Social natures, environmental ethics and an urban mangrove

Once there were fishermen:
Social natures, environmental ethics and an urban mangrove
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
2014
Luc iana Lang Rein isc h
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
Table of contents
List of images .................................................................................................................... 4
List of diagrams ................................................................................................................. 6
List of maps ....................................................................................................................... 6
Abstract ............................................................................................................................. 7
Declaration & Copyright Statement.................................................................................. 9
Acknowledgements......................................................................................................... 10
Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 12
The place ......................................................................................................................... 12
The story ......................................................................................................................... 21
Defining terms & conceptual context ............................................................................. 26
Analytical approach......................................................................................................... 35
Agenda & methodology .................................................................................................. 39
Thesis structure............................................................................................................... 42
The characters................................................................................................................. 47
Part I – Naturalisms.............................................................................................................. 51
Chapter 1 – Eden .............................................................................................................. 51
Exploitation, protection, and new regimes of value ....................................................... 55
Nature in itself & nature for itself ................................................................................... 62
From nature to environment: the ethical moment ........................................................ 70
The lonesome warrior: myth, history, and simulating the fisherman ............................ 74
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 80
Chapter 2 – Paranapuã .................................................................................................... 83
Historical imagination & the chronotope ....................................................................... 86
Nostalgia ......................................................................................................................... 94
The bridges...................................................................................................................... 98
From nature to environment: home and land .............................................................. 104
Disorder, favelas, and the intangible mangrove ........................................................... 108
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 115
Part II – Social Natures ...................................................................................................... 119
Chapter 3 – Jequiá .......................................................................................................... 119
2
Washed-in and washed-out .......................................................................................... 122
The mangrove as a living eco-system ........................................................................... 126
The mangrove as nature ............................................................................................... 130
From nature to environment: perceptions of the APARU ............................................ 134
The mangrove as culture: mud, Exu and the embodiment of ambiguities .................. 138
Living on the edge: how marginal beings perform borders .......................................... 144
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 148
Chapter 4 – Tronqueira .................................................................................................. 150
Scratching the surface................................................................................................... 152
Work, war, order and development: domesticating nature......................................... 156
The Gira ......................................................................................................................... 163
The permeable boundaries of nature-culture hybrids ................................................. 170
From nature to environment: nurturing the assemblage ............................................. 183
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 187
Chapter 5 – A Big Rubbish Dump (or Disenchanted Arcadia) .................................. 190
The ambiguity of waste ................................................................................................. 193
Waste in the making of ethical subjects ....................................................................... 197
Classifying pollution and the life cycle of matter .......................................................... 203
From nature to environment: jobs and recycling in the afterlife of waste .................. 212
Use-value re-signified: the politics and poetics of waste ............................................. 218
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 222
Part III – Environmentalisms ............................................................................................ 225
Chapter 6 – The 12th Floor ............................................................................................. 225
Ethics and the institutionalization of the environment ................................................ 228
Rights, laws and human exceptionalism ....................................................................... 230
The mangrove and the Olympic Village ........................................................................ 233
Being in limbo ............................................................................................................... 237
From nature to environment: public policies and environmental education .............. 239
Uncharted waters: ontological shifts and a new collective ethics................................ 247
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 250
Chapter 7 – Iguaá-Mbara .............................................................................................. 253
Fishing nets and networks ............................................................................................ 257
3
Rio + 20: the official event and the People’s Summit ................................................... 260
From nature to environment: the politicization of the mangrove ............................... 267
Participation and accountability ................................................................................... 274
Evolution or revolution? Adaptation as a political choice ............................................ 279
Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 283
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 286
Bibliography .................................................................................................................... 296
List of images
Figure 1: Some key actors related to contributors in this ethnography, when the colony was
still Z-1 (circa 1950, from Zé Luiz’s photo collection).
18
Figure 2:Painting depicting the foundation of the city of Rio de Janeiro by Estácio de Sá after
the victory against the Tamoios, against the background of the Guanabara Bay.
51
Figure 3: Coat of arms of Ilha do Governador (source: guiailhadogovernador.com - Date
Unknown)
60
Figure 4: Illustrations of wildlife on Brazilian bank notes.
69
Figure 5: Entrance to the colony’s main office.
70
Figure 6: The raising of the flags.
74
Figure 7: From the 1950s, this photograph of St Peter's Procession shows followers coming
out of Z-10 by the exit of the right-hand corner. The gate in the distance is the entry to the
Navy grounds. The tide is high as processers cross the bridge onto the mainland of Ilha. Back
then, the procession would attract people from all over Ilha (from Zé Luiz’s photo
collection).
77
Figure 8: From 2012, the photo on the left shows the fishermen carrying St. Peter on his boat,
on the procession round the colony. The photograph in the middle shows followers placing
their 'key to the sky' on St. Peter's boat, and the image on the right shows Zé Luiz, barefoot,
setting the fireworks for the procession that returns to the colony over the bridge.
77
Figure 9: Road to Jequiá, circa 1920 (from Zé Luiz's collection - source unknown).
83
Figure 10: Those two pictures are of almost the same spot on Américo Goulart street. The
one at the top is from 2011, and the one at the bottom (Zé Luiz’s archive) is from circa 1950s
showing a fence between the colony and the Navy grounds.
89
Figure 11: Life-size statue of Arariboia (source Cafe Historia, Date Unknown).
92
Figure 12: Paintings by Seu Jordão showing the different style bridges at Z-10.
99
Figure 13: Front of Seu Jordão’s house. Note the bridges in the background wall, and
Guanabara Bay with the Sugar Loaf Mountain at the top.
99
Figure 14: The boat at the top is a copy of his own fishing boat.
101
Figure 15: Otávio and Irene.
110
Figure 16: The mangrove of Jequiá.
119
4
Figure 17: High tide.
123
Figure 18: Low tide.
123
Figure 19: D. Diná.
125
Figure 20: Zé Luiz looks for polychaetes, also known as bristle worms, an important link in
the food chain of the mangrove since it feeds on the nutrients from it, including elements that
constitute sewage, while serving as food for a variety of fish and maçaricos, a bird from the
Scolopacidae species.
128
Figure 21 - Didil at the former Texaco island where he cleans his fishing net.
150
Figure 22: This privately owned area, ‘Ecological park of Orixás',lets out plots for giras for
the duration of about 5 hours. Groups of Umbandistas from a number of terreiros in Rio go
there in big buses booked specially for the occasion. Note the man at the bottom left carrying
a box full of leaves for the gira.
165
Figure 23: On the left, the table laid out with the bowls of corn, beans, and vegetables to be
thrown over the mediums' heads. In the middle, the different ties and cigars for the Exus; on
the right, Seu Toquinho riding Toninho.
166
Figure 24 – Playing the adejá.
167
Figure 25: On the left, Seu Toquinho throws popcorn over the mediums' heads.
168
Figure 26: ‘Pai Felipe carries a little cloth he puts over his legs when he sits down to give
consultation.
169
Figure 27: Incorporation.
170
Figure 28: ‘That image has the sense of the forest, of nature inside our house, representing
the culture of the orixás: the waters of Oxum, the sky of Oxalá. The staff and dagger belong
to the line of Exu’. – Toninho
172
Figure 29: The tronqueira at the terreiro.
172
Figure 30: Both Oxossi, on the left, and Caboclo, in the middle, are syncretized with Saint
Sebastian, on the right, because the latter bears an arrow through his chest, an object
associated with Caboclo and Oxossi who hunt in the forest.
175
Figure 31: On the left, a representation of Omulu in an Umbanda terreiro outside Z-10; on the
right, the Exu Zé Pilintra, in one of the rooms at Toninho's, and in the middle St. Lazarus. 176
Figure 32 - Zé Luiz walking down the mangrove.
190
Figure 33: Barriers made out of plastic bottles.
203
Figure 34: Information leaflet on ‘sacred rubbish’. Issued by the State Department of
Environment.
208
Figure 35: Cizino, a former fisherman.
220
Figure 36 – Demonstration outside INEA, the State Institute of Environment in Rio de
Janeiro.
235
Figure 37: Velho do Rio and his model of a socó.
242
Figure 38 - An emulation of a Guanabara Bay postcard image made with scrap materials:
installation by the artist Vik Muniz with public participation at Rio + 20
253
Figure 39: Born in 1924, Baixinho is considered the oldest fisherman in the colony, and is
also one of the last people who masters the craft of weaving a fishing net in the area.
257
Figure 40 – Banner for Rio + 20 Conference.
262
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Figure 41: In one of the marquees, a group of people created a great Mandala out of fruits and
grains, while in another a circle of people held hands around the food they were going to eat
as they prayed to mother earth.
265
Figure 42: Zé Luiz’s feet deep in mud.
285
Photographs are by the author, unless otherwise stated.
List of diagrams
Diagram 1: The hybrid economy model formulated by the anthropologist Jon Altman (2010)
to analyse the work by aboriginal art producers. .................................................................. 215
Diagram 2: The layers of competing ethics. ......................................................................... 229
List of maps
Map 1: A google maps satellite image of Colony Z-10. ......................................................... 12
Map 2: Z-10 is located at the bottom right of Governor’s Island. One can see above the green
area that corresponds to the Navy base and part of the mangrove. Governor’s Island is inside
Guanabara Bay. ....................................................................................................................... 14
Map 3: Above is the coast of Rio with the funnel-like entry into Guanabara Bay. ................ 14
Map 4: Map made during workshops using Openstreetmaps. ................................................ 16
Map 5: Map from 1893 (Zé Luiz’s archival material - original source unknown). ................ 59
Map 6: Sixteenth Century - 1555 França Antártica (public domain)...................................... 90
Map 7: The route followed by the Temiminós after being evicted from Ilha 500 years ago is
in red, and the routes followed by the first fishing families are marked in black. .................. 91
Map 8: Maps made by children............................................................................................. 113
Map 9: Kindly conceded by the Department of Environment/Rio de Janeiro. ..................... 237
Final Word Count: 89,935
6
Once there were fishermen:
Social natures, environmental ethics and an urban mangrove
University of Manchester
Luciana Lang Reinisch
Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities
Social Anthropology, School of Social Sciences
2014
Abstract
This research looks at the change in ethical sensibilities towards a mangrove
in a fishing colony in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and at how they may
have changed as the mangrove became a protected area and entered the
environmental assemblage. Formerly called Z-1, this was the first of 800 cooperative
fishing colonies founded along the Brazilian coast in 1920 as part of a government
initiative. The study unveiled the following pattern around the mangrove: from being
a source of livelihood and place for communal activities up until the 1970s, it became
the locus of an environmental movement in the 80s and 90s after it was devastated by
a big fire. The concrete outcome of the movement was the creation of the APARU,
Area of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration, which meant that after
more than seventy years under a system of tutelage by the Navy, the colony and the
mangrove were subjected to an environmental form of governance administered by
the City Council, and the mangrove went from being a taken-for-granted thing to an
environmentally-oriented concept. It finally fell silent and isolated as it became
increasingly polluted, even if ‘protected’ by a municipal decree.
The main argument presented is that, as the mangrove passed from nature to
environment, which implied a change in governance from the Navy to the
Department of Environment, people found creative ways of holding on to its
thingness, and to ethical values that at times conflict with the broader environmental
assemblage. Those local ethics forge the links that sustain an ecological assemblage,
and the ethics prescribed by the environmental governance currently in place can be
undermined by more embedded values. That said, local knowledge and practices are
environmentally informed, and different ways of being political emerge. This
7
community was not only created literally on a mangrove, but it was also symbolically
and politically reproduced through the mangrove, and even more so after it became a
protected area. The dialectical outcomes of the relationships between human beings
and the mangrove, and between human beings as they multiply, transform the
landscape continuously, just as the mangrove in its perpetual unfolding impresses
itself upon human matters and sustains the social ordering of things.
As new elements are assembled around the mangrove, from discarded utensils
to stories of environmental activism, the mangrove is enacted as heritage, as nature,
as a biome, as culture, as pollution, as an institution, and as environment. This thesis
hopes to contribute towards the broader body of literature on environmental
anthropology, political ecology, and anthropology of moralities, by focusing on
‘human-disturbed environments’ (Tsing 2013) and bringing attention to the value of
local perceptions in policy making.
8
Declaration & Copyright Statement
Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an
application for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other
institute of learning.
Copyright Statement
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owns certain copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The
University of Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for
administrative purposes.
ii. Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic
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1988 (as amended) and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance
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iii. The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks and other
intellectual property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright
works in the thesis, for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be
described in this thesis, may not be owned by the author and may be owned by third
parties. Such Intellectual Property and Reproductions cannot and must not be made
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Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions.
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Thesis restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University
Library’s regulations (see http://www.manchester.ac.uk/library/aboutus/regulations)
and in The University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
9
Acknowledgements
First, I wish to thank my supervisors, Professor Peter Wade, who was tireless in his
orientation providing invaluable advice and steadfast feedback, and Professor
Penelope Harvey, whose insights gave shape to some rather erratic reflections of
mine. Peter Wade’s gentle steering of me through the process of writing this thesis
with his regular question ‘Why are you telling me this?’ will follow me through my
academic career like a mantra. I am also grateful to Dr. Angela Torresan and Dr. Ian
Fairweather for their comments on early drafts of some chapters. My doctoral
research was made possible through a few sources of funding I would like to
acknowledge here. The Sutasoma Award by the Royal Anthropological Institute
allowed me to complete the writing up of this thesis. I am also grateful to my students
and translation clients who provided a much needed financial backing throughout my
studies.
I have a heart-felt gratitude for all the people in the colony who generously shared with
me their views on culture, nature, and the mangrove, including fishermen, local
environmentalists, City Council employees, and Umbanda followers, and to members
of Soltec/UFRJ, in particular Professor Sidney Lianza who first took me to Z-10. But
my most sincere thanks go to Margarida, my research godmother; Zé Luiz, the
‘organic’ environmentalist who I truly admire; and Toninho, the pai de santo who
introduced me to the supernatural characters in this thesis. I wish to acknowledge
another non-human character, the mangrove that surrounds the colony. I am amused by
the fact that after having my hands literally deep in mud as I performed my labour as a
potter years before I chose my object of study, I found myself in fieldwork immersed
in the physical and metaphorical implications of muddy landscapes.
I am also grateful to the lovely people at the tree protest that took place during my
writing up period against the felling of 435 trees in Alexander Park, in Whalley Range,
Manchester. Despite our failure to save the trees, the experience gave me the verve of
emotional involvement with the environmental cause and taught me a thing or two
10
about different ways of being an environmental activist, from the driven radicalism that
prompts one to justify tree spiking, to the exercise of ‘direct’ experiencing nature while
mindfully exchanging gases with the surrounding plant life.
This PhD would not have been a truly gratifying experience without all my colleagues
at the department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, who were
always around for those necessary unwinding moments after hours at the computer.
Special thanks go to Ines Ponte who provided unwavering technical support whenever
I needed it. Thanks also to the University of Manchester for the delightful space
where students and staff socialize and exchange ideas, and for the Monday seminars,
an essential weekly food for thought.
Lastly, but by no means least, I wish to thank my family who supported me in my
decision to do this PhD in more ways than one, my partner who provided me with a
roof in Manchester, my father who introduced me to the joys of journeying in every
sense of the word, and a very special thanks to my children who coped so well during
the long periods when I was absent.
This thesis is dedicated to my mother, Ilse, who opened my senses to the non-human
world of nature.
11
Introduction
The place
Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things.
Walter Benjamin (1977:177)
Map 1: A google maps satellite image of Colony Z-10.1
1
See Google (2014), also for Maps 2and 3.
12
As one crosses the bridge that leads to Colony Z-10 seen in the picture above,
the visitor may encounter fishermen repairing nets, plastic basins half filled with fish
scales and entrails, herons poised on anchored boats, and a village square, indicating
the existence of a fishing colony in this urban periphery of the city of Rio de Janeiro.
Z-10 is situated on an islet surrounded by mangrove, also called Sack of Jequiá,1 and
by the green grounds where the Brazilian Navy Radio Transmitter is based, and at the
bottom on the right-hand corner, is the entry to Guanabara Bay, and the bridge that
connects Z-10 to the rest of Governor’s Island. Most of my fieldwork was undertaken
in this community which has a population of around five thousand people. However,
the pollution of the surrounding waters, caused by big oil enterprises, sewage and
domestic waste, is making fishing almost impossible causing those first impressions
to assume the form of allegories of a past time, while precarious housing and
sanitation, and a large influx of newcomers have made the area look more like a
favela2 than a fishing colony.
Colony Z-10 is an administrative designation that includes another fishing
colony in Governor’s Island, called Tubiacanga, as well as a small island in
Guanabara Bay called Paquetá, though Z-10, or ‘colonia’ as locals call it, is
commonly used to refer to the geographical location of the colony. But Colony Z-10
also houses an APARU (Área de Proteção Ambiental e Recuperação Urbana), Area
of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration, which extends well beyond the
built-up area seen in Figure 1, covering 147 hectares, mostly in the area belonging to
the Navy. The APARU do Jequiá encompasses the mangrove and the estuary of
Jequiá river, including its micro-bay, the forest compound called Morro do Matoso
(situated inside Navy grounds), and the areas occupied by the colony and by the
Navy. Despite the pollution, the mangrove is still home to rich flora and fauna, and
although the slums nearby are fraught with violence and drug gangs, Z-10 is
considered a safe place to live. This second differentiating aspect, the perceived
1
Name given to the bag-shaped piece of land surrounded by mangrove where the colony is
located.
2
Portuguese term for a shantytown.
13
safety of the area, though not central to the research will keep reappearing in the
accounts since it is regarded as a form of social capital associated with this place.
From the maps below, one can see how strategic a place Guanabara Bay is with
regards to the protection of the sovereign coast. Z-10 is connected to the mainland of
Governor’s Island by a small bridge, visible in the map above, which is in turn
connected to the mainland of Rio de Janeiro city by another bridge.
Map 2: Z-10 is located at the bottom right of
Governor’s Island. One can see above the green
area that corresponds to the Navy base and part
of the mangrove. Governor’s Island is inside
Guanabara Bay.
Map 3: Above is the coast of Rio with the funnellike entry into Guanabara Bay.
The colony
Formerly called Z-1, Colonia Almirante Gomes Pereira or Colony Z-10 was the first
of 800 cooperative fishing colonies founded along the Brazilian coast between 1919
and 1923 as part of a government initiative. The model for the fishing colonies came
from Portugal, inspired in the old Spanish Guilds. Strategically set up just after the
First World War, the mission was idealised by the Navy Admiral Gomes Pereira who
created the National Program for Fishing and Sanitation aimed at curbing the spread
of diseases amongst the fishing populations, disseminating basic notions of hygiene,
and promoting literacy. But most importantly, the initiative was designed to
strengthen the bonds with the fishermen, seen as the ideal coast guards to protect the
14
national borders against unwanted visitors. The objective of contributing towards
coastal vigilance and national defence was part of a broader political project which,
since the start of the twentieth century, had created policies and promoted the
formation of settlements to integrate the supposedly ‘backward’ caiçara 3population,
term used for fishermen from the states of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.
