogue with Bates' own conflicted allegiance to natural historical systematics as mediated by all the complications stirred up in his Amazon experience" (p. 142).
Rating:
Summary: anthropology at its best
Review: Hugh Raffles has managed a very difficult feat-writing an engaging and accessible book about a quite complex topic, the emergence of Amazonia as a region. I have taught his book to both graduate students and undergraduates, and have consistently been impressed with how beautifully and effectively Raffles' book teaches. What a find!!!!
Rating:
Summary: anthropology at its best
Review: Hugh Raffles has managed a very difficult feat-writing an engaging and accessible book about a quite complex topic, the emergence of Amazonia as a region. I have taught his book to both graduate students and undergraduates, and have consistently been impressed with how beautifully and effectively Raffles' book teaches. What a find!!!!
Rating: 
Summary: Who in academia chooses these?
Review: Sorry, this is one of the worst books I've ever read. It is overwritten and makes no worthwhile point. It is both incoherent and disjointed, and incorporates many stray Portuguese words no one would want to know.This is a fine example of the waste that often pervades academic presses.
Rating:
Summary: A great read
Review: This beautifully written book won the 2003 Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, a big deal in US anthropology. When you read it you can see why, as it really succeeds in bringing this fascinating region to life. It is lyrically written, and often both funny and sad. It is very personal in its account of the author's experience in the Amazon and of the people that he knows there, and it is also very informative about the region's history and culture. A quote on the book rightly says that "it has a great deal to offer those knowing everything or nothing about the Amazon." I agree: Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: This is an amazing book!
Review: This is an amazing book - at once engaging, entertaining and challenging. I can understand why it won two awards for ethnographic writing at the AAA. It is a testament to the possibility of combining beautifully written prose, interesting stories and sophisticated theoretical insights under the same cover, making it a great read for those with a general interest in Natural History, the environment and Amazonia, as well as for the most theoretically-minded academics interested in a sophisticated exploration of the complex relationships between nature, culture and power. Indeed, I used this book in a graduate seminar that I taught at Stanford and my students selected it as the best of 12 ethnographies they read during the course. The book has also been thoroughly enjoyed by non-academics, including my sister, who is a physician. In short In Amazonia is a tremendously worthwhile read.
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