An Inter-American Conversation on Indigeneity, Art & Education
A dialogue between indigenous artists from the Brazilian Amazon and North Carolina, followed by a talk on indigenous art from Jamille Pinheiro Dias, a Q&A discussion, and live music from Wesley Nóog (Brazilian).
Gustavo Caboco, from the Wapichana people, is one of the rising stars of indigenous arts in Brazil as well as an important public intellectual and advocate for indigenous rights, cultures, and lifeways. You can see some of his work here: https://caboco.tv/
Jessica Clark is from the Lumbee people of North Carolina and has had her work exhibited in many prominent US galleries and museums. She is also an educator. You can see some of her work here: https://www.jessicaclarkart.com/
Jamille Pinheiro Dias is a Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of London. She is currently a von der Heyden Fellow at the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Amazon Lab at Duke University.
Wesley Nóog is a widely acclaimed Samba-Soul singer, composer, bandleader, and multi-instrumentalist from Rio de Janeiro.
Imagining Amazonia Cartographically with Amanda M. Smith
What is the relationship among mapping, extractivism, and literature in the Amazon region? Why do so many novels about Amazonia written after the Rubber Boom period fixate on maps and geographic descriptions? Why do “literary maps” matter?
In this talk, Amanda M. Smith (University of California, Santa Cruz) draws on research from her book, “Mapping the Amazon: Literary Geography after the Rubber Boom” (Liverpool University Press, 2021), to address how 20th-century Latin American intellectuals from Amazonian countries reacted to the destructive effects instigated by literal and metaphorical maps of the region. Authors José Eustasio Rivera, Rómulo Gallegos, Mario Vargas Llosa, César Calvo, and Márcio Souza turned to narrative fiction to confront and contest the misconceptions perpetuated by institutional representations of Amazonian spaces. However, the literary cartographies of their now canonical works contain blind spots of their own that have had lasting political consequences. The 21st century has seen a rise in Indigenous responses to this long history of misrepresenting Amazonia, and in the second part of the talk, Smith turns her attention to this emerging trend. She focuses on cultural mapping projects by the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Surui leader Almir Narayamoga Suruí, and the Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo to analyze Indigenous Amazonian efforts to counter-map the conversion of the river basin into natural resources for the rest of the world. Because these Indigenous maps circulate in a cultural market that persistently marginalizes perspectives coming from the Amazon, Smith addresses the role of academic scholarship in centering, promoting, and amplifying those Indigenous cartographies.
Plants of the Amazon: New Directions in Conversation
In anthropology, we might say that plants are “good to think with.” Thinking about them helps us see how we understand and fit into the world. But what if plants are more than just living instruments, what if plants are persons? What if plants are teachers and not merely adornments? What if plants are guides?
Our roundtable on plants of the Amazon opens a space for dialogue on key turns in theoretical approaches to the study of/with plants, research methodology innovations, ethical interventions, connections and continuities of plant practices beyond the Amazonian region.
Roundtable Featuring: – Mireia Campanera Reig (Cultural Anthropology, University of Rovira i Virgili)
– Christine Folch (Cultural Anthropology, Duke Univ.)
– Ruth Goldstein (Gender & Women’s Studies, Univ. of Wisconsin)
– Chris Jarrett (Environmental Social Scientist, The Field Museum)
The Amazon Rainforest: An Evolutionary Tale with Lúcia G. Lohmann
The Amazon Rainforest, also known as Amazonia, covers more than five million square kilometers of dense tropical forest. In addition, its river basin transports the largest volume of water of any river system, accounting for nearly one-fifth of the total water carried by rivers to the oceans worldwide. Plant growth is dense and species diversity is among the highest in the world. Ecological aspects as well as major geological and climatic changes that happened over the course of millions of years have driven both speciation and extinction in this region. The history of the Amazon basin is a complex one, requiring integrative studies that combine data from botany, zoology, ecology, evolution, geology, paleontology, and climatology, among others. Dr. Lúcia G. Lohmann leads us on a journey through time, spanning 30 million years of species evolution, coupled with climatic and geomorphological changes through the Amazon basin.
Lúcia G. Lohmann obtained her Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics from the University of Missouri-St. Louis (2003) and conducted her postdoctoral work at the Missouri Botanical Garden (2004). She has been a faculty in the Department of Botany at the University of São Paulo (Brazil) since 2004 and was a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley between 2017-2019. She is also the Executive Director of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation (ATBC), a member of the São Paulo Academy of Sciences (ACIESP), and an international honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAA&S). Her primary research interest is to understand patterns of diversity and biogeography in the Tropics, especially in the Amazon basin.