I first visited Z-10 in 2006 with SOLTEC, a centre that promotes solidarity
economy projects in communities in urban peripheries, based within the engineering
department at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. We were welcomed by key
actors at Z-10 and introduced to the impressive collection of documents that had been
compiled by Zé Luiz, the son of a former fisherman, about the colony’s history. I
soon found out that the names of the roads in the colony were those of the first
fishermen who settled there. Between 2007 and 2009, I visited the colony many times
and came to know some of the descendants of the first fishermen whose names
appear in Map 4. The exception is the road José Bonifácio, which is in fact the name
of the vessel that set off from Rio in 1920 and took the Commander Frederico Otavio
de Lemos Villar, the founder of Colony Z-10, up the Brazilian coast to found other
fishing colonies. Thus, the colony’s roads are constantly reminders of the ancestral
fishing roots of my informants, one of the many ways history is inscribed onto the
landscape at Z-10 resonating with the commonly held statement that ‘we are all
family here’.
Knowledge of which fishermen were there before the foundation of the colony
in 1920 is diffuse with comments such as ‘there were a few fishermen who lived right
inside the mangrove area, and only houses on stilts’, others maintain that Alexandre
Rosa and Luiz Vitorino were the first ones. According to some accounts, there was a
caiçara community there before the foundation, but even if that was the case, the
community can not be easily dissociated from the Navy given that a Navy Radio
Transmitter station had been built there in 1916. Furthermore, the area staged quite a
few Navy-related events and combats. So the original colony must have been a
3
This term is also synonymous with the ethnic combination of indigenous, Portuguese and Afrodescendant backgrounds.
15
combination of a few fishermen and their aggregates, and the Navy, sharing the
mangrove landscape. All accounts collected by researchers over the years, myself
included, depict the lives of fishermen always intermingled with the Navy’s presence
and its regulations as if people’s identities were constructed in response to those strict
military codes. We shall see, as this story unfolds, that the commonly held phrase ‘we
are all family here’ has more than one connotation, and kinship bonds knit this
community and this place together in more ways than one.
Map 4: Map made with the help of children during workshops at Z-10 using Openstreetmaps.
Those first fishermen who gave names to the streets are remembered with
pride, as when Margarida, my hostess, tells me about her late husband’s grandfather,
16
Hipólito Nascimento, who named the street where her house is; or when Seu Jordão,
a fisherman and musician, who after singing to me a famous folk song Se essa rua
fosse minha, ‘If this street was mine’, declares with great satisfaction that the street is
indeed his, given that Luiz Vitorino was his grandfather and founder member of the
colony.
As my time in field progressed more genealogies were revealed weaving
history and place, both naturally and culturally, given that the depth of kinship
relations here do not depend on blood: a great deal of the connections that appear in
the flimsy family trees I constructed were made up of filhos/as de criação, children
who were not blood related. The reasons for so many children being raised by
families who are not their own are many, some of them were unwanted children,
some came from homes who could not afford another child, or from relations out of
wedlock. And with each family tree I made, something people were happy to
contribute towards but which seemed to them a curious exercise, further family
connections were made, and at times, a relation was unveiled that the informant was
not aware of. In one of those occasions, a local dropped by for a chat and I learned
that she was the granddaughter of another fisherman in the map above, Américo
Goulart. As I expanded her family tree, Margarida realised that the hairdresser that
year’s carnival samba song was paying homage to was actually a cousin of her late
husband. She then remarked that ‘the colony was one single family’ and that if I kept
looking into the colony’s family tree I would end up unveiling a lot of people who
‘sneaked over the garden fence‘, sometimes literally, in the sense of having sex with
someone from a different household.
17
Figure 1: Some key actors related to contributors in this ethnography, when the colony was still Z-1
(circa 1950, from Zé Luiz’s photo collection).
This tight network is also evident in the ways houses are laid out. The plots
of land that were originally taken by one family were split exponentially over the
years as families grew. Thus, Margarida’s veranda where she runs the evening bingo
sessions shares a window with her late husband’s sister’s living room, and her sewage
pipes are shared at the back of the house with another cousin, since the now
individual kitchens once belonged to a single household. The genealogies of those
families also mirror the decline in the fishing activity as the main source of income of
families. All the genealogies start with the first generation constituted of fishermen,
and women marisqueiras, shell fish collectors, and as the generations move down
other labour activities proliferate, the most common ones being: cleaners at ‘casas de
familia’, ‘family houses’, or at the Navy; odd-job men at the Navy, such as janitors,
ship kitchen crew, or informal sea guides and sailors; and in more recent years, carers
for the elderly; shop workers (including supermarkets and a variety of commercial
outlets in surrounding neighbourhoods; builders; and car mechanics. There is also a
substantial contingent who opts for running small businesses such as beauty parlours,
bars, restaurants, and food trolleys, perhaps reflecting a preference for a more
18
autonomous rhythm of work which fishermen enjoy, often remarked upon as one of
the upsides of the fishing activity. And more recent still, after the mangrove was
turned into an APARU, jobs with the city council, or through short-lived policies to
redress the fishermen affected by the pollution in the bay.
The mangrove
But why was the mangrove worth all the effort that eventually turned it into an
area of environmental protection? Map 1 shows how it forms a belt around the
community, but what we do not see is that in the memories of the older folk the
mangrove was actually under their floorboards. Before the houses took over, the
mangrove was the place for work and for leisure, it invaded the houses at times, it
provided shellfish, and its most hidden parts were the backdrop for children’s play,
secrete encounters, and supernatural work. This thesis looks at how the mangrove
was exploited and sculpted by the national and the environmental projects, as well as
by the activities and affects (Spinoza 1677) of those who inhabit that space. Zé Luiz,
the local protagonist of the struggle to save the mangrove, summarised the
transformation that took place since the creation of the colony:
This here was all mangrove; actually, not mangrove, but a tide-invaded area.
In 1930 the Navy took a hill down over there, landfilled this area and created
the colony. There are two distinct things, one is the mangrove vegetation,
mangue, and another is the mangrove itself, manguezal. Here there used to
be a mangrove with very little mud and consequently, very little mangrove
vegetation. In 1972 there was still sand around, then politicians decided to
widen the Jequiá road so they emptied eight trucks full of clay inside the
mangrove. The clay spread and the silting process started, and by 84 there
was already mangrove vegetation, which is now much intensified with the
daily pumping of sewage from 95 thousand people. Mud occurs naturally in
mangroves as a result of natural elements settling to the ground, but here
19
the mud is mostly sewage with a high level of bacteria and algae, stifling
growth. There will come a time when the water will not manage to hydrate
the vegetation because of all the mud. Foreign trees such as riverside ferns,
pitanga tress, hibiscus or palm trees will start to take over and this will turn
into a transition area. There will be no more mangrove and no more crabs.
However, notwithstanding the scientific classification of what constitutes a
mangrove as explained above by the self-taught local specialist, that area is mangue
as far as residents are concerned, especially those of an age to remember life on stilt
houses. It was a fire in this ambiguous landscape that triggered the story I am about to
tell, a story which is about the many affects this mangrove produces, playing an
active role as it informs people’s actions, fosters institutions and policies, and shapes
moral and metaphysical frameworks. Geographically and metaphorically framing a
history of transformations, the mangrove at times appears, depending on who is
looking and in what capacity, as a natural landscape, at others as environment, and
mostly as just the mangrove, either as an integral part of people’s activities or just as
part of the daily landscape, with myriad connotations attached to it as it changed over
time. In the process, the mangrove is enacted as heritage, as nature, as a biome, as
culture, as pollution, as an institution, and as environment.
Described as ‘new spatial canvases for anthropology’ (Hayden 2003: 222),
issues related to ‘environment’ travel across space via policies, NGOs and the media
(Milton 1993; Berglund 1998), encompassing relations and things. Thus, this study
will also look beyond the borders of Z-10 to better understand the scope of
environment-related issues. This terrain forms an assemblage4 which becomes more
complex as the mangrove becomes an APARU. The paired tropes of ‘order and
progress’5 permeate the analysis and converse with ethnographic categories such as
4
A translation of the French term agencement, formerly used by Deleuze & Guattari (1987) and
which encompasses ‘notions of arrangement and agency’ (Farías 2011:370).
5
Those two words were inherited from the Positivist movement which took hold in Brazil in the
second half of the nineteenth century, establishing the goals for the young Republic. Order and
Progress became the guiding motto of political, economic and religious projects, while also
20
disorder, bagunça,6 nostalgia, development, and evolution. In trying to trace the
ramifications of this network, and the relations and objects therein, the following
story unfolded.
The story
After its foundation in 1920, the colony remained for decades under the
auspices of the Navy. In 1938 the Navy’s Radio Transmitter donated to the fishing
colony the area where the community was based but maintained administrative
control over it. Back then, the mangrove was all around. Many houses were on stilts,
so the mangrove was literally below the floorboards of some dwellings and just
outside people’s front door. It was people’s front and back yard, and a place to swim
and to pick mussels. The story of the community reflects the transitions brought about
by development-driven policies, such as mass rural exodus towards the cities, which
was accompanied by natural and man-made silting up of some of the swampy areas.
But the first turning point in this particular story was a big oil spill into Guanabara
Bay that took place in 1975, and the environmental disaster that ensued, dramatically
affecting the livelihood of the fishermen. This event triggered a grassroots movement
to protect the mangrove surrounding the colony. As a result, on 31st August 1993 the
mangrove was turned into an APARU7 through the municipal Decree 12250. The
present throughout this study, be it in connection with the ordinance of nature in the Brazilian
Forest Code, the utopian verve of some strands of the environmentalist movement, the discourse
of the new corporate model of Green Economy, or the doctrine contained in the Umbanda reading
of the evolution of spiritual entities.
6
7
Portuguese word for mess.
The category APARU is only found in Rio de Janeiro, having been established by the
Complementary Law 16/92 in the City Management Plan (Plano Diretor da Cidade). Because it
is not a federal category, it has some traits of a kind of ‘bastard child’, which means that rules that
apply for APAs (Areas of Environmental Protection, normally in rural rather than urban
surroundings, established throughout Brazil) are not in force in the case of APARUs. There are
only four APARUs in the whole of Brazil, and only in the city of Rio: APARU do Complexo
Cotunduba-São João (in the areas of Urca and Leme), APARU do Alto da Boa Vista, APARU da
Serra da Misericordia (in the huge slum complex called Complexo do Alemão), and APARU do
Jequiá. Although Jequiá is not the largest mangrove in the Guanabara Bay area, it is considered
21
unexpected outcome of this achievement is that once the mangrove became protected,
the Navy had to pass the control it had of the colony to the City Council, a much less
authoritarian form of oversight, to which the local Department of Environment
answers,8 signalling the second turning point in this story.
This passing of control unleashed developmental urges, both by individuals
and by the local authorities that had been kept dormant due to the Navy’s restrictions
over construction. The subsequent process of vertical growth alongside the huge
influx of ‘outsiders’ is described by some residents as the ‘favelization’ of the place,
though traits considered typical of the favela are not found there. Now a simulacrum9
(Baudrillard 1994) of what was once a fishing community due to demographic
expansion and pollution,the colony is also referred to as a place with ‘disorderly
growth’,10 with an ever-growing use of the laje11 to create more room for family
members or for tenants, large amounts of rubbish waiting to be collected, and a
supposed lack of environmental consciousness. That said, natural and man-made
features that mark the boundaries of Z-10, including the bridge that connects it to the
mainland, the Navy Radio Transmitter attached to it, and the mangrove, have fostered
the illusion of gemeinschaft,12 as evident in the adjectives used in the local media to
important due to two factors: its rich biodiversity, and the fishing community that lives by it
(Robertson and Sánchez 2010).
8
SMAC (Secretaria Municipal de Meio Ambiente), the Environmental Department at the
municipal level, is the main body in the Municipal System of Environmental Management
(Sistema Municipal de Gestão Ambiental) and the current overseer in Z-10.
9
Jean Baudrillard applied the concept, originally used for a map that simulates a territory, a
concept as opposed to the real thing, to refer to the generation of the hyperreal, a double no longer
connected to reality. The distance between the concept and the real thing is unbreachable since, as
Baudrillard remarks, the difference between them disappears: “When the real is no longer what it
used to be, nostalgia assumes its full meaning” (Baudrillard,1994:171).
10
“Crescimento desordenado”, or disorderly growth, is an expression used by public
administrators to describe a favela, referring to informal and illegal construction of unrendered
and unpainted houses creating a characteristic sight of plain red bricks.
11
Concrete slab used to create extra floors above the houses.
12
I draw here on the distinction made by the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies between
gemeinschaft, or communal society, standing for rural-based communities where personal
relations prevail, and gesellcshaft, associated with modern and cosmopolitan societies, grounded
on feelings of rationality and self-interest, and typical of bureaucratic and industrial systems
(Tönnies 1963 [1887]).
22
depict the area, such as ‘bucolic’, or ‘lost paradise’.13 The paradox implied in a place
which on the one hand is seen as a favela, while holding an area of environmental
protection and values associated with its fishing tradition, seemed worth exploring.
Furthermore, this unusual combination points to a tension between old and new
orders, rural and urban lives, which vaguely coincides with the old Navy rule and the
new City Council/Department of Environment administration, a tension which I
describe as the shift from ‘nature to environment’.
The study reveals the following trajectory of the mangrove: up until the 1970s
the mangrove was integrated in the landscape of the colony and inseparable from it as
a source of livelihood and place for communal activities; in 1975 when a fire
destroyed most of the mangrove vegetation, it became the trigger and locus of social
movement putting Z-10 in the limelight; in the late 1990s it fell silent and isolated as
funding dwindled, becoming associated with pollution and crime; and finally being
locked up to prevent public access, despite having acquired status as an APARU.
This was an interesting story that fell within a broad thematic area of political
ecology and ethics, compelling me at a personal and political level. There were
characters who shared with me their everyday practices, imaginaries, and ethical
concerns related to the mangrove, to the colony, to nature, and to the environment.
And there was Jequiá, a particular mangrove surrounding the fishing colony that
apparently stitched all kinds of materials and meanings together. This was also a
privileged place to analyse both the successes and pitfalls of environmental
governance, which marks the shift from the Navy to the City Council.
My argument is that the mangrove changed as it became an APARU, both as a
thing and conceptually, and if it thrives today, it does so mostly thanks to grassroots
strategies, rather than to environmental governance. What I describe as a shift from
nature to environment is here used as a Weberian ideal-type or model that refers both
to the more concrete institutional change that characterises the environmental
assemblage, and to subsequent impacts that this shift had on behaviour towards the
mangrove. My use of assemblage, described in the section below on analytical
13
For more on the role of the media see chapter 7.
23
approach, makes that model more elastic by allowing nature and environment to be
re-arranged and re-articulated as meanings and practices. In other words, there has
been a change when the mangrove became an APARU which involves changes in
perception about the mangrove, but that does not mean that the mangrove stopped
being seen as nature, nor that it was not seen as environment before. Thus, the
passage ‘from nature to environment’ is the anthropologist’s abstract perspective that
makes the change salient to highlight certain elements that dominate the two different
moments of the mangrove, and to order the messiness of a more concrete social
reality. The assemblage, on the other hand, helps us envisage the entanglement of the
relations and values between all those elements.
I also argue that adaptation is a major working frame found in the human and
non-human realms, ranging from the biology of the mangrove to qualities of
supernatural entities,14 and that the adaptive strategies used by people unveil an
ecological assemblage, rather than an environmental one. The adjective ecological
being used to characterise the assemblage around the mangrove is grounded on
literature that approaches the city as an ecological and metabolic process (Farías
2011:368). At times seeming like a work of bricolage, the mangrove assembles
relations and networks revealing an ecological assemblage, which is more complex
and open-ended than the environmental one. Over those transformative years people
found creative ways of holding to meanings associated with the mangrove and
fashioning new adaptive practices around it, sparking a tension between old ethical
values and new ones found in the broader environmental assemblage; concomitant
with that, the mangrove also adapted by absorbing some of the foreign elements that
came to constitute its body of water. This thematic thread of an ecological
assemblage held together by adaptive strategies encompasses new relations and
sensibilities resulting from the environmental disaster brought about by the fire that
swept across the mangrove in 1975.
14
I do not mean adaptation in the social Darwinist sense of the survival of the adaptively fittest,
but rather as the use of creative strategies of survival which in turn foster new practices.
24
The second thematic thread investigates a supposed universality of the
morality project embedded in environmentalism. The proposition was used as a
yardstick to investigate ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove, what informs
those sensibilities, and how they may have changed as the mangrove became a
preserved area and entered the environmental assemblage. By ethical sensibilities I
mean the sensible approaches towards the care of oneself and of others drawing on
Michel Foucault’s (1994) distinction between ethics as the relation to oneself, and
‘more stable moral codes’(ibid.: 266).The study reveals that environmentalism,15 in
its many variations, though nurturing forms of ethical behaviour, is far from
providing a single, universal moral framing. Instead, the environmental paradigm
encompasses many different affects and intentions, informed by economic, political,
religious, and personal pursuits from the most varied backgrounds, and guided by a
wide range of ethical sensibilities, rather than by a universal form of morality. As
those sensibilities surface against the backdrop of the mangrove, unified forms of
environmental ethics are debunked.
The discussion of ethical behaviour with regards to the mangrove has
collateral implications for how people enact the nature/culture divide. For example,
the supposed ‘favelization’ of Z-10 sometimes surfaces as a borrowed discourse from
those who blame members of the community for the environmental degradation of
the mangrove, echoing the view that culture degrades nature. In other words, the
enactment of nature and culture, whether as separable realms or as a unified whole,
underpins two core themes in this thesis: environmental governance, and
environmentalism as morality. In sum, this research addresses the following major
questions: How did the creation of the APARU of Jequiá inform the ethical
sensibilities towards the mangrove? For whom and on what grounds is the protection
of the mangrove a moral imperative? Who decides what environment should be
15
Environmentalism is here understood as an umbrella term for ideologies with a common
underlying concern with environmental protection. Informed by cultural perspectives towards the
environment, those ideologies are multifaceted (Leach & Fairhead 2002), and mediated by a wide
range of social-economic relations, including those within environmental movements and related
institutions.
25
protected? How and under what circumstances is nature, the environment, or the
mangrove enacted in the making of an ethical subject? How does the political emerge
in a shape-shifting assemblage? And, how does local knowledge inform ethical
practices and policies regarding the mangrove?
Defining terms & conceptual context
The terms nature and environment were the first theoretical hurdles I had to
face. Many have commented on how polysemic the term nature is (Williams 1980,
Bingham 2008), an observation that applies for both English and Portuguese, the
languages that conduct narratives and reflections in this thesis. Concomitant with
that, the way the social sciences have pulled the term nature apart over the last
decades has irrevocably destabilised the category (Bingham & Hinchliffe 2008)
making the task of having nature as an object of study even harder. On the positive
side, this means that social scientists no longer take categories such as nature for
granted, but I do sympathize with existing apprehension as to what will be left to
protect if nature, as a concept, is no longer there (Kohn 2009, Law & Lien 2012).
