Housed in the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, the Amazon Lab will engage in a set of projects that foreground the region’s remarkable heterogeneity. The lab will be a space for experimenting with a new paradigm for studying the Amazon through the interdisciplinary field of the environmental humanities, incorporating a number of humanistic and scientific disciplines as well as Indigenous modes of knowledge.
The lab will develop workshops, a film series, and an interdisciplinary Amazon seminar at Duke University, as well as a Virtual Amazon Network across the United States, South America, and the Amazon region. The film series will feature films by women and transgender filmmakers in the Amazon. The workshops will include a writing workshop for grad students, a series on the natural and human history of plants in the Amazon, and a series on cultural memory in the Amazon, focusing on the preservation of language, cultural expression, and knowledge, interconnecting museums and activist movements.
The Amazon Lab’s co-directors are: Gustavo Furtado, Associate Professor of Romance Studies; Christine Folch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology; and Paul Baker, Professor of Earth and Ocean Sciences. They will also work with affiliate Michael Heckenberger, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida, who has worked extensively with the Kuikuro people of the Mato Grosso region.
“There’s been so many articles in the last three months about the tipping point,” said Paul Baker. “We’re moving beyond the tipping point so fast. I’ve studied a lot of places on earth, and I feel the Amazon is the most important place on earth. Because it’s the most diverse place on earth. We could lose that. It’s a crucial time.”
“The Amazon has been a place of fascination for the Western imagination for centuries, and yet it’s a widely misunderstood and misrepresented place,” said Gustavo Furtado. “It’s hard to describe a place with that level of cultural and biological diversity, and over such a vast territory. It’s crucial that we understand it in best possible way in order to have chance to fight for it.”
The co-directors remarked on the importance of an interdisciplinary lab structure in examining this vast and complex region. According to Christine Folch, this approach “sets a table for us to have these deep conversations in different disciplines about the Amazon. It demands that because of its scale in so many ways. It requires conversations that take seriously the knowledge of indigenous communities, the biota, presentations in 17th century travel logs…there is no better way to study it than a lab.”
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