Furthermore, doing away with the concept could have potential implications for
environmental education and policies, and not necessarily positive ones.
As for ‘environment’, roughly defined as the surroundings in which a person
or thing lives, its use in the vernacular language is much more recent, dating back to
the nineteenth century, and its semantic history less complex.16 That said, the
environmental movement has complexified the term by bringing its definition closer
to that of nature, and objectifying the latter. Thus, nowadays the concept of nature
overlaps with that of environment and may encompass all living and non-living
things that occur naturally on earth. In anthropology, Tim Ingold’s understanding of
16
Although the term environment is much older to refer to the conditions in which a person or
thing lived, I am here referring to its later use, associated with specialised ecology in the second
half of the nineteenth century.
26
environment as an all-embracing world co-produced by human and non-humans
(2000) did bring another dimension to the term by going beyond dichotomies such as
nature and culture, mind and body, or social and biological.17 However, his focus on
hunter-gatherers meant that his ‘environment’ is much closer to my ‘nature’, and very
different from the heterogeneous environment of derelict landscapes in urban
scenarios.
My personal struggle to define what I mean by nature and by environment is
in many ways irrelevant, seeing that this research is interested in how those concepts
appear in the ethnographic material. Thus, related terms, such as mato, the Portuguese
word for ‘bush’; floresta, ‘forest’; terra, ‘earth’ or ‘soil’; terreno, ‘plot of land’;
planta, ‘plants’; or even ‘clean water’, stand as variations of ‘nature’ or
‘environment’ in the ethnographic accounts. That said, because I wish to investigate
how the mangrove changed as it passed from nature to environment, both as thing
and as concept, I have to give those ‘shifting signifiers’ (Soper 1995:151) some sort
of pre-existing form. In chapter 1, I will distinguish between what I call nature in
itself, and for itself, and give a brief historical background to the term ‘environment’.
For now, suffice it to say that the term nature will be used in this work as a taken for
granted unmarked category,18 meaning the material world that does not involve
human design, against which other related categories such as environment, plants,
and the mangrove itself will be marked. In other words, I shall be using the term
nature throughout, unless I refer to the more historically-situated denomination of
environment, as the object of policies and projects, and will, whenever relevant,
signpost how those terms are being used.
17
Exploring the immersion of the organism-person in an environment, Ingold’s ‘dwelling in the
environment’ (2000) implies that humans are primarily embedded in the world, inhabiting it with
their senses, and moving through a world that is itself in motion.
18
Marked and unmarked categories were already in use in the ambit of phonology when Roman
Jakobson made its use widespread in linguistics. Basically, a marked category ‘states the presence
of a certain property A’, while the unmarked category is used to indicate the absence of A: ‘One
of two mutually opposite categories is “marked” while the other is “unmarked”. The general
meaning of a marked category states the presence of a certain (whether positive or negative)
property A; the general meaning of the corresponding unmarked category states nothing about the
presence of A, and is used chiefly, but not exclusively, to indicate the absence of A’ (Jakobson
1957:47).
27
The term naturalism, as it is deployed in the first part of the thesis, is not
grounded in philosophical works such as that of Karl Popper, nor in the natural
sciences. Instead, I draw on work by anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, and on Raymond Williams’s useful Keywords (1976).
Descola (2013) tries to understand the relationship between humans and their natural
environment through continuities and discontinuities, materially and ideally, thus
formulating four ontological frameworks: naturalism, animism, totemism and
analogism. In the so-called West, where naturalism is pervasive, interiority or the soul
is restricted to humans, while a biological continuity is perceived between human
beings and the rest of the natural world. In other words, nature is the unifying feature
of which Darwin’s theory of evolution is a prime example,19 while culture marks the
discontinuity between humans and non-humans.
Another major concept in need of clarification is the adjective ‘ecological’,
here used to characterise an existing assemblage around the mangrove which
intersects in parts with the environmental assemblage. ‘Ecological’ here will be used
based on Farías’s conception of the city as ‘a socio-natural machine’ (2011:369),
encompassing the human, non-human, institutional and material worlds. Latour also
adds ‘techno-social networks’ (2013) to ecology and uses the verb ‘to ecologise’ as a
means to acknowledge the past while innovating. Thus, I shall use the term to refer to
a local approach towards the mangrove which is more inclusive than the
environmental one, but most importantly, one which encompasses the presence of
elements classed as polluting.
Of less importance but also in need of definition due to possible overlaps, are
terms such as landscape, place and space. With regards to the latter two, I will
19
His other three models are described as follows: Animism, a model whereby the continuity is
internal, and the physical body is the discontinued aspect. Viveiros de Castro’s model of
perspectivism in Amazonian indigenous thought would be such an example. Totemism is based
on both moral and physical continuities between the human and the non-human. The cosmogony
of Australian aborigines, where all beings share a given set of qualities, transmitted over the
generations and through the concept of dreamtime, would be such an example. And finally
Analogy, a model characterised by a world of singularities, with no continuities. According to
Descola such a world would be unbearable, hence the need for correspondences to be made
between the differences in order to link heterogeneous systems.
28
subscribe to the distinction by those who associate the place with the foreground, as
in the here and now place of concrete and bodily experiences; and space with an
abstract backdrop (Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995). Landscape is perhaps the most open to
multiple entendre out of the three. The term originated from the Dutch landschap as a
technical term used by painters in the sixteenth century. It referred to an ideal or
imagined world (Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995; Cosgrove 1988) and it was for a long
time associated with a crystallized and timeless scenery. Such static view has been
contested and landscape came to be perceived as a temporal and always changing
milieu (Hirsch & O’Hanlon 1995:3). Some see it as a cultural image (Cosgrove 1988)
while others see it as a process (Ingold 2000). This research subscribes to a definition
of landscape as process, a fitting term to refer to the changing traits of the colony and
mangrove I am describing. Thus, landscape will be used throughout this study
whenever I am referring to the changing surroundings of Jequiá, including man-made
and natural elements.
In terms of conceptual context, I situate this work in the overlap between
Environmental Anthropology, understood as the study of the relationships between
humans and their environment, Political Ecology, and the Anthropology of Morality,
which I discuss below. However, the term ‘socio-ecological economics’ used by the
economist Clive Spash (2014), as opposed to environmental economics or political
ecology, could perhaps be adapted to anthropology. His argument for the use of the
‘socio-ecological’ adjective comes from his commitment towards environments of
poverty and pollution, which are often neglected. Concerned with what I perceive as a
vacuum in environmental anthropology, which so often focuses on ‘traditional’
peoples and ‘natural’ landscapes, I chose to focus on the small–scale fishermen who
inhabit a space characterized as urban. Embedded as they are in a capitalist context
encompassing tradition, technology, and wage labour, this could be classed as a work
of socio-ecological anthropology concerned with the ‘political ecology of the
precarious’ (Weston 2012:429) in human-disturbed environments (Tsing 2013). It
hopes to contribute towards the broader body of literature on political ecology and
ethics, while bringing attention to the value of local perceptions in policy making.
29
The following is a brief of the theoretical dialogue I engaged with in the three main
subfields of environmental anthropology, political ecology, and anthropology of
moralities.
I shall start by laying out how my work speaks to and against the existing
body of related literature. Within the realm of political ecology, some ethnographers
looked at the economic impact of environmental changes unveiling how ‘traditional’
practices are intermingled with economic development (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009),
how environmental issues affect a wide range of actors (Pacheco 1992), or at how
different ways of adapting to change produce a hybrid economy (Altman 2010).
Following that trend, I look at how environmental policies came to be part of the
colony’s economy as a means to complement people’s subsistence, and at how people
adapted to environmental changes, but differently, the collective I focus on is made
up of heterogeneous elements, including plastic, faecal coliforms and oil, in a semiurban periphery.
On a different note, a large part of the literature in environmental
anthropology and political ecology tends to focus on environmentalism as a
resistance to some dominant force (Nadasdy 2003; Martinez-Alier 2002) as a means
to resolve conflicts over land (Escobar 2008; Lopes 2006; Martinez-Alier 2002;
Orlove 1991; Pacheco 1992), or as something to resist against (Hogan 2000). While
my work also looks at state-community relations, the drying up of the social
movement that turned the mangrove into a political entity alongside the particular
form of reciprocity between the colony and the Navy indicate a larger grey area in the
bigger picture of resistance and dominance. People’s supposed ‘lack of engagement’,
and the tension produced by two seemingly different models of State, one inherited
from the Navy rule over the colony based on reciprocal favour exchanges, and one
that underpins the current administration by the city council with a more neoliberal
ethics of laissez-faire favouring market and individual-based initiatives, and
development prompted me to follow in the footsteps of authors concerned with the
rhetoric of environmental politics (Milton 1996).
30
The relationship between environmental ethics and the nation-state is a
framing that appears only marginally in the literature, a contribution I hope this
research will make. The confluence between ethics and the nation in many ways
speaks to the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, described by the author as an
endeavour ‘to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the
phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a
population: health, sanitation, birth rate, longevity, race…’ (Foucault 2000:73). Now,
the foundation of the fishing colonies was part of one such endeavour, and a great
deal of the rhetoric associated with environmental education, and with environmental
governance in general, comes dangerously close to the pursuit observed by Foucault.
In addition, the historical-materialist contingencies that spawned environmental
governance, including the 1988 Brazilian Constitution and the environmental
propositions that became part of the civil jurisdiction, coincide with the emergence of
a form of liberalism, which as far as the natural landscape is concerned, is as virulent
as previous developmental initiatives. The actors that took centre stage in the national
neoliberal scenario fostering production and consumption, the GDP and the market,
became the be-all and end-all of governments and made ‘sustainable development’ a
mere rhetorical tool. This is only one example of the dilemma that the environmental
paradigm faces in the twentieth first century. I am not here suggesting that because
environmentalism shares some common traits with neoliberalism or with biopolitics it
is suspicious per se. But given the complexity of local specificities, the disparate geopolitical needs of countries, and the wide array of stakeholders jumping on the
environment bandwagon, claims to environmentalism as a new form of morality
should be treated with scepticism.
My initial immersion in the anthropology of moralities presented me with the
challenge of defining whether those ethical sensibilities were in the ambit of morality,
values, ethics, or even aesthetics. Seeing nature as a parameter to justify moral values
is a long-standing and deeply rooted idea (Harvey 1996; Haraway 1989), and one
which legitimised a large number of analogies such as that found in the nineteenth
century between the evolutionary drive in Darwin’s theories and the survival of the
31
fittest in the competitive world of capital. We are all too familiar with comments such
as ‘it’s not natural’ being used to judge people’s behaviour, or ‘it’s natural to want to
succeed’ to justify ruthlessness in the workplace and provide a natural basis for
certain agendas. Such naturalizations can also work in quite the opposite way, as
when an ecologist uses examples of cooperation in the non-human world to associate
nature with communitarian living (Harvey 1996:161). Those selective framings act as
blinders directing our sensibilities to what ‘our value-loaded metaphors allow us to
see in our studies of the natural world’ (ibid.:163),20 Harvey draws two conclusions
from those observations, the first one is that that if nature provides us with values, as
people’s related analogies over centuries suggest, it is impossible to determine what
they are, except from a subjective perspective; the second is that values related to
nature are selected according to that subjective perspective, in other words, they are
in us and not in nature.21 Derrida refers to it as ‘the blunder made by those who, in
reasoning on the state of nature, always import into it ideas gathered in a state of
society’ (Derrida 1976:265). But what does the ethnographic literature say about the
value-defining actor? According to David Graeber, value can be seen as ‘the way in
which actions become meaningful to the actor by being incorporated in some larger,
social totality’ (Graeber 2001:xii), or as conceptions of what is ‘good, proper, or
desirable in human life’ (Graeber, 2001:1).
Foucault makes a distinction between morality and ethics: the former is
concerned with the prescription of a code of behaviour, while the latter permits the
exercise of freedom to consciously create an ethical self while still acknowledging
existing codes. Lambeck in turn sees morality as that which deals with everyday
conformity, while ethics emerges when people take a stand and commit ‘to one’s own
20
The way that the myth of a very active sperm and a placid egg changed once scientists started
to look at the selecting properties of the egg is such an example (Martin 1991).
21
Harvey also includes in his overview of how nature is valued what he describes as ‘the
biologization of ethics’ to refer to the idea that morality could have evolved as instinct (Harvey
1996:165), a line of reasoning whose best-known advocate is E.O. Wilson. Wilson elaborated the
biophilia hypothesis which proposes that after thousands of years of interaction with nature,
Homo sapiens have an emotional need to connect to the non-human world (see Wilson 1984 and
Kellert 1993).
32
words’ (Lambeck 2013). Other work in the subfield of the Anthropology of Morality
suggests that morality is negotiated, practiced and performed in the ordinary events of
everyday life (Das 2012; Zigon 2008; Lambeck 2010). Following Lambek’s lead, I
opted to investigate the everyday ethics and corresponding ongoing judgements that
are intrinsic to the practices in the assemblage, and are incited by the mangrove.
Since my first research activity in the colony previous to my PhD had focused
on the work undertaken by Zé Luiz to keep its memory alive through ceremonials
such as celebrating the anniversary of the colony’s foundation, I was familiar with the
literature on memory, nostalgia, and ‘imagined communities’. But to understand
what inspired a sense of collective belonging to this particular landscape, I had to
bring fragments of a wide-ranging body of literature that looks at the overlap of
nation-building and nature, including references from what is known as the Brazilian
Social Thought. This literature deals mostly with representations and meanings
associated with nature, and was crucial to give a conceptual backing to one of my
core arguments: that the mangrove had passed from being seen as ‘nature’ to being
seen as ‘environment’ once it became an area of environmental protection.
Although topics related to environment and/or nature have attracted the
attention of many social scientists over the last two decades, such as Arturo Escobar,
Bruno Latour, Anna Tsing, Eeva Berglund, Kay Milton, Ramachandra Guha, Gupta
& Ferguson and Michael Goldman, it is only in the last couple of decades in the
context of Brazil that it ceased to be restricted to the realm of the natural scientists as
object of research (Carneiro et al. 2009).22 In two reviews of the environmental
literature recently made by social scientists working in Brazil, one of them an
anthropologist (Da Silva-Rosa 2010; Carneiro et al. 2009), it was observed that a) the
environmental question still holds a low level of legitimacy in Brazilian social
sciences; b) political decision making is mostly informed by works in the field of the
natural sciences; and c) those who are informing public policies still have a
22
Angela Alonso and Valeriano Costa were responsible for a literature review of the production
of work related to the environment in the social sciences in Brazil and abroad (2002),
encompassing 180 publications.
33
fragmented view of reality, thus insufficient to address social demands. In the light of
those findings, it seems reasonable to suggest that the complexity of environmentrelated hurdles asks for more integrative and interdisciplinary methods.
I therefore found it pertinent to use as secondary sources nine pieces of work,
all by Brazilian authors, done in the last ten years about Colony Z-10. This set of
references includes a television programme on the mangrove and the struggle of Zé
Luiz, part of a larger series of programmes about the environment,23 an article on
environmental education at the APARU do Jequiá (Robertson & Sánchez 2010); a
paper by a sociology doctorate student on the creation of the Centre for
Environmental Education (CEA) at the APARU do Jequiá (Borges 2004); a paper on
the degradation of the mangrove by environmental engineering students (Santos,
Silva & Filho 2002); a Master’s dissertation in Social Memory on the landscape and
memory of the colony (Monteiro 2005); a Master’s dissertation in Social History on
the power relations, memory and identity (Ferreira 2013); two final essays for a
specialization course in Environmental Education (Victorino da Mata 2008,
Boaventura 2007); and last, but by no means least, Zé Luiz’s unpublished work on
the fauna and flora of the mangrove (Castro Ferreira 2005). According to the content
of these works, researchers found the following aspects noteworthy: 1- the colony’s
accomplishment in keeping drug gangs and violence out of its boundaries, a
common-place feature of other communities in Rio de Janeiro; 2- the fact that it was
the first fishing colony founded in 1920 as part of a national project, granting it
historical capital; 3- the fact that it is an APARU, granting it environmental capital;
4- the heroic feat of an individual who, against all odds, reversed the outcomes of an
environmental disaster; 5- the high levels of pollution in an area that should be
protected. It is clear from the profusion of these studies, all undertaken after the
creation of the APARU, that the transformation of the mangrove into environment
brought Z-10 into the limelight, but the outcome of the policies that followed, and
people’s perceptions of the changed status of the mangrove were only marginally
addressed.
23
See the documentary by Estevão Ciavatta and Regina Casé (2010).
34
The still incipient field which analyses relationships between local
populations and environmental policies suggest that the latter often reproduces
existing power relations (Nadasdy 2003) since they are grounded on concepts from
the dominant paradigm of the modern capitalist logic leaving no room for local
knowledge. Likewise, even initiatives such as participatory conservation with
concerns of social justice are influenced by economic rationality (Orlove & Brush
1996; Hayden 2003). There is a considerable body of literature that looks at rights
and obligations associated with the implementation of certain environmental agendas,
like those drafted at the UN Conference on Environment and Development in 1992.
Those working on the crossover between neoliberalism and environmental projects,
have noted that in the transition from state to market-based forms of governance, new
approaches to manage natural resources emerged (Braun 2006:649), and scientific
knowledge went from simply being capitalised to being politicised (Hayden 2003:
222). These findings point to the need for researchers to map how local knowledge
converses with policies, and the role in policy-making for ontologically different
paradigms, on which some forms of local knowledge are based.
The broad range of theoretical references this study draws on reflects the
struggles of the anthropologist with how to interpret the heterogeneous collective
around the mangrove, requiring an intellectual dialogue with theories and approaches,
content and form. In this section I laid out the main theoretical lines of enquiry in
terms of existing literature I engaged with. Next, I shall focus on form and on the
literature that provided the analytical tools for my enquiry.
Analytical approach
I was initially inclined to use Marxist lenses to interpret how changes in the
means of production affected those whose livelihoods depended on the sea and the
mangrove. Inspired by the historical-geographical materialism of the geographer
David Harvey, I aimed at an approach that would encompass historical, geographical
35
as well as metaphorical territories. The choice of deploying alongside those lenses the
analytical tool of ‘assemblages’ came as a result of the multifaceted characteristic of
my object, namely, the mangrove, which in fact turned out to be many different
objects. That said, the very practical effects of capital on people and the landscape,
and the ways it interacts with and forges institutions, are not necessarily lost in this
manner of analysing phenomena. Depending on the speaker, the mangrove appears as
a different entity: a childhood memory, a source of livelihood, a spiritual entity, a
rubbish dump, or a cause over which to fight. In sum, people’s actions are enmeshed
with a dynamic mangrove which grows according to its own biological principles,
whilst nurturing people’s creative initiatives, and fostering institutions. Following the
lead of the authors of Thinking through things (Henare et al. 2008) I approached the
mangrove as an artefact, a thing; as well as a plural signifier holder, a polysemic
concept. The ethical is located in different places and temporalities, sometimes as a
past way of living and being, and at others, as an imagined future. The notion of
assemblage seemed the most appropriate tool to analyse all those things and concepts
that hover around and constitute the mangrove.
Assemblage was used as a methodological tool by Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari, and Bruno Latour, and proved useful to address people’s ways of seeing and
enacting a mangrove. Manuel De Landa (2013), drawing on Deleuze and Guattari,
explains the difference between an assemblage and a mere collection of things as
follows: if you have a man, a horse and a sword, you have a collection of things; if
the man is an experienced horseman and warrior, then you have an assemblage,
which amounts to a whole which is bigger than the sum of its parts. That means that it
is not enough to have an imbroglio composed of all the things around a mangrove, the
whole cannot be reduced to its component parts. In addition, it exceeds the sum of the
elements that constitute it.24 In other words, the environmentalist assemblage came
into being once the mangrove became bigger than the sum of its parts, which actually
started before the 1993 Decree that transformed the mangrove into an APARU.
24
De Landa uses the example of water, which has ‘emergent properties’, since it is more than the
sum of its parts, hydrogen and oxygen, which cease to be gases when they form the water
molecule.
36
This ethnography will unravel how people, thoughts and actions nurtured the
assemblage round the mangrove, multiplying its material and semantic components.
While the fire in 1975 was the event that provided the ethical turn so to speak, the
condition of possibility for an environmental assemblage, the conjunction of forces
that made the whole larger than its parts, were gathered over time. It is as if the
whole, the assemblage, has some autonomy and its process is ongoing since
assemblages are always open to change (De Landa 2013; Deleuze & Guattari 1987).
Assemblage as a tool avoids cultural essentialisms like classing people’s
actions as being driven by capitalist or democratic principles, or seeing the concept of
human/non-human integration as being culturally specific. Instead, because
assemblages are ongoing processes, people and things can belong to more than one
category, depending on the occasion. In a particular configuration of the assemblage
the mangrove is seen as both nature and culture, sometimes as neither nature nor
culture, and at others as pure nature, or pure culture. Thus, the entities associated with
natural phenomena in the religion of Umbanda25, the focus of chapter 3 and 4, are
both cultural and natural, they drink and smoke, and they inhabit the forest and the
crossroads. The sewage in the mangrove is seen as neither natural nor cultural, and
while environmentalists consider the mangrove natural, drug users experience it as a
place for socialisation. The correlative conjunctions ‘either…or’, ‘both…and’, and
‘neither…nor’ not only elucidate the conundrum that an urban mangrove represents
for the enlightenment project of a nature culture divide, but they also serve as
indicators of who and what is allowed in the assemblage, and on what grounds.
Ignacio Farías notes that one may choose between deploying the ‘notion of
assemblage as an empirical description, a methodological tool or an ontological
perspective’ (Farías 2011:369). Echoing Callon and Latour (1981), Farías adds that
assemblage theory enables the anthropologist to see the distribution of resources and
25
With elements of the African-rooted Candomblé, Indigenous cosmology, Catholicism and
Kardecism, a late nineteenth century form of French Spiritualism named after Allan Kardec,
Umbanda is arguably the religion that best reflects the construction of the Brazilian identity
(Umbanda is the focus of Chapter 4). Its spiritual realm is peopled by guides whose influences
encompass Yoruba, Gêge, Ketu and Angola traditions, Catholic saints, occultist symbols, and
urban myths.
37
agency (ibid.:370;). In this research, assemblage is mostly used as an analytical
category to trace the flux of social relations and concrete networks found therein,
relations that are both material and semiotic, between things and between concepts,
drawing on the definition of assemblage as associations between heterogeneous
elements (Latour 2005). Because fieldwork revealed a collection of things, people,
concepts, and non-human nature that ranged from sewage to city council departments,
the model of assemblage appeared to be the most appropriate to explore the social
and material relations around the mangrove: it allowed me to trace the connections
between a polluted mangrove and the two core concepts in this work, nature and
environment.
An assemblage is composed of networks, two very closely linked concepts
that enable the tracing of those connections and between the heterogeneous elements
of the collective. In Strathern’s words, ‘the concept of network summons the tracery
of heterogeneous elements that constitute such an object or event, or string of
circumstances, held together by social interactions’ (1996:521). Now, I am also
interested in describing the network of social relations from the perspective of actors
themselves, as when environmentalists talk about their network of relations. This
translates into using networks descriptively, as when actors recognise their belonging
to a network, as well as analytically, in the sense of an anthropologist who follows
the chain of elements of a given configuration. I shall signpost those two distinct uses
of the term.
The importance of ‘enactment’ in the way parts affect the whole has also to be
considered insofar as the environment has to be performed by the many parts for the
whole to be interpreted as an environmental assemblage. In the same way a disease
has to be enacted by both patient and doctor for it to be considered as such (Mol
2003), or for epistemic categories to be activated (Das 2012) in the case of a scientific
field of expertise. However, Das adds the caveat that the specialist’s knowledge is
itself associated with other forms of social knowledge such as the marketing of
medicines and new technologies, making the assemblage around a given disease more
heterogeneous. Some theorists working with those conceptual tools see the
38
engagement with ‘different ways of enacting things’ (Bingham & Hinchliffe 2008:84;
Mol 2003) as political, since it shifts the focus onto practices and onto ways of
articulating different modes of living (Latour 2013).
One of the main critiques of assemblage theory is regarding its supposed
‘relational’ perspective, in the sense that because of its open nature, inviting an
inquiry rather than a critique, it provides a value-free analysis, which is paradoxically
ideological since it hides the power relations within it (Farías 2011). However, I side
with Farías who defends the assemblage theory as a critical tool, claiming that cities
provide specific historical contingencies where capitalism assumes multiple forms in
a ‘transactional relation with the environment’ (ibid.: 368). In an attempt to pre-empt
similar accusations, I shall proceed by exposing my own ideology on the subject.
Agenda & methodology
I would not have described myself as an environmentalist when I first started
my fieldwork, but it dawned on me that I was ethically compelled by environmental
issues when, whilst writing my thesis at the University of Manchester, I found myself
militating in protests, going to meetings with local councillors, and exchanging abuse
with the police, over the felling of 415 trees with lottery-fund money in my local
park. As it turned out, it was a conflict over aesthetics and safety, between those who
supported a park with lots of trees and a touch of wilderness and abandonment,
against those who pushed for the park to have its ‘Victorian glory’ back, with plenty
of lawns, flowerbeds and open ‘sight lanes’, deemed a much ‘safer’ environment.
We, in the first group, lost, and they won. Over one year later planners were at a
standstill since it became plain what was argued at the outset by protesting
environmentalists, that because the place is wetland, it is ideal for the sycamores that
39
were felled, and a nightmare for flowerbeds. Writing on the subject was certainly a
rite of passage into the role of environmental activism in the Anthropocene.26
Shying away from any anthropological high ground, I nonetheless wish to
share my views on the state of precarious livelihoods of many fishermen and their
descendants. I do not believe it is an overstatement to say that people at Z-10 are
dispossessed,27 even if many of my informants have access to commodities. The
fishermen were alienated from their means of subsistence, from the cultural heritage
associated with it, and from the relative security they previously enjoyed, being left
with the blame for not joining demonstrations against big oil corporations, not being
‘environmentally conscious’, and generally being described as apolitical.
While the ontological approach is not the main thrust in this investigation, I do
subscribe to the urge to break away from ‘human exceptionalism’ (Haraway 2008),
and challenge the idea of an ontological supremacy that undermines dissimilar world
views to the detriment of selected forms of human and non-human life. My
understanding of the ecology and welfare of a mangrove, without having experienced
a life by it, is bound to be different from that of someone who grew next to it, swam
in it, flew kites along its shores, made a living from it, saw it burning to the ground
and re-emerging from the ashes, and assimilated all the outside elements that are
assembled there today.
With regards to methodology, data was generated by means of fieldwork
undertaken both within the grounds of Z-10, and outside it. To get a sense of people’s
perception about the mangrove, and of the movement to protect it, during one year of
fieldwork I conducted around 120 interviews, including 32 life stories, and
participated in around 60 meetings related to environmental issues. Because my first
26
A term coined by the chemist Paul Crutzen to refer to the current era, following the Holocene,
when human activity has changed the world to an extent comparable with other major geological
events in the past.
27
Here I am referring to David Harvey’s conception of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (2009) to
call attention to the colonization of the natural resources, in this case, the sea, by those who have
the ultimate say over such monopoly, such as corporations which withhold the capital and the
means to accumulate.
40
visit to Z-10 had happened four years prior to my fieldwork, when I conducted a
research on the process of memory construction by residents there, I already knew
some key figures in the community. A great part of interviewees were introduced to
me by people I knew from that time, but I also met people through my visits to the
Umbanda terreiro,28 and through hanging out in front of the CEA. A great deal of
my time was spent in Margarida’s kitchen where there was a constant flow of
visitors, and in her veranda during the bingo evenings she held for about six months.
While those gatherings constituted an interesting locus of social interaction, very little
of it, if any at all, was related to the key aspects in my research since playing
demanded concentration and people could get irritated with an anthropologist
shooting questions at them.
After her granddaughter Walkyria started running a beauty parlour in the
living-room, the age-group of visitors changed considerably. While most of the
conversations in the household consisted of gossiping about neighbours and common
acquaintances, quite frequently the subject would converge to matters related to the
terreiro when those visiting were Umbandistas. As carnival approached, most
conversations were around the organization of the bloco, the making of costumes, and
the politics between those making decisions.
There is a storytelling vein throughout this research which resulted both from
a personal choice of using it as a method, and from people’s manner of responding
when prompted by questions related to the mangrove which would almost inevitably
trigger a process of reminiscing about growing up in that landscape. I also used photo
elicitation to tap into people’s memories of the past, and map-making to capture a
sense of people’s perception of place. This latter method was particularly useful to
capture perceptions of the landscape by younger generations who would not normally
volunteer to talk about the place. In trying to get involved with my field exploring a
more phenomenological approach, I learned to repair fishing nets with the oldest
28
The space for Umbanda rituals, prayers and weekly ‘giras’ (sessions with music, dance, spirit
possession and consultation with entities).
41
fisherman in the colony, Seu Baixinho; I took part in the bateria29 of the carnival
bloco30 at Z-10 as a percussionist; I helped the women prepare carnival costumes and
cook for fund-raising events; and I was initiated as an umbandista, receiving my
quartinha, a porcelain vessel with my spiritual information, and marker of my
membership in that terreiro. I also took part in a few litter-picking walks along the
mangrove shores. I have used people’s real names throughout the thesis, except when
I deemed inappropriate to do so, mostly triggered by my perceived need to protect the
identity of some informers.
Thesis structure
The thesis is divided into three parts, Naturalisms, Social Natures, and
Environmentalisms, and sub-divided in seven chapters, each chapter named after a
place, and each following different enactments of the mangrove: its heritageization,
memorization, biologization, domestication, commoditization, institutionalization,
and politicization. The first part focuses on a discursively constructed ‘nature’,
through national-developmental ideals that changed over time, and through people’s
memories; the second part explores the social-natural mangrove; and the third part
dwells in the discursively constructed ‘environment’, mostly through the voices of the
Department of the Environment, and of environmental activists.
Raymond Williams notes that from the sixteenth century onwards to study
natural history, or ‘to explain or justify morality from nature or human nature (italics
in the original), was to be a naturalist and to propound naturalism’ (Williams
1976:181). In the arts, and in painting in particular in the nineteenth century,
naturalism indicated a reproduction of natural objects. I draw on both Williams’s and
Descola’s understanding of naturalism to give a sense of direction to the first part of
29
A carnival percussion group.
30
A bloco is a micro version of a Brazilian samba school set up and managed by local
communities and usually associated with a particular neighbourhood.
42
this thesis, since it is concerned with representations of nature, both as iconography
and as memory, grounded on a biology-related naturalism, a paradigm that relies on
the separation between nature and culture. While generally speaking academics
understand that separation as a construct, its sociological reality cannot be
understated. I have, however, used Naturalisms in the plural to complexify the
dualist perspective of nature and culture implied in the term.
In this investigation of how people’s ethical sensibilities changed as the
mangrove went from nature to environment, each chapter revolves around one set of
interests in the collective life of the community where those ethical sensibilities
become apparent. This practice-based exercise sheds light on how concepts of nature
and/or environment inform those sensibilities. Thus, the first chapter, Eden, gives the
historical background to the construction of the concepts of ‘nature’ and
‘environment’ to elucidate why I use the abstract model of a shift from nature to
environment. It looks at how nature was construed in the Brazilian national
imaginary, at the origins of an ethics towards nature, and at the imagined community
of Z-10 which was created via a national project, then revitalized as an environmental
project. The elements that form this naturalist view of nature include early accounts
by missionaries and travellers, and the role of mangroves in the project of the capital
city of Rio. It also presents the paired trope ‘order and progress’ that permeates the
thesis. The passage from nature to environment reinforces the need to enact the two
founding myths of the colony which touch on the nation and on nature.
The second chapter dwells in the imaginary of those whose nostalgia towards
the mangrove nurtures an ethic towards the natural landscape of the past grounded in
a perception of the mangrove as nature, and in the paradoxes brought about by the
passage of control from the Navy to the City Council when the mangrove entered the
environmental assemblage. It describes the production of the socio-natural urban
space around the colony, and then looks at the trajectory of the mangrove as it moved
along different ‘regimes of value’ (Appadurai 1986:5), and changed as a thing,
situating it in the broader landscape of the Governor’s Island. This memorisation of
the mangrove reveals the tension between nostalgia and progress as it changes
43
through time, narrated through life stories of residents at Z-10. The passage from
nature to environment has implications for land ownership and is often seen as the
culprit for the current landscape of pollution and ‘disordered growth’.31 In that
context, the mangrove assumes the role of a moral agent for those who see it as a
protective barrier against undesirable outside influences.
Moving away from the nature/culture polarization which permeates the first
section of this thesis, the second part, called Social Natures, focuses on the contact
zone where the supposed division between nature and culture dissipates (Helmreich
& Kirksey 2010), exploring the terrain of multispecies and quasi-objects, as well as
that of supernatural beings. This exploration of social natures32 is sub-divided into
three chapters broadly corresponding to the biological, metaphysical and material
aspects of the mangrove addressing its social natural constitution of river, sea water,
and sewage; supernatural entities; and rubbish. These three topics encompass
practices that both acknowledge social natural hybrids, and exercise the purification
of ideal models.
Chapter 3 explores the hybridization of the mangrove in its current
constitution of river, sea water, and sewage, and its ‘polluting’ aspects enmeshed as
they are with its organic aspects. The practices around the mangrove, including
fishing activities, knowledge and beliefs, expose it as ontologically different from the
natural landscape of people’s memories described in chapter 2, and as the
embodiment of contemporary ambiguities. It suggests that as the mangrove embodied
changes over the years, absorbing those transformations in its biological makeup,
people’s values and life projects incorporated, literally and symbolically, aspects of
the mangrove. This chapter also explores the concept of evolution both with regards
to a mangrove turned into an area of environmental preservation, and to Exu, the
most popular spiritual entity/doctor in the colony who evolves by means of healing
and charity work. In the passage from nature to environment the mangrove is seen as
a bio system, and performed as an impermeable boundary in need of purification,
31
This is an expression commonly used by public administrators to refer to favelas.
Latour uses the term ‘naturecultures’ (1993) for hybrids of nature and culture.
32
44
while in the ecological assemblage, the meshwork of people and practices that lies
beyond both nature and environment, the mangrove is a spiritual entity, and a place of
permeability where humans and non-humans interact. It is this supernatural aspect of
the mangrove that lies at the core of this chapter.
The fourth chapter finds in the religious cosmology of Umbanda, a particular
form of ethics grounded in the culturalization and domestication of a set of
overarching concepts of nature. This relationship expands into spiritual forms of
kinship, and includes other non-humans such as animals, weather phenomena and
mass-produced objects. Through the manipulation of plants, and gift exchanges with
supernatural and social natural entities, mediums interact with nature. Those
transactions are normative with nature performing a social role in the development of
the medium. The tropes of progress, and order, are explored here in the elucidation of
the evolutionary process of Exus,33 Caboclos,34 and mediums. The passage from
nature to environment brought changes to practices such as animal sacrifice and
offerings to entities, as well as new ethical compromises.
The fifth chapter focuses on what most people agree nature is not: rubbish and
pollution. It explores the effects of the commodification of nature, and of waste in a
preserved area, and the distinctions between visible and invisible forms of pollution.
Perceptions on waste, mostly seen as non-natural, are revealing since they bring a
variety of oppositions to the surface such as order versus disorder, nostalgia versus
progress, man-made versus not man-made. In this exploration of how pollution and
waste are perceived in relation to nature and to the mangrove, it becomes clear that
those elements are key in the construction of ethical subjects. The passage from
33
A spiritual entity whose origin is the Yoruba god Exu, also called Legba by the Ewé. It is the
intermediary between other deities and human beings, between the sacred and the profane.
According to Herskovitz, it introduces chance to the world order, while for Roger Bastide, it
opens and traces the pathways (Ortiz 1978). Because of its trickster’s qualities, it was syncretised
with the devil in the Catholic context. In Porto Alegre, in the south of Brazil, he was syncretised
with St. Peter, because both are seen as gatekeepers.
34
The definition of the term Caboclo in Portuguese is of a person of mixed Portuguese and
Amerindian descent. In Umbanda the entity Caboclo refers to a representation of the generic
Amerindian understood as belonging to a homogenous group, and undermining the multiplicity of
ethnic denominations among native Brazilians.
45
nature to environment enforces the notion that the mangrove can only be environment
if it is dully purified. In sum, this chapter explores the ‘bones of contention’ related to
waste, such as a concrete slab or litter, as they appear in people’s speeches and
actions, along with the ethical implications of monitoring waste disposal.
The third and last part, Environmentalisms, comprises chapter 6, and the final
chapter. Its main thrust is the heterogeneity of the environmental movement, and the
wide scope of ethical framings deployed, in order to understand the role of
environmental institutions in the assemblage, why the movement lost its momentum
in the community in question, and what the subsequent implications for the mangrove
are. Environmentalisms is a shift from Social Natures in the sense that we enter the
contemporary purified zone of the environmental paradigm, inserted as it is the neoliberal logic of the market, moral capitalism,35 and environmental governance. In this
section, the ethnography will leave the boundaries of Z-10 to encompass the plurality
of the environmental movement, as well as the wider space of the Guanabara Bay.
The sixth chapter addresses the institutionalization of the mangrove,
presenting it as the environment, a new form of currency. It looks into the production
of ethical sensibilities by governmental institutions through laws and educational
projects, and by people conversing with current legislations and political agendas, at
times being informed by them, at others judging, or undermining them. It shows the
gap between discourse and practice by focusing on the episode concerning the
decision of building the Olympic Village, and on the work undertaken by the Centre
for Environmental Education in the colony. The passage from nature to environment
reveals the detachment from local knowledge about the mangrove on the part of the
political actors with a supposed interest in the environment.
The seventh chapter investigates the politicization of the mangrove, and the
tension between evolution and revolution; adaptation and social movement.
Considering that there had once been a movement which mobilised many people and
secured a legal status of protected area for the mangrove, I was incited to understand
35
Here understood as an ideology that sees no conflict between interest and virtue.
46
the drying up of the social movement. Prompted by the view held amongst
environmental militants that fishermen from colonies are ‘pelego’ or ‘scabs’, I set out
to investigate what being political meant. The passage from nature to environment
exposes the political consequences of conflicting ethical framings towards nature, the
environment, and the mangrove, and the distance between the fishermen in Z-10 and
their descendants, and the ‘traditional fishermen’ in the discourse by environmental
activists.
In order to situate some of those pursuits and familiarise the reader with
names that helped me weave this socio-ecological narrative, as well as with people’s
historical connections with the mangrove, I compiled a short reference list of my
main informants through fieldwork, those who I feel most indebted to.
The characters
Margarida: I call her my research godmother. I first met her in 2006 at Z-10,
and we have kept in touch ever since. She was born in 1940 in São João Del Rey, in
the state of Minas. She was five when her mother died, so her father gave her and her
three sisters away, and each went to a different place. She was given to a family who
ran a textile factory. She used to feel very cold and used to wear a wheat sack with a
hole in it over her head. Her main job was to bring water into the house but she also
did all kinds of services until the age of nine, when a cousin discovered her
whereabouts and took her to Rio de Janeiro to work in a ‘casa de família’,36 a
family’s house, in the district of Tijuca. After a couple of years, she went back to
Minas for a short while, and then returned to Rio to live in the community of Boréu,
nowadays a favela rife with drug dealers and violence, where she lived from 13 to 16,
before she moved to Dendê, a community in Ilha. It was then that she joined Ilha’s
Samba School where she met her husband Deley, who was part of its managing
36
To ‘work in a family’s house’ means to do jobs like cooking, cleaning, washing, and ironing for
families of middle and upper classes.
47
committee. Margarida was a passista, the samba dancers who come at the front of the
different sections in the Samba School parade.37 Deley belonged to one of the oldest
families in the colony and was a fisherman. One of the streets in the colony is named
after his grandfather, one of the first fishermen to come to the colony. In the late 50s,
when Margarida first arrived at Z-10, outsiders were only allowed in through kinship
relations or marriage. After having children, Margarida complemented her family’s
income by picking mussels and crabs from the mangrove, and cleaning shrimps. Later
in life Deley secured a job at the Navy as a cleaner and general services assistant,
which he held until he died in his early fifties. Margarida now lives and supports her
grandchildren with this pension. Carnival is until now the activity Margarida is most
devoted to, but she is also a regular participant in craft workshops at CEA, the Centre
for Environmental Education. Because she likes traveling, and worked as a
marisqueira, collecting shellfish, she also often goes to meetings in the capacity of
fisherwoman, having become an important player in the environmental assemblage.
But at Z-10, she is best known for her cooking. She chain smokes and swears all the
time. Margarida’s story is an example of the diversity in the migratory patterns of
different men and women who came to live at Z-10 since its foundation.
Zé Luiz: He is often referred to in Z-10 as a hero, a warrior, or an
environmentalist, but I like to describe him as an organic environmentalist in the
Gramscian sense (Gramsci 1998). The son of a fisherman who migrated from
Portugal, Zé Luiz is 57 and has been involved with the environmental cause for forty
years. He has been interviewed hundreds of times, and participated in television
programmes about the Jequiá mangrove, including one episode of a popular series on
the environment presented by Regina Casé, a television celebrity. He always enters
the mangrove barefoot. I first met him in 2006, but he has lost weight since and
became very bitter about the environmental cause and his commitment to Z-10,
though he still runs his Environmental NGO, Amigos do Manguezal, Friends of the
37
União da Ilha, Ilha’s samba school, is one of the biggest in Rio. It has been in the Group A
category of samba schools, having paraded for decades in the famous Sapucaí Avenue. To have
been a passista at União da Ilha is no small feat, and certainly grants social capital to Margarida in
her involvement with carnival until now.
48
Mangrove. He is also known locally as the keeper of the colony’s memory with a
respectable archive of old documents and photographs. He takes an active part in the
colony’s main annual celebrations, lighting the fireworks as a ‘fogueteiro’ at every St.
Peter’s catholic celebration, and raising the Brazilian flag at every official ceremony
of the colony’s anniversary. He worries about who will preserve the traditions of the
colony once he ‘leaves this world’. He is loved by many, and hated by a few.
Didil: A fisherman. I met him in 2011 by the colony’s fishing administration
office. A couple of fishermen were telling me what I should be writing about: ‘fish
swimming inside plastic bags’. Didil offered to take me out to sea to see the reality of
fishermen, and we went out fishing on a few occasions. We sometimes met at the
crack of dawn when the tide was still high to collect the fishing net we had laid out
the previous afternoon. He would row the boat always in the direction of the RioNiterói bridge, a good half-an-hour away, and I would help him pull the net back into
the boat. He usually gave me a couple of fish in gratitude for my help. I would
interview him as he rowed, and that is how he introduced me to his idea of Nature,
something that was entangled with his religious practices in Umbanda. Didil was an
ogan38 at the terreiro39 of his brother, the main pai de santo40 in the colony, but
stopped going there when he left his family and moved into another community in
Ilha to live with a woman out of wedlock.
Toninho: The pai de santo. He comes from one of the oldest fishing families
at Z-10 and fishes in his spare time. He and Zé Luiz are childhood friends, and used
to roam the mangrove as kids. A man of incredible tenacity, Toninho is totally
dedicated to the Umbanda terreiro and to the work he and other mediums do helping
people with all sorts of problems without any type of charge. He also has a job in a
fruit market in the nearby district of Ribeira. Toninho is married with six grown-up
children, and two grandchildren, and is seen as a model of a man by followers and
non-followers alike. Umbandistas have the greatest respect for the guides he
38
Traditionally the drummer at terreiros and person in charge of killing animals to be sacrificed.
39
The place where the Umbanda rituals take place.
40
The high priest in the Umbanda ritual.
49
incorporates. The mediums at his terreiro are told to collect all the ‘trabalhos’
(offerings to the entities that are usually laid out on earthenware trays) after a few
days, something he considers an ‘environmentally conscious’ practice.
Seu Toquinho: The Exu that descends on Toninho during spirit possession on
a regular basis. His full name is Exu Marabô Toquinho and he presides over the
crossroads and the weather. As soon as he emerges from the roncó,41 barefoot and
bare-chested, with trousers and a hat, and with a tie around his neck, a medium brings
him a glass of cachaça (spirit made of sugarcane) and a cigar. Seu Toquinho enters
this list of main protagonists because I couldn’t help but see uncanny parallels
between this entity and the mangrove, an overlap that will be explored throughout
this thesis. For now suffice it to say that Exu, an entity associated with immoral
behaviour, such as drinking, smoking, prostitution, and urban living, brings order to
the house and cleanses bad thoughts. The mangrove, a mix of river and sea water, and
sewage, is described by biologists as a filter for the broader bio-system where it is
located.
Elmo:42 An environmentalist. He lives in Ilha but not at Z-10, though he often
goes there on weekends. He comes from a family of settlers in the agrarian reform of
the 1970s in the north of Brazil. His father started a rural union there and a fishing
community, and became a radio commentator. The grandfather from the mother’s
side was a communist, and belonged to both the shoemakers’ and rural unions. At the
time of the dictatorship, communists would hide weapons at his parents’ house. His
mother was a teacher and taught him to read and write. He joined PV, the Brazilian
green party, at 19. He said he started militating in socio-ecology because of his
upbringing in the forest. He was a key actor in the social movement that made Jequiá
a protected area.
41
The room reserved for the pai-de-santo where he goes to dress up accordingly, depending on
which guide he incorporates.
42
A pseudonym has been used for this character throughout the thesis.
50
Part I – Naturalisms
Chapter 1 – Eden
This is a lost Eden, a microcosm of Brazil.
Zé Luiz
And God said ‘Let’s make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have
dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle,
and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the
earth.’
Genesis, chapter 1, verse 26
Figure 2:Painting depicting the foundation of the city of Rio de Janeiro by Estácio de Sá
after the victory against the Tamoios, against the background of the Guanabara Bay.
51
The passage from Genesis reproduced above indicates what some authors
have pointed as the Judeo-Christian roots of the current environmental crisis: the
reinforcement of human superiority by means of the exploitation of nature. The
painting in the background of the photograph inserted above illustrates the main
protagonists of the newly founded city of Rio de Janeiro: the clergymen and white
men walk towards an open gateway, while a few indigenous representatives stand on
the periphery in puzzlement and wonder. The Guanabara Bay is the backdrop for the
development plans which would follow in the next 500 hundred years following the
event depicted.1 Although the original dwellers of the area where my fieldwork took
place used natural resources for their survival, nothing compares to the endeavour by
the newcomers that re-shaped the landscape around Guanabara Bay, especially after
the eighteenth century.
José Murilo de Carvalho, a political scientist working in Brazil, used the term
‘edenismo’ (from Eden), a leitmotif in Brazilian social thought, to mean the exaltation
of the natural qualities of Brazil, including landscape, climate, fertility and the
absence of natural disasters. Two public opinion surveys using the indicator ‘national
pride’, were conducted in Brazil to prove that ‘edenismo’ still lives. The conclusion
of the survey was that the main reason for Brazilians’ national pride is ‘nature’
(Carvalho 1998), here meaning natural landscapes. The role that representations of
nature play in social imaginaries cannot be overstated, featuring in history classes,
paradidactic materials, in early chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth century,
and in the romantic literature movement of the nineteenth century. Yet, while the
policy of mercantilism during colonial times irrevocably altered the landscape, the
developmental model grounded on further accumulation of capital and expropriation
1
Located at Pedro Ernesto Palace, the seat of the legislative power in Rio de Janeiro, this painting
by Rodolfo Amoêdo dates from 1923.
52
of nature further intensified the Anthropocenic process. Another dialectical product of
capitalism thus emerged: environmentalism along with its moral high ground,
perhaps an unwitting by-product. Rabinow cites environmentalism, alongside
genetics and immunology, as 'the leading vehicle for the infiltration of techno
science, capitalism and culture into what the moderns called “nature'" (2008:245).
The suggestion that the current environmental movement provides a new form
of universal morality (Grove-White 1993; Descola & Pálsson 1996; Little 1999;
Tsing 2005) is predicated upon a contradiction in the understanding of where humans
stand in relation to nature. According to Descola’s four ontologies already laid out in
the introduction of this thesis, the naturalist paradigm implies a continuity between
humans and non-humans, since we are all part of nature. However, it also implies a
major discontinuity with respect to morality, an attribute only granted to humans, the
supposed exclusive holders of culture. Instigated by those ponderings, the first part of
this thesis focuses on representations of nature, as iconography in the national
imaginary and as memory, and both with a direct impact on people’s ethical
sensibilities towards the mangrove.
This chapter elaborates on the transformation of the natural landscape around
Z-10, on the nation, and on how related representations changed once the mangrove
became a preserved area and entered the environmental assemblage. One of the key
ideas to understand this passage is that when the mangrove was nature, in the
analytical sense, it was more taken for granted. Once the mangrove was burned down
and its existence endangered the environmental movement starts. As observed by
Timothy Morton, ‘environmentalism is a set of cultural and political responses to a
crisis in humans’ relationships with their surroundings’ (2007:9) and, because it
encompasses a wide range of artistic, ethical and political affiliations, it ‘is broad and
inconsistent’ (ibid.). Furthermore, from the point of view of fishermen and their
families, ‘nature’ was also less mediated, since it constituted part of their working
lives. ‘Nature’ was constructed differently over time initially as an object of
exploitation, and later, already as environment, via policies of protection. Either way,
those objectifications are still predicated on the naturalist paradigm and on the
53
separation between nature and culture, widely accepted in academia as a construct
which is undermined in practice. I will then proceed to look at the origins of the
environmental movement in the Brazilian context.
Although nature appears as the object of policies as early as the eighteenth
century bringing it close to the concept of environment, it is only after the 1960s that
those policies will protect nature for its own sake. In the particular case of the
community studied here, the passage from nature to environment also coincides with
the shift from an authoritarian rule to a democratic one, which means that a
conjunctural outcome of the Decree that transformed the mangrove into an APARU
will also mark the analytical shift from nature to environment. In other words, this
chapter will elucidate the more abstract shift between different representations,
including ethical and aesthetical responses, and a more concrete one, pertaining to the
realm of policies and legislations. Thus, the environmental turn that made the
APARU possible also reflects latent tensions between distinct paradigms and sets of
values.
The last section in this chapter looks at the role of the mangrove in the
construction of an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1986) at the local level of
Colony Z-10 through the endeavours by the local environmentalist to keep old values
alive, namely those of the fishing history and values, despite the demise of former
modes of production and authority. By re-enacting the anniversary celebration of the
colony and St. Peter’s procession, both related to a past where nation and nature
figured under a different order, more recent forms of state management in the current
environmental assemblage are put to the test. The anniversary celebrations and St
Peter’s procession link Z-10 to an ethical nation, with the mangrove as a necessary
backdrop. In brief, the entanglements that form this naturalist assemblage include
early accounts by missionaries and travellers, perceptions about mangroves in the
making of the capital city of Rio, and the enactment of two founding myths of the
colony.
54
Exploitation, protection, and new regimes of value
As early as the nineteenth century, the coastal zones of Rio de Janeiro
attracted real-estate capital because of its natural beauty, seen as a precious
commodity (Amador 2013:170). ‘Good’ and ‘beautiful’ nature were usually
associated with the coast, while ‘ugly’ nature, was connected to the interior, or in the
case of a burgeoning city like Rio, the peripheral areas and mangroves. The
transformation of nature allowed land to be incorporated to the capitalist productive
system, while the efficient biological system of mangroves, which ensured fish stock
and provided subsistence to men and beast alike in the area of the Guanabara Bay,
was not part of the calculations.
The transformation of natural landscapes in the city of Rio as a whole
translated into a process of land drainage (drenagem), occupation and evictions,
paving the way for the massive land fill projects which would characterise the first
half of the twentieth century, of which the mangrove areas were the biggest victims.
Regular urban waste collection started in the second half of the nineteenth century,
with mangroves and islands being selected as the favoured disposal areas. Aterros, or
land filling, soon became the best solution both to hide areas perceived as degraded,
and to make room for real estate capital, roadwork developments and rubbish dumps.
What started to destroy this area was a factory that produced fat out
of coconut, they would throw all the residues in the mangrove. There
was a mining company over there. Then Shell2 arrived, after Esso,
then Texaco, and lastly Petrobrás. – Zé Luiz
Back then, a slave-based logic based on archaic relations of production with
the coffee boom as a prime example coexisted alongside the capitalist one, which
reproduced the English Imperialist model (Amador 2013:98). The social-historical
transformations of the landscape around the colony, affected by the waves of
2
Shell was founded in 1907, and has been in Brazil since 1913.
55
migration and economic cycles from 1567 onwards,3 played a role both in people’s
sensibilities towards the mangrove and on the way political agendas were conducted
over the years, indicating that history is intrinsic to the environmental assemblage
under investigation. This prompted me to look at environmental transformations as
historical-geographical processes, and shed light on how the mangrove, as a thing,
circulated between different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986) over time. The time
framing is significant if we are to understand how historically contingent the
capitalist logic is (Herzfeld 2001), and whether it makes sense to say that capital
entered an ‘ecological phase’4 (Escobar 1996), as some would suggest.
The eighteenth century is characterised by the growing presence of the
Benedictine Order, mostly in the west part of Ilha, which in the twentieth century
came to be occupied by the Air Force. Their large property was used for the
production of sugar and sugarcane spirit, agriculture and cattle-raising, mostly
deploying slave labour.5 The production reached unimaginable heights with the
arrival of the Portuguese Royal family in Rio in 1807, when the city’s population
doubled almost overnight, and Ilha took on a vital role in the provision of food and
construction materials.6 However, until the nineteenth century the population was
scarce, consisting mainly of workers in the intense production of sugar and sugarcane
3
This was the year when the governor of Rio de Janeiro, then capital of the Portuguese colony,
came to live in Ilha.
4
Escobar sees political ecology as the study of conflicts over access to and control of natural
resources, while noting that “the political field is traversed by three domains: the ecological, the
economic and the cultural” (Escobar 2008:13). He goes on to explore how capital develops a
conservationist tendency, including the concept of self-management of a now capitalized nature,
in a significant shift from its previous destructive form of accumulation and growth.
5
They were renowned for their organization and efficiency, and money-making skills, which
facilitated the construction of what is now the oldest church in Ilha, the N.S. da Ajuda in the
district of Freguesia, built in 1710.
6
The Benedictine property was also the place chosen as the Royal Hunting Grounds, created by
decree on 12th August 1811. In her book about the History of Ilha, Cybelle de Ipanema (1991) has
examples of newspaper advertisements circulating in the capital for the purchase of land in Ilha:
big portions of land with large variety of fruit trees, coffee plants, forests, springs, boats and
slaves (Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888) even taking into account that a fair proportion of
Ilha was swamp.
56
spirit, called cachaça, which accounted for a large proportion of the export balance.7
Those workers relied on subsistence agriculture, and on the rearing of some animals,
while also supplying farm products to the burgeoning population of Rio.
In 1870, with a population of 2,594 inhabitants, Ilha was described as ‘a place
with clean beaches; detached houses at the seafront for single families; some
businesses; some industries, in particular those of ceramics and lime; and many trees’
(Ipanema 1991:105, my translation), and from 1850, the production of roof tiles and
bricks. The farm of São Sebastião, one of the most prosperous of Ilha in the
production of gravel, shellfish, and lime from shells, fell prey to a plague that wiped
out its slave population, and was subsequently sold to the Navy8 in 1871 to house a
School for Sailors. In 1883, a revolt erupted, known as Revolta da Armada, resulting
from the discontentment of some Navy officers with the rule by the vice-president of
the newly formed Republic (1889) after the first republican president’s renunciation.
The officers and sailors who supported the revolt sought refuge in the Sailors’
School, and as a consequence the area comprised between Jequiá’s Canal and the
school were bombarded, along with the ships that stayed nearby in the bay with food
and water provisions, and Ilha was invaded by the government’s military forces. In
addition, there was the Revolta da Chibata, another revolt that took place in 1910 in
Guanabara Bay in which sailors held Navy officers demanding the end of corporal
punishment.
The main land fills in Rio were undertaken by the Navy after 1945, as a result
of the construction of Avenida Brasil, a highway which connects the city to the
suburbs. Four years later, in 1949, the bridge connecting Ilha do Governador to the
continent was built, which irrevocably transformed that area from a paradisiacal
island and holiday resort into what it is now: a piece of land surrounded by beaches
7
According to the historian Cybelle de Ipanema, Antonio Knivet, a crew member on the pirate
vessel commanded by Thomas Cavendish, was held prisoner and worked as a slave in one of the
governor’s sugar plants in Ilha.
8
The plan was to build a home for Navy officers injured in the Paraguay War, but the initial
project was replaced by the Sailors’ School, which later gave place to the Radio Transmission
Station and Liquid Fuel Warehouse, still there today.
57
‘unsuitable for swimming’. The 1950s was marked by the government’s investment
in its most promising progeny, the oil company Petrobrás, which with its resulting
pollution was also the beginning of the end of the means of production for the
fishermen.
The industrialization phase that started during the office of Juscelino
Kubitchek and was intensified under the military rule, meant that pollution in
Guanabara Bay reached proportions never seen before, not to mention the large-scale
land filling for the expansion of roads and real-state. In the 50s and 60s projects such
as Projeto-Rio9 and the Program for the De-pollution of Guanabara Bay, Programa
de Despoluição da Baia de Guanabara, became massive political stakes, and
valuable electoral assets. Urban versions of clientelism thrived, and many populist
candidates took advantage of the situation, fighting re-settlement of populations and
opting instead for the urbanization of favelas, which translated into more drainage
and land filling, and loss of large mangrove areas. Still during the military rule,
Carlos Lacerda was the mentor of a ‘sanitation’ project,10 which basically meant the
land filling of huge areas of mangrove, lagoons, marshes, as well and the bay itself
and the canalization of rivers, around the city. All in all, 95 km2 of the surface around
Guanabara Bay was land filled (Amador 2013:278), a practice used for areas deemed
degraded. One of the projects during the Lacerda term in office as governor of Rio
was the eradication of mangroves and favelas around Guanabara Bay to give way to
concrete ‘sanitation docks’ (cais de saneamento).11
Jequiá, the name of the river that forms the mangrove and ends in Guanabara
Bay is also a canal, which according to Áureo, a history teacher in Ilha, was widened
9
Projeto-Rio was a renewed version of the Sanitation Docks, Cais de Saneamento, a project
undertaken under Carlos Lacerda’s government in the 1960s, which had the objective of
producing available land for industrial expansion, as well as removing slums that had proliferated
since the construction of Avenida Brasil in the 1940s.
10
This process was actually described as ‘saneamento’, ‘sanitation’. The geographer, militant and
specialist on the Guanabara Bay, Elmo Amador, describes this as a perverse vision grounded on a
logic of making the surrounding areas of the bay more artificial, still present amongst technical
personnel at the state level.
11
These are protections walls built next to swampy areas that are likely to get flooded.
58
by the Navy in the nineteenth century so that big boats could enter there to fill with
lime, the production of which was apparently resumed after the Navy bought the land
from the widow Dona Amaral, but was also used a few years later as a hiding place
for vessels involved in the Revolta da Armada. If this in fact happened, it would
mean that the now preserved area of Jequiá amounts to a man-made military
accomplishment, in an interesting blurring of history and geography. Zé Luiz,
however, denies the claim, convinced that it was always a very deep canal, and made
a point of showing me the following map to prove it, claiming that the indent which
creates an inland passage at the bottom right of Ilha would suggest that the canal was
already there. The black arrow indicates where the canal used to be:
Map 5: Map from 1893 (Zé Luiz’s archival material - original source unknown).
59
The Coat of Arms of Ilha do Governador is divided into four, with the first
quarter showing clockwise a bow and arrow to symbolise the indigenous people who
were the original occupants of Ilha; the second quarter
showing the oldest church in Ilha, Matriz de Nossa
Senhora da Ajuda, recalling the foundation of the district
of Freguesia in 1710; the third quarter displays the
symbols of the Navy, (the anchor), and the Air Force,
(the wings), standing for the presence of the military in
Ilha; and finally the picture of Salvador Correia de Sá,
brother of Estácio de Sá, founder of Rio de Janeiro who
led the defeat of the Portuguese, allied with the
Figure 3: Coat of arms
of Ilha do Governador
(source:
guiailhadogovernador.c
om - Date Unknown)
indigenous people of Ilha, the Temiminós, against the
Tamoio, a confederation of indigenous people of the surrounding areas who were
allied with the French. Correia de Sá was twice general-governor of Rio de Janeiro
and owned half of Ilha where he established his sugar-cane plantations. The red
colour is the heraldic representation of the bloody conquest of Rio de Janeiro by the
Portuguese. According to the Portuguese historian Pedro Cardim, the notion of
reciprocity of the Old Portuguese Catholic Regime was grounded on Aristotle,
Agostinho de Hipona and Tomás de Aquino (Duarte 2011), and was part of an
exchange system between the authorities and the local population, not unlike that
seen between the fishermen and the Navy until the change of hands that marked its
entry in the environmental assemblage.
So, what were the origins of the reciprocal relations between the Navy and the
fishermen? The story goes like this: after the Revolta da Chibata, the government
thought it advisable to keep the fishermen under control and use them for national
defence. At the time of the Empire, fishermen had to pay taxes to the value of 10% of
their total yield, which was abolished once the colonies were founded from 1920
60
onwards. Unlike the clientelistic12 relations found throughout Brazil, in Z-10, we see
a specific form of favour exchange, which does not involve obligations in terms of
political votes.13 Nor is it a pure form of tutelage, often associated with populism,14 or
guardianship, since the Navy did expect the fishermen to keep an eye over national
waters. According to Chauí’s foundation model for the Brazilian state, the governor
represents God ‘distributing favours’ (Chauí 2000:51), so all social relations are
based on favour and patron-client transactions, and ‘all powers are perceived as forms
of privileges and favours which emanate directly from the will of the Crown’
(ibid:52, my translation). In the case of Z-10, the mediation between the State and the
people was done via the Navy representative, the prefect,15 before it changed hands
and the mangrove started to be supervised by the City Council/Department of
Environment. Below is a brief summary of some of the measures created to
strengthen the bonding16 between the State and the fishermen:
1846 Law 667 divided the fishermen in fishing districts, placing them under the
administrative responsibility of the Navy, bringing the compulsory registry
12
Ubiquitous in Brazilian history, clientelism, broadly understood as arrangements based on
reciprocal exchanges, has been the object of a great number of critical analyses by social scientists
in Brazil. For more on the topic see Victor Nunes Leal 1948; Octavio Ianni 1958; Maria Isaura
Pereira de Queiroz 1976; and André Botelho 2011, to mention a few.
13
The historian José Murilo de Carvalho differentiates between clientelism (based on clientpatron relationships with an exchange of jobs, services or goods for political support),
mandonismo, and coronelismo (based on negotiations between the government and the colonels).
All those models are rooted in the rural context, although clientelism has been transposed to the
urban context. As for the patrimonial relations, the State not only grants public positions in
exchange for political support, but also delegates part of the local administration.
14
A well-studied phenomenon in Brazilian Political Sciences, populism is a form of domination,
often of the charismatic type following Weber’s classification, which resorts to direct relations
without the institutional mediation and based on personal networks.
15
The former denomination for Navy officers who used to oversee problems in the colony.
16
As observed by the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta, patronage is characterised by ‘a personal
hierarchical orientation’ which permits ‘the unification of polar positions’ (DaMatta 1991:398).
The author was making this observation in a reference to the relations within Umbanda , which
here appear with a historical antecedent.
61
system for professional fishermen. Those fishing districts are the embryos of
the future colonies
1912 The first Brazilian Work Confederation is established. In the same year, the
administrative responsibility over fishing is transferred to the Ministry of
Agriculture, going back to the Navy within a few years
1920 After founding Z-1, Captain Frederico Villar left, from Rio de Janeiro, for the
North of Brazil aboard the vessel José Bonifácio, as part of a governmental
fishing and sanitation commission to create, over a period of four years, around
800 cooperative colonies, 1000 schools, with around 100,000 fishermen
enrolled
1923 The first Statute of Fishing Colonies was approved
1924 The National Confederation of Fishermen was created
1938 The Navy donated the area where the colony was founded to the fishermen
How did the nationalist initiative of founding the colony give way to an
environmental project? In the next section, I shall comment on some practices, and
policies that over the years helped changing aesthetic responses to mangroves, and
influenced the paradigmatic change Zé Luiz mentioned in the last comment.
Nature in itself & nature for itself
Ingold defines nature as being ontologically founded on the separation
between the subject that perceives the world and the object being perceived in such a
way that before acting in the world, the actor has to have conscience of his/her action
(2000). So what paved the way for a differentiated view of nature that in the late
twentieth century grants it rights under the environmental paradigm? As early as
1577, only a few decades after the arrival of the Portuguese in Brazil, the Portuguese
62
Crown laid out the first regulations concerning the use of mangroves, the wood of
which was used for fuel and for building precarious housing by local populations, as
well as for naval construction. The mangrove’s bark also provided the coveted tannin
which was extracted to dye fishing nets and cure leather. In 1664 the Crown
prohibited the concession of flooded areas, but when some religious orders started to
take them over, the people of Rio de Janeiro pleaded for the right to use them,
resulting in the Ultramarine Council conceding the right to the city residents.
By the eighteenth century, owners of factories of shoe soles for whom tannin
was an essential substance to cure leather for export denounced the felling of
mangrove vegetation. Because the bark of those trees was necessary for the
production of tannin, producers and authorities were concerned with its potential
demise, resulting in a warrant dated from 10 July 1760 by which anyone caught
cutting such vegetation, unless it was for a specific commercial use, could be arrested
and fined. In the period between 1760 and 1840, the coffee production in the
Guanabara bay region caused so much environmental ravage, including vast areas
comprising the mountains of Tijuca, Pedra Branca and Mendanha, and extending to
the regions of Itaboraí and Maricá on the other side of the bay, that in 1817 and 1818
the government established laws to protect the water sources for the population of
Rio which had doubled with the arrival of the Portuguese Royal family in 1808
(Amador 2013:93).
It is clear that while such policies aim at protecting natural landscapes, their
concern is not only anthropocentric, but also guided by an economic logic. At the
same time, a growing interest in natural landscapes, and in what came to be regarded
as the most prevailing cultural tradition in the West, the natural sciences (Haraway,
1989:1), apparently paved the way to a differentiated preservationist logic. From
1856 onwards, some small holdings on the mountain side of the city of Rio were
expropriated following plans to transform Tijuca forest into a National Park.17
17
Darwin arrived in Rio in 1832 and spent some time in a small house on Corcovado hillside
collecting specimens and writing on the rich biodiversity found therein, a fact undoubtedly
granted value to the area (see Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty's Ships
63
Besides the reforestation of the Tijuca mountain range to protect the water springs,
the Botanical gardens were created, resulting in a fresh interest in exotic species of
flora and fauna by foreign naturalists such as Martius, Spix and Luccock (Amador
2013:103). In 1818, Luccock described Ilha as an area of sandy soil, partly
marshland, partly forest, worthy of attention ‘especially due to the fact that it houses
extremely curious species of parasites’ (in Amador 2013:120, my translation).18
In 1906, the control of mangrove areas went to the Federal Government under
administration by the Navy (which holds control over all the national coastal areas up
to this day).Still following an economic and anthropocentric logic, seeing that the
water springs were protected to safeguard the water supply for the city, and the
Botanical Gardens were created for the delight of those who sought solace in nature
for example, in the first half of the twentieth century some legal provisions
recognised the value of mangroves for the fishing activity. In 1934, a Brazilian Forest
Code was drawn up, at the same time that legislation was passed to protect the
national heritage, including ‘natural monuments, sites and landscapes worthy of
protection given the attributes nature granted them’ (Urban 2001:31). In that same
year during the First National Congress of Fisheries (I Congresso Nacional da
Pesca), the first proposal for the preservation of mangrove was presented, which only
materialised with the Forest Code in 1965, during the military rule, when mangroves,
considered strategic for both the human and maritime population, were turned into
areas of permanent preservation. To ensure this and other environment-related rights,
the Law of Environmental Crimes (Lei dos Crimes Ambientais) was passed in 1981 to
‘preserve and restore the essential ecological processes while providing ecological
Adventure and Beagle between the years 1826 and 1836. Darwin, Charles. New York: AMS
Press, 1966 [1839].
18
The genealogy of the current Brazilian National System of Conservation Units, has as its
forefather, the National Park of Yellowstone in the USA in 1872, though the first National Park in
the country dates from 1937. In an analysis of the system, Drummond, Rocha & Ganem highlight
the fact that the criteria for selecting what area would become a National Park, changed over the
years, initially being based on the presence of Exuberant beauty and easy access for visitors, and
only after 1979, the criteria changed to focus instead on the areas displaying a variety of biomes
and ecosystems.
64
management of species and ecosystems’ (Política Nacional do Meio Ambiente – Lei
6938/81, my translation).
As for an actual environmental movement, the sixties saw new forms of
ecology, different from the mere protective model in place since the nineteenth
century, accommodating both a Marxist critique which focused on the way capitalist
societies saw nature as object of consumption or means of production, and a form of
militancy that blamed technological-industrial societies, whether capitalist or
socialist. National Park models such as Yellowstone in the USA also started to be
criticised for being disconnected from the man/nature relationship found in nonindustrialised contexts. Others claimed that environmentalism in the global north
neglected the problem of poverty and wealth distribution elsewhere (Redclift 1984;
Diegues 2002) by focusing on industrialization and consumption at home. The result
of those critiques was a new modality of conservation concerned with social justice
towards populations which depend on natural resources (Diegues 2002).
Important shifts took place in the years to follow. During the 1970s, at the
time of the UN Conference on the Human Environment when the country was still
under military rule, Brazil became one of the main receivers of polluting industries.
The Brundtland Commission19 called attention to the effects of modernization on the
environment and people’s lives, the solution to which would be the association
between environmentalism and economic development. In the context of Brazil, the
movement has been associated to the so-called ‘political opening’, after the end of the
military dictatorship. Eduardo Viola, a political scientist who studies
environmentalism in Brazil,20 identifies the positioning of the movement in relation to
three different political periods: from 1974 to 1981, during military rule, the
19
The World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), otherwise known as the
Brundtland Commission, was convened by the United Nations in 1983 acknowledging the
environmental issue as a global concern while establishing as a common interest of all nations the
pursuit of sustainable development. In 1987 the World Commission for the Environment and
Development issued a report titled ‘Our common future’, also known as the Brundtland Report,
blaming wasteful depletion of resources on development.
20
For a comprehensive understanding of the history of the ecological thinking and protected
areas, see Diegues 2002.
65
movement was apolitical while denouncing environmental depletion; in the second
period, from 1982 to 1985, recognised as being one of democratic transition, the
movement acquired political overtones, and after 1986, the ecopolitical phase, many
activists come to integrate the political party known as PV (the green party).21
Considered the first democratic constitution in Brazil, the 1988 Constitution paved
the way to a new era in the environmental movement, including the creation of the
APARU of Jequiá. Elmo’s comment reflects this shift:
I started to engage with social ecology and social justice in 88,
without even knowing that such terms existed. I think that I was
drawn to it because of my roots in the forest with my dad. In 89 I
went to Z-10 with a group of militants: people from the PCB [The
Brazilian Communist Party]. We were just kids who got together
with people with an environmental slant. There were dozens of tyres
dumped in the mangrove, we removed them all with Guga’s help [a
fisherman].One day I came across the report by FEEMA [State
Department of Environmental Engineering, formerly responsible for
the licensing and monitoring of potentially polluting activities] which
proposed a conservation plan for the mangrove of Jequiá which
involved the removal of the population. That was not my position: I
wanted its protection but without taking the population away.22
21
Viola also distinguishes two sets of cleavages in the world system in the nineties: forces whose
orientation and interests lay in the realm of the nation-state, which he called the nationalists, as
opposed to those whose orientations and interests were more global, referred to as globalists; and
forces who see environmentalism as a guiding principle, the environmentalists, as opposed to
those for whom the environment is not a concern, the non-environmentalists. Those two sets of
cleavages produce in turn four distinct forces: nationalists, globalists, environmental-nationalists,
and environmental-globalists (Viola 1992).
22
Traditionally, National Parks were based on the precept that humans are destroying agents of
nature, and the presence of human population in areas considered as having high ecological
capital is until now a polemic aspect with regard to environmental policies. However, as early as
1982, the idea of co-managing these areas together with the local population emerged as a way of
combining conservation with regional development according to the guidelines in the World
Conference on National Parks, in 1984 (Drummond, Rocha & Ganem 2010).
66
This third phase sees the entrance of multisectorial involvement (corporate
and industrial sectors) under newly created ‘social responsibility’ departments,
institutionalization of environmental groups and the concern with squaring the circle
of protecting the environment without hindering economic development. In 1992,
when the first Earth Summit was held, twenty years after the United Nations
Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm, a document was
elaborated called Agenda 21,23 which paved the way to policies such as the National
System of Conservation Units in Brazil, and the Secretary for Solidarity Economy, a
creation of the first government of President Lula. Environmentalism by then had
spread to other sectors encompassing other actors, who, after Rio-92, would converge
around the ideal of ‘sustainable development’24(Alonso 2002;Viola 2004). The
crossover between the private and public sectors was not lost locally:
I was involved with many projects. The one with Shell lasted 12 years,
and we raised 60 thousand mangrove saplings per year. Then there
was the photography exhibition sponsored by Esso25, and Siri na Lata
(Crab in a Tin), with Transnave.26 - Zé Luiz
It is clear from the above timeline of the environmental movement in Brazil
that attitudes towards protected areas were influenced by both local and global
processes, as already noted by a number of observers (see Vivanco 2006; Tsing 2005;
Escobar 2008; Orlove 1991), prompting a reaction from civil society, alongside legal
provisions which may or may not reflect public demand. We can also see from the
above trajectory, that economic and scientific interests, alongside aesthetic
perceptions, inform decisions on legislations concerning natural landscapes. In other
23
Agenda 21 is perhaps mostly known through their actions as part of the social responsibility
agenda of most big corporations in the country.
24
The concept of sustainability, now inseparable from environmentalism, is broadly understood
as ‘production that respects ecological capacities’ (Le Menager 2012:572).
25
An American oil company which was later replaced by Exxon.
26
Siri na Lata was a grassroots percussion project with children who would make their own
percussion instruments out of waste materials found in the mangrove. The project was sponsored
by Transnave, a Brazilian company that imports oil derivatives.
67
words, the analytical shift from nature to environment is towards a less taken for
granted approach towards natural landscapes.
If we take the idea of environmentalism, itself a human and institutional
construct, we can observe how it has become materialised in the landscape and how it
continues to create a large range of things, ideal and material, from jobs27 to
institutions, in an interplay between economic conditions and the realm of ideas, the
infrastructure and the superstructure, each affecting one another. Not surprisingly, the
environmental mentality has come to be understood in Brazil as a group of ideas and
representations, in some ways inseparable from the process of nation formation. In
conclusion, once nature was no longer taken for granted, the environment became a
key concept for the notion of the nation-state. In other words, endangered nature
gives rise to a conceptual environment, mirroring the environmentalist framing in the
current notes of the Brazilian currency Real. The following representations of animal
life have been selected: the arara-vermelha-grande, which though not endangered,
has disappeared from parts of Brazil; the mico leão dourado, endemic to Brazil; the
endangered onça-pintada; and the garoupa-verdadeira, a fish common in the southeastern coast, including Guanabara Bay:
27
Some residents (about 10 people in each program) have been benefited through the programs
Guardiões do Rio and Programa Mutirão, run by the City Council, to keep the area around the
mangrove free of rubbish. The wages are very small but a good complement for those who would
be otherwise unemployed, or who fish in their spare time.
68
Figure 4: Illustrations of wildlife on Brazilian bank notes.
69
From nature to environment: the ethical moment
Figure 5: Entrance to the colony’s main office.
Although populated by fishermen since the beginning of the twentieth
century, it was in 1920, just after the First World War, that the governmental
commission led by Leonardo Villar departed from Rio towards the north of the
country to promote sanitation and education28 whilst sealing an alliance with the
fishermen that could contribute towards coastal vigilance and national defence.
28
Approximately one thousand schools were founded, with around one hundred thousand
fishermen enrolled. The anthropologist Marco Antonio Mello (2004) suggests that the intention
behind the effort was that of making coincide the limits of the nation and the state with those of
society and while fighting illiteracy and diseases thought to be endemic amongst coastal
populations with precarious livelihoods, which explains why the vessel José Bonifácio was also
known as the ‘Cruiser of Goodness’.
70
Seeing that Rio de Janeiro was the capital of Brazil from 1763 up until 1960, it is not
surprising that the first fishing colony to be founded was situated on the strategically
located Guanabara Bay. For decades the nation served as a frame for imagining and
reproducing community life as seen from the chronology in the previous section.
Time’s arrow was pointing towards the future with the nation being constructed and
the environment being exploited. The 1950s was marked by the government’s
investment in its most promising progeny, the oil company Petrobrás, but the
fishermen still controlled their means of production, and nature was still taken for
granted.
When in 1975 the Iranian ship Tarik, then under contract by Petrobrás, spilt
six thousand tons of oil into the Guanabara Bay, the big fire that swept across the
mangrove and the devastating impact on the fishermen caused a massive outcry
which resulted in a series of studies about the impact of industrialization on the local
ecosystem. This big fire, alive in the memories of old residents, destroyed all the
vegetation of the mangrove:
The fire spread over everything and everybody thought that it was the end of
the mangrove. Then our warrior Zé Luiz started a war and plants started to
sprout back to life. For a while the smell was terrible, now it doesn’t smell
anymore, the mangrove is beautiful, herons are procreating, and there are
many socós29 around. – Toninho
The accident that prompted Zé Luiz to start a social movement to save the
mangrove could be read as the ‘ethical moment’ (Zigon 2008:165), which according
to Zigon, is brought about by an event that upsets the normal unfolding of everyday
life causing individuals ‘to reflect upon the appropriate ethical response’ (ibid). But
an event does not happen in a vacuum: Marshall Sahlins describes an event as ‘a
relation between a certain happening and a given symbolic system’ (Sahlins
1985:153), which depends on the structure for it to be salient and have significance.
Now, the mid seventies was a time when environmental awareness was growing in
29
A type of bird which is native to mangroves.
71
Brazil along with people’s antagonism towards the military regime. At that time, Zé
Luiz was working in the Navy’s Research Institute helping with the elaboration of
graphs of tides and winds, and being interested and already quite knowledgeable
about the mangrove ecosystem, he became the main protagonist in the struggle to
save Jequiá.
After almost two decades, the mangrove secured an environmental reserve
status and became an APARU through the municipal Decree 12250/93. In a place
where the question of belonging was directly associated with fishing activity, one can
now witness involvement with the environmental cause, be it through formal
employment as a member of the team that cleans the shores of the mangrove, through
association with the main grassroots NGO, or through activities of the Centre for
Environmental Education, as a form of self-identification. In 1994, a year after the
creation of the APARU, Zé Luiz founded his NGO Amigos do Manguesal, Friends of
the Mangrove. Since then, he has been involved in projects with sponsorship by
corporations and their social responsibility departments, such as Shell. His biggest
frustration and disappointment is the fact that he was never officially employed by the
City Council/Department of the Environment, even though all the expertise about the
mangrove comes from him, and the staff at CEA at the colony are constantly sending
reporters, university students, researchers, and school children to knock at his door
for information.
Besides the historical capital held by the colony constantly boasted by
residents, the status of protected area in 1993, conceded yet another form of capital to
Z-10, and in the last three decades, environmentalism acquired salience as the main
form of heritage held by the colony. More importantly, it was after the mangrove
entered the environmental assemblage that the authority went from the Navy to the
City Council/Department of the Environment, supposedly a more democratic form of
domination since it functions under the aegis of the 1988 Constitution, the first
democratic constitution in Brazil. If in the past people resorted to the historical capital
as the first fishing colony in the national project, now with fishing ‘only in the name’,
they seek other forms of capital. That does not mean that the nation lost ground in
72
relation to environmentalism, but rather that the state, today standing as a democratic
form of government, by institutionalizing environmentalism, only becomes visible at
Z-10 through environmental governance. The material hurdles this environmental
scenario presents add to the assemblage another number of things and concepts such
as policies, politicians, legislations, institutions, notions of environmental justice.
While the process of environmental degradation at the colony was already
underway due to demographic pressure and pollution caused by oil spills and sewage,
there is a unanimous view that after that change of hands degradation worsened.
Apart from the unbridled influx of outsiders and subsequent real estate speculation,
environmental policies that were implemented there bore very little fruit and now
appear devoid of meaning and of political will. The denomination of APARU could
have granted the community capital with reasonable exchange value, but the fact that
the decree was never turned into law left the mangrove in a legislative limbo which
made it unattractive for potential stakeholders. The most crucial modification is that
which took place in the sea, the main means of production of the fishermen, with
pollution reaching proportions believed to be irreversible. Today, the fishermen are
due a good amount of compensation for loss of productivity,30 but that comes in
modest form of help such as the sponsoring of handicraft workshops at the CEA
(Centre for Environmental Education). There is a clear sense that the city council is
not committed to what it promised, and many people feel the loss of the system where
favour exchanges guaranteed jobs in the Navy, even if in the position of cleaners or
janitors, and there was perceived guardianship and protection from the Navy, in other
words, people miss the authority of the military rule and the order that resulted from
it.
Against this background, the following affirmation I heard on several
occasions regarding the city council management of the mangrove, is illuminating:
‘They are not looking after the child’. The ‘child’ may refer to the colony or the
30
Major national and multinational companies such as Petrobrás and Shell were deemed liable,
having to take legally binding actions to remedy the socio-economic impact they caused on the
environment.
73
mangrove, depending on who is voicing the comment. Either way, it presupposes a
parent-child relationship whereby the State, be it in the form of the Navy, or of the
Department of Environment, is the parent figure, and the place, the colony or the
mangrove, an entity not strong enough to look after itself. That comment illustrates
how the passage is perceived as a changing of hands.
But what other outcomes has the passage from nature to environment brought
about? How can we interpret affects and praxis surrounding the mangrove through a
vernacular understanding? I will proceed by analysing two ceremonies that take place
at Z-10 to flesh out ways through which the mangrove is enacted through the
symbolic language of those annual festivities.
The lonesome warrior: myth, history, and simulating the fisherman
People have to learn not to destroy the heritage that gave identity to this place.
Zé Luiz, referring to the mangrove.
Drawing on its reputation as the first official fishing colony in the country, Z10 displays some unique rituals such as the annual Catholic procession on the day of
St. Peter, patron saint of the fishermen,
and the anniversary of the colony’s
foundation with the presence of the Navy
band. I call them rituals due to the solemn
nature of their performances, and to the
particular pattern which follows a regular
order that persists over the years. Both
rituals are grounded on the fishing
Figure 6: The raising of the flags.
tradition of the colony, and are performed
outdoors against the backdrop of the mangrove, but whereas St. Peter’s procession
74
has been performed for decades, the anniversary celebration was started by Zé Luiz in
1999, five years after the creation of the APARU, with the purpose, in his words, of
‘not letting the colony’s identity die’. After making history by casting the mangrove
as the main protagonist of the local environmental movement, Zé Luiz has
endeavoured to keep the fishing heritage alive by raising the Brazilian and the
colony’s flag on the anniversary of the colony’s foundation on November 20th, and
whenever a fisherman dies, and by shooting fireworks during St. Peter’s procession.
In other words, the passage from nature to environment meant that the fishing
tradition and the mangrove had to be performed as heritage, in order to survive.
Given all the connections between nature and nation elaborated throughout
this chapter it is not surprising that this pursuit goes hand in hand with Zé Luiz’s
struggle to preserve the mangrove which, as evident in his opening statement in this
section, he sees as heritage, ‘patrimônio’. Many in the community refer to Zé Luiz as
the official guardian of the colony’s memory,31 and years ago, he retrieved from the
trash old records of the colony’s history, such as the document donating the land to
the fishermen (in the appendix), and dozens of photographs. The importance of
writing down selected traditions to legitimise the nation-state and its continuous
territory was noted by a number of authors (Anderson 1983; Cosgrove 2008; Ramos
1998; Botelho 2002; Hobsbawn 1983) and certainly explains why St. Peter’s
procession has so much symbolic value for residents in Z-10. But the spark triggered
by the relation between event and structure (Sahlins 1985), in other words, the fire
that affected the order in the colony, meant that new ways of valuing the mangrove
had to be assigned, including the performance of the colony’s foundation.
But how do people make sense of those ceremonies? And how is the
mangrove enacted in those events? As with all ‘invented traditions’32 (Hobsbawn
31
Besides my own research back in 2006, four Master’s dissertations (two in the area of Social
History, one of Sociology, and one of Environmental Education) were written on the theme of
memory alone in that particular location, in the past six years.
32
For Hobsbawn, invented traditions are ‘a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or
tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and
norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past ‘(1983).
75
1983), agents are vital to keep memories alive and many others in the colony dedicate
a great deal of their time to organising St. Peter’s procession. Saint Peter is the saint
that has the key to the sky and consequently to weather conditions, so important in
the fishing activity, hence the sale on procession day of keys made of wax. The static
image of St. Peter on his boat stands for the cosmology that rules the fishing activity
and the colony’s fishing past, along with respective relations of kinship and
reciprocity. Michael Herzfeld refers to such ‘collective representation of an Edenic
order’ as ‘structural nostalgia’ (Herzfeld 1990:305), a concept that will help us in the
next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that St. Peter stands for the mythical aspect of
the fishing activity, not least for the role he plays in the Catholic pantheon as one of
the twelve apostles, himself a fisherman.
The procession happens over two days, on the first, people follow the
procession within the limits of the colony, on the second day, the procession crosses
the bridge and goes round the next district before heading back over the bridge. Most
of the followers are women, but the boat with St. Peter is always carried by
fishermen. On both days, the colony grounds are the central arena for the festivities,
with the mangrove as the borderline containing the imagined community.
76
Figure 7: From the 1950s, this photograph of St Peter's Procession shows followers coming out of Z10 by the exit of the right-hand corner. The gate in the distance is the entry to the Navy grounds. The
tide is high as processers cross the bridge onto the mainland of Ilha. Back then, the procession would
attract people from all over Ilha (from Zé Luiz’s photo collection).
Figure 8: From 2012, the photo on the left shows the fishermen carrying St. Peter on his boat, on the
procession round the colony. The photograph in the middle shows followers placing their 'key to the
sky' on St. Peter's boat, and the image on the right shows Zé Luiz, barefoot, setting the fireworks for
the procession that returns to the colony over the bridge.
77
Judging from the photographs and from people’s accounts, little has changed
in the way the procession is conducted, even if in the past the procession would
attract much larger numbers. However, the new status of APARU has meant that Z10 gained visibility, which in turn renewed the colony’s prestige as a place for
drinking and socialising, with St. Peter’s festivities lasting as long as a month
nowadays, to the benefit of commercial outlets, from small hotdog trolleys, to the
more formal bars of the colony.
As for the anniversary, after the mangrove entered the environmental
assemblage the colony’s foundation on the mangrove of Jequiá had to be performed
as heritage, and as a reminder of those socio-political relations that ceased to exist
under environmental governance, namely, an authoritarian and centralised form of
rule. The first anniversary I spent at Z-10 was in 2006, five years before my
fieldwork. I had been invited to the event by Zé Luiz, who was preparing a
celebration in the old headquarters of the colony. The Navy band arrived punctually
at 10 am and started playing a hymn followed by a speech by a Navy representative
before the colony's flag and the Brazilian one were raised. The ceremony felt
awkwardly formal for such an early hour and given that the ritual was taking place
next to the football pitch. Curious to find out how much of a common fishing identity
there was amongst, if any at all, considering most residents were now wage-labourers,
I asked Zé Luiz’s permission to show a couple of films during the party that was
going to happen after the ceremony inside the colony’s headquarters.
I chose two films with the fishing theme: Barravento (1962) by Glauber
Rocha, a Brazilian director from the 1960s, and La Terra Trema (1948), an Italian
film by Luchino Visconti. I was not expecting that the films would be watched,
seeing that they were not action-packed and lacked the gloss of contemporary
filmmaking, and was contented with the idea of leaving the images to run in the
background. Thus, I was very surprised when I spotted a number of children
enthralled by the black and white scenes in the film by Luchino Visconti, and
pointing to the fishermen on the screen pulling their nets. This was for me a clear
example of a collective affect, in the Deleuzian sense, experienced in the fishing
78
activity and lives of those children, of which the mangrove is part. While nowadays
there are very few fishermen in a population of almost five thousand, all the children
I talked to had at least one member in the family still fishing, if not for a living for
pleasure on weekends.
In sum, the performance of the ‘fishing identity’, as Zé Luiz puts it, is socially
effective. By foregrounding the event that marked the foundation of the colony, Zé
Luiz is mirroring the national project that spawned the colony, enacting the fishing
past, and keeping the connection between the Navy and the fishing colony by the
mangrove, between nation and nature. As observed by Roger Keesing, in the context
of the Malaitans in Papua New Guinea, the effort of ‘strengthening out’ custom in a
colonial context emerges as a counter-structure that nonetheless mimics the dominant
paradigm, in order to make acts of resistance and local demands assume legitimation.
By writing down custom, just like the colonial powers did with law, the Malaitans
created culture, albeit from selected customs: ‘Prior to colonial rule, Malaitans had
ancestors and their rule: but they did not –could not - have kastom’ (Keesing,
1994:45). Just as resistance to colonialism mirrors the colonial structure, the attempts
to keep the colony’s autonomy and existence as a fishing colony, also mirror the
Navy’s instruments, hence the flags.
This evident commitment towards preserving a memory related to the fishing
activity seems to yield results in the sense of granting a cohesive element to the
community. Those ceremonies are inseparable from a sense of place, and perhaps
more importantly, they are instances when culture is acted out in conversation with
nature. In sum, the rites performed annually during the colony’s anniversary and for
St. Peter’s celebrations, reminding residents of its fishing history, provide a reminder
of a state of order that is perceived as no longer being there. Here, poetics and politics
act as bookends that hold together the enormous arc of understandings, affects and
praxis related to fishing and nature in the context of Z-10.
79
Conclusion
In drawing parallels between the nationalist initiative, which informed the
colony’s foundation, and the environmentalist one, in place at the time of the
establishment of the APARU, I laid out the temporal framework for my analytical
separation between nature and environment and between the ethical orientations
underpinning those instances. At the local level, nationalism and environmentalism
are frames through which people can locate themselves, create meaning and access
opportunities and resources. Similarly to the 1920s commission, the broader
environmental initiative is permeated by discourses of citizenship and education, the
focus of chapter 6, to offer ‘guidance’ to citizens that lack ‘consciousness’,
reminiscent of the techniques of bio-politics Foucault brought attention to (1979), and
in line with the logic of the tutelage system described above. Such logic has deep
historic roots in Brazil predicated on a transcendental power by authorities to
orientate the autochthonous population, seen as lacking organization, autonomy and
leadership.33
I have also elucidated how much the two initiatives differ, since the
disjuncture between them is of significance to understand the implications and
possibilities of the relationship between people and a mangrove in the Anthropocene.
The question of aesthetics appears as a key stage in the move from nature to
environment, the roots of which are in instances like the creation of the Yelowstone
National Park. Many of the changes that mark the passage from nature to
environment are part of the democratic era in Brazil, and were outcomes of the first
Earth Summit in Rio in 92, such as the mainstreaming of the sustainability concept,
or the concept of co-management in preserved areas. However, few of the
propositions which originated then, were put into practice, as seen in ‘The Lonesome
Warrior’ section of this chapter. It has been observed that one of the reasons
development projects fail is because of the way local participation is absent from
33
A logic that totally ignores all the instances when indigenous people took the forefront in
resistance movements such as the Tamoios Confederation in the sixteenth century.
80
them (Ferguson and Gupta 2002). In other words, a new paradigm is set forth, but
little attention is given to how people adjust to new policies, to whether they feel
those policies are imposed on them, or to how local knowledge may contribute
towards new policies.
As for the ethical moment itself, contingency appears here as a function of
structure, since the fire was a direct result of the practices that were by then part of
the economic infra-structure in the area. That said, accidents, as highlighted by the
anthropologist Laura Bear (2014), often bring about new configurations of rights and
obligations. In the case here narrated, it meant that Petrobrás was indebted to the
fishermen, and, in an ideal world, would be obliged to compensate them for the event
that irrevocably changed their means of production. The environmental status that
came some years later also implied a new set of obligations for residents in the
community, and institutional bodies, but this time, towards the mangrove.
The livelihoods of the fishermen and of the mangrove are always entangled,
as if they were parts of a whole with semi-autonomous existences. The two annual
celebrations that stand for the founding myths of the colony are an example of that,
and even though the mangrove does not appear in the annual ceremonies in an
explicit manner, it is the necessary backdrop for those practices, and the condition of
possibility for the tradition those rituals symbolise since it was by land filling the
mangrove that the colony developed as a community. Thus, for Zé Luiz the mangrove
is both nature and culture, it encompasses history and a bio-system, and those rituals
enact an amalgam of the two, which in his words is heritage. We shall see as this
narrative unfolds that he is not alone in that reasoning. Now, while the overlap
between the project of a moral community and that of green values, as seen in many
cases around the globe, can be both reactionary and progressive (Harvey 1996:172),34
that does not invalidate the moral high ground claimed by environmentalism, seeing
34
The claim that the Nazis were ‘the first radical environmentalist in charge of a state’ (Bramwell
1989 and Ferry 1995 in Harvey 1996:171) is a much commented one, often used by actors with an
invested interest in undermining the environmental project.
81
that environmental ethics can hardly do without a moral community on which to
anchor. However, those ethics may not respond to the same set of values.
In a critique of Anderson regarding the specifically located meta-framework
underpinning national imagined communities, Elizabeth Povinelli notes that people
have diverse tenses, or space-time references, of nationalism (2011:37). In the
following chapters, the study will reveal the changes brought about by the tense of
environmentalism, and the creation of the APARU. The different practices related to
nature consciously environmental or otherwise, make up the political mosaic that
encompasses both the micro and the macro levels of environmentalism. The next
chapter will focus on how the particular landscape around the colony was sculpted
and transformed, from the perception of those who inhabit it, and on the
heterogeneity of histories and representations of the mangrove.
82
Chapter 2 – Paranapuã
The storytelling that thrives for a long time in the milieu of work – the rural, the
maritime and the urban- is itself an artisan form of communication, as it were, it
does not aim to convey the pure essence of the thing, like information or a report.
It sinks the thing into the life of the storyteller, in order to ring it out of him
again. Thus traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of
the potter cling to the clay vessel.
Walter Benjamin (1970:91-92)
Figure 9: Road to Jequiá, circa 1920 (from Zé Luiz's collection - source unknown).
83
Paranapuã, a combination of the terms paranã, meaning sea, and apuã,
meaning hill, was the name given to Ilha, or Governor’s Island, where the colony is
located by the Temiminós, its indigenous inhabitants in the 1500s. Still under
Naturalisms, the first part of this thesis, this chapter focuses on people’s readings of
history, and the local versions of how the mangrove was sculpted over time.
The first chapter focused on how nature was constructed conceptually,
through representations and practices, as a national by-product. It also looked at how
the mangrove ceased to be taken for granted and gained the status of heritage. This
chapter addresses more directly the mangrove as a cultural artefact by exploring
distinct interpretations of the historical-economic changes around the colony. It also
suggests that the dualist view of nature/culture which characterised the naturalist
paradigm, and underpinned the human intervention of the surrounding geographical
landscape, was reinforced by the entry of the mangrove in the environmental
assemblage. While the first chapter contextualises the ‘ethical moment’ (Zigon
2008:165) of the oil spill that resulted in the mangrove gaining the status of
‘protected area’ under the auspices of the city council, this chapter revolves around
the unexpected outcome of that achievement, namely, the fact that the mangrove
became marginal in people’s lives.
This chapter situates the colony within a brief social history of Ilha through
life stories of residents at Z-10, starting with a narrative about its indigenous
population, which unravels the transformations in the island: its first waves of
migration, initial economic trajectory, developmental stages such as the construction
of bridges, and finally its environmental depletion through intensive development and
demographic expansion which directly affected the mangrove of Jequiá. The
inclusion of this history illustrates a) how Ilha’s social landscape consists of a process
of eviction of the indigenous population followed by migratory waves; b) how
development and changes in landscape have been going on since 1567; and c) how
people’s memories of this continuous change have an impact on their ethical
sensibilities towards the mangrove.
84
Even the older inhabitants of Z-10 are very recent incomers, whose families
came for reasons almost always related to the fishing activity. People’s life
trajectories and historical awareness have shaped their perceptions of the mangrove.
With the increasing pollution of its waters, ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove
change. Through people’s memories the mangrove is enacted as nature, against the
backdrop of how it is perceived now: a site of pollution; a potential opportunity for
jobs; or an orphan child. In sum, while the mangrove distanced itself from people’s
daily lives, it became increasingly alive in their memories as a different entity. If in
people’s memories mangrove and colony were one and the same thing, now, with
more and more houses being built on drained areas, the colony is about housing.
Thus, colony and mangrove have been duly separated, as the mangrove became
institutionalized, and a hybrid of seawater, sewage and mud.
As with all ethnographies, this is a story about a place, yet the place is more
than just the background for people’s interactions. Often place is the most important
reference in people’s lives, and place is constitutive of who they are, associated with
turning points in people’s trajectories. But this narrative is also about time, both in
terms of form, as a chronology of changes; and content, as it is always looking back,
referring to past histories, to people’s nostalgic memories, and to the wear and tear,
and blessings, of development. In order to access the mangrove as a cultural artefact
that invites distinct ethical responses produced over time, this ethnography resorts to
life-stories, photo-elicitation and map-making. To familiarise the reader with the
social-economic landscape of Z-10, life stories of older residents weave the narrative
to unveil people’s sensibilities towards the physical environment, both natural and
man-made, and their role in its making. The use of maps and photographs helps
thread the narrative encompassing time in its depiction of space, and allowing for a
multiplicity of interpretations, as in the case of children.
Seeing time and space as intrinsically connected, the first section in this
chapter will look at the historical-geographical changes to Ilha do Governador. All
those narrating stories are part of the environmental assemblage, either as actors who
consciously participate in it, or as agents who transform the landscape, tell stories,
85
both mythical and historical, and produce meaning about the mangrove. It then goes
on to explore notions of nostalgia and of the chronotope,1 to shed light on how people
perceive the mangrove under two different forms of the state control over Z-10: the
Navy and the Municipal Department of Environment. Some of the voices reveal why
the mangrove became an APARU, and what other socio-political transformations it
reflected. It will finally focus on the contemporary scenario, after the mangrove
entered the environmental assemblage, and resulting changes, to include perceptions
of the mangrove by younger generations, and the issue of house ownership. Drawing
on Jarret Zigon’s distinction between morality and ethics (2008), this chapter
highlights the role of a ‘moral mangrove’ made salient in the embodied dispositions
of everyday life of fishing families, and in perceptions of younger generations who
boast about the protective border the mangrove provides.
Historical imagination & the chronotope
How can the council expect the children to love the mangrove if they don’t know
its history?
Zé Luiz
History inevitably came up when I prompted people to talk about the
mangrove, as though place and time formed one indivisible whole. If according to
Sahlins, culture is ‘the organization of the current situation in the terms of a past’
(Sahlins 1985:155), people’s perception of the mangrove today, including their
ethical sensibilities towards it, was constantly being articulated in historical terms,
1
The definition of chronotope, a concept concocted by Mikhail Bakhtin, refers to a setting
considered as a spatio-temporal whole. The idyllic chronotope, for example, is described as ‘an
organic fastening-down, a grafting of life and its events to a place, to a familiar territory with all
its nooks and crannies, its familiar mountains, valleys, fields, rivers and forests, and one’s own
home’(Bakhtin 1981:225).
86
surfacing in unexpected ways, as in Zé Luiz’s remarks on the importance of Z-10 as a
stage for historical events, and archaeological findings.2 Áureo, a history teacher,
professional storyteller in Ilha, and regular visitor to Z-10, said a community of
Temiminós, called Corouque, or Kurú-kié (Ipanema 1991; Léry 1578) supposedly
lived in the area where Z-10 is located before the arrival of the Portuguese. When
people started to fill parts of the mangrove with soil in the 1970s to allow for house
expansion, something in the region of 80 funerary urns of indigenous origin were
found and thrown away, lest the authorities should find out about it and stop people
constructing on what could be deemed national heritage area.
Ribamar represents the Navy nowadays in the colony on occasions when the
city council proposes meetings to discuss sanitation policies, the APARU, or when
there are ceremonies such as the Anniversary of the Colony’s foundation. Back in the
1980s when the colony was still under the Navy’s tutelage, he was a prefect3 for Z10. I asked him why he was interested in the mangrove:
Have you ever been to a place where you thought ‘I know this place’? It’s
because in past lives you went there. When I was a kid, I used to go to a
place, and my friends and I would run along the river and collect palm nuts
(piaba), and we would swim in the river, and walk through the thicket.
Everything we do is related to things that you came across in your life, which
make you do something in the future totally related to the past. It’s amazing;
it’s as if you were transported to that place.
Here the concept of chronotope (Bakhtin 1981), creating a time-space unit, is
useful to understand how time and place were interchangeable with each other. The
stars in the sky represent the chronotope par excellence: we perceive the
configuration of stars existing now; but in actual fact those stars are no longer there.
2
He refers to the presence of sambaquis, which consist of mounds of shells left by the indigenous
people who inhabited the area, making Z-10 an unofficial archaeological site.
3
The former denomination for Navy officers who oversaw problems in the colony.
87
Doreen Massey suggests that globalization reinforces the primacy of time over space,
of history over geography, reifying a single narrative proposition, and undermining
multiplicities (Massey 2005). To resist this trend she suggests the suspension of the
distinction between time and space, as found in old maps of the sixteenth century,
when such representations told stories creating a time-space unit, not unlike a
chronotope. Our senses also often function like chronotopes, a smell may call into
play a moment of the past which will form a unit of affect, in Deleuze and Guattari’s
(1987) sense as a sentiment embedded in the bodily experience, with the place now.
Thus, often when I asked someone to explain why the mangrove was important to
them, they would reply with the initial ‘When I was a kid…’, because the mangrove,
for those who live by it, does not stand outside personal life stories, nor outside
history for that matter.
Thus, upon seeing an old picture of St. Peter’s procession, people would start
telling me of how they saved all year round to buy new shoes and clothes for the day.
Then, the conversation would invariably drift away from the context of the image to
other people or events associated to that place, and the same person would recall the
high tide invading certain areas which are now safely concreted. Thus, a photograph
of St. Peter’s procession could evoke distinct moments of his or her life, such as the
high tide that spoiled another set of new shoes after the ball in the colony’s
headquarters. In other words, the photo elicitation sessions conveyed the centrality of
action in people’s relationship with a past mangrove, and the tides associated with it,
certainly no longer apparent in current daily life. The photographs would also
elucidate the transformations in the landscape, such as bridges, gates and fences, as in
the common description of the separation between the colony and the Navy, from a
see-through fence to a wall as seen I the following photographs:
88
Figure 10: Those two pictures are of almost the same spot on Américo Goulart street. The one at the
top is from 2011, and the one at the bottom (Zé Luiz’s archive) is from circa 1950s showing a fence
between the colony and the Navy grounds.
I came across many good storytellers at Z-10, who connected place and time,
inspired by past events that were inseparable of their surrounding landscape. One of
those gifted weaver of narratives was Áureo who, according to Zé Luiz, is the most
knowledgeable person on the local history of the island where Z-10 is situated. The
89
following is a summary of the story he frequently tells children from Ilha who come
to his story-telling workshops at the local library in the district of Cacuia:
When the Portuguese first arrived in
Ilha, it was populated by the
indigenous ethnic group of
Temiminós, also dubbed Maracajás,
meaning wild cats, for their supposed
treacherous nature. The Tupinambás
who inhabited the mainland of Rio
used to have a peaceful relationship
with the Temiminós, but on one
occasion in the early 1500s, the
Tupinambás got drunk on Tauí (a
beverage made with manioc) and
attacked a group of Temiminós in Ilha,
Map 6: Sixteenth Century - 1555 França
Antártica (public domain)
who escaped to Espirito Santo further
north. There, the latter allied themselves with the Portuguese and returned with a
vengeance. On finding out that the Portuguese were coming to Guanabara Bay, and
since they had already witnessed the destruction of the French Fortress Pay Colas in
1960 by Mem de Sá,4 the Tupinambás formed the confederation of the Tamoios, a
term that meant ‘the original ones’, along with a number of tribes such as the
Aimorés and the Goitacases, and started to build small fortresses in various points
around Guanabara Bay.5 A group of Goitacases found out that the Temiminós, led
by Araribóia, were going to strike against the Tamoios. Araribóia was considered a
4
Estácio de Sá, nephew of the governor Mem de Sá came from Lisbon with two armed galleons in
1563 after much insistence from the latter and the Jesuits Nobrega and Anchieta. Once a few
vessels arrived in Bahia, Estácio de Sá headed south, first to Espírito Santo, where he managed to
secure a few more canoes loaded with Temiminós led by Araribóia. A letter dated from 9th July
1565 by Padre Anchieta is considered by some as the baptism certificate of Rio de Janeiro.
5
The occupation of Rio de Janeiro was crucial to the Portuguese, by dominating the Guanabara
Bay they were protecting it from both the Tamoios and the French.
90
new Tibiriça, the Tupinambá that had betrayed his own people a few years before.
Some would claim that the War of the Tamoios was the first popular uprising in the
newly found land of Brazil, a revolt against slavery, in defence of land and of the
rights of men. Araribóia later received a Portuguese name, Martim Afonso, as
gratitude for his help in the Portuguese victory over the Guanabara Bay. He wore
European clothes, befriended the Jesuits and the general governor, but to his
distress, he was told to leave Paranapuã, and was given land in Niterói.6 The
governor wanted Ilha for himself now, hence its name ever since, Governor’s Island’.
As it happened, after
being expelled from Ilha,
Araribóia was given one of the
most illustrious titles at that time,
a Knight in the Military Order of
Christ (Cavaleiro da Ordem de
Cristo), had a wedding full of
pomp (Celestino de Almeida,
2003), and was left in charge of
the other side of the Bay in
Niteroi, then called São Lorenço,
where he remained as HeadCaptain, at the request of Mem de
Sá (Ipanema 1991, Quintiliano,
Map 7: The route followed by the Temiminós after
being evicted from Ilha 500 years ago is in red, and
the routes followed by the first fishing families are
marked in black.
1965). This was a fruitful political
association for the Portuguese since it succeeded in forcing the French out of
6
The village of São Lourenço, currently Niterói, was founded with the objective of providing
military defence of the strategic Guanabara Bay by the indigenous population that moved there
with Araribóia.
91
Guanabara Bay, and saved at least some Temiminós from being wiped out as other
indigenous peoples had been.
At the time of the Temiminós the agriculture consisted of manioc and corn,
complemented by fishing and hunting in its dense vegetation that covered the island,
but after the Governor settled in Ilha and started his sugar plantation, the landscape
started to change with exotic species being introduced, such as the sugar cane, and
deforestation taking place with subsequent demise of its fauna over the following
years. These local legends inform people’s understanding of the mangrove. In the
vast pantheon of Umbanda entities, one of them actually carries the name of the
infamous ( for those who despise his siding with the Portuguese) Araribóia, bridging
together the historical and the mythological characters in the almost five hundred
years that separate them. The main characteristics associated with this entity are his
pride and his knowledge as a hunter.
Given that all the terreiros of Umbanda in
the history of Z-10 were started by members of
fishing families, and that most fishermen originally
came from the municipality of Niterói or its
surrounding areas, it is not surprising that
Arariboia, a landmark in contemporary Niterói7
would be in people’s imaginary. Umbanda
cosmogony is constantly being informed by place
and history, and references to both surface in
unexpected ways:
The part of the mangrove where the Navy
Figure 11: Life-size statue of
Arariboia (source Cafe
Historia, Date Unknown).
is located was a cemetery, and I believe
that the spiritual origins of Z-10 come from that place. My parents used to
7
Arariboia is presented as tall, proud and semi-naked in this statue that stands near to where the
biggest fish outlet in the region, St. Peters’s market, a common destiny for fishermen at Z-10 to
sell their wares. The Fishermen Federation at the state level, where fishermen go to solve
problems related to documentation, is also located there.
92
say that one could hear the noise of chains inside the Navy grounds. Here
was also a centre of war, so there are many wandering spirits that find in this
place the means of transportation to the other side. –Lucimar, a spiritual
medium at the Umbanda centre in the colony.
The cemetery mentioned by Lucimar was supposedly built for the slaves of
the once prosperous farm of São Sebastião, closed after the plague that wiped out its
labour force, and which was subsequently bought by the Navy already mentioned in
chapter 1. As another instance of chronotope, the spiritual entities that inhabited the
environments extend the time-space unit to today by featuring as symbolic fragments
in song lyrics, in bodily gestures during spirit possession, in the way offerings are laid
out, and in the interpretation of the entities as beings:
The characteristic of Omulu8 is the cemetery and the beach, because the
biggest cemetery in the world is the sea. The sea receives everything: the
ships, the dirt, and the people who drowned. - Toninho
And in fact, the current webpage of the State Department of the Environment
supports Toninho’s view of the sea as a cemetery when it announces that one of the
priority items in its agenda, as part of a massive governmental investment, is to clean
ship carcasses from the bottom of Guanabara Bay9 by 2016, the year Rio will hold the
Olympics. But if the overall question this thesis hopes to answer is how people’s
ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove changed as it entered the environmental
assemblage, one has to attend to what sensibilities towards the mangrove were there
in the first place. Having had a glimpse of how historical-geographical changes have
penetrated people’s imagination, I shall now attend to how they are reproduced
through people’s memories.
8
An orixá of African origin which is related to Toquinho, through the entity Exu (see Chapter 4
for more on the associations).
9
See webpage for the State Department of Environment of Rio de Janeiro (2012).
93
Nostalgia
Those who were raised at Z-10 often refer to the past with nostalgia, as a time
when the houses and fences were made of wood, everyone was related, the waters
were clean and full of shellfish, St. Peter’s Procession had virgins carrying the patron
saint, doors could be left open, and most houses had some land for growing
vegetables. Such stories haunt those who come to Z-10, already drawn to a certain
aura of a place lost in time. Besides, nostalgic visions unveil past local vocabularies,
and embodied dispositions around the mangrove. The marks of the ‘structural
nostalgia’ as posed by Herzfeld, ‘social balance, reciprocity, moral parity, observance
of self-enforcing rules’ (1990:307) are all there. According to Rabinow, the residual
naturalism that inhabits our times would prevent us from changing our perceptions
ontologically (2008:249), a limitation that could nurture perceptions such as nostalgia
towards a more natural world.
Svetlana Boym points out that if four centuries ago nostalgia was seen as a
passing ailment, which could be remedied with opium, leeches or a trip to the Swiss
Alps, by the twentieth first century, it came to be seen as incurable. The futuristic
utopia of the twentieth century was replaced by a nostalgia contaminated with utopian
feelings (Boym 2001) and longing for nostos10 came to feature in a variety of works
about the environment (Pálsson 1996; Gupta & Ferguson 1992; Jameson 1991;
Robbins 1998). Jeremy Davies observed that the sustainability paradigm transformed
‘nostalgia from a life-threatening illness into a global ethical programme’ (Davies
2010:267) turning the environmental crisis into the cultural malaise of the twentyfirst century. However, rather than being influenced by the environmental paradigm
per se, people’s ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove mirror the ways in which
the mangrove entered different regimes of value, including, but by no means
restricted to, those contained in the environmental assemblage.
10
Nostos is the Greek word for homecoming, a theme addressed by Homer in the epic Odyssey.
94
‘Saudade,’ the Brazilian translation of ‘longing’ which only allows a romantic
looking back at something that appears irretrievable, was often present in the
accounts by the older residents at Z-10 where nostalgia towards a clean mangrove full
of fish is directly related to the fact that the fishing activity it once provided is no
longer feasible. It was the water-logged area next to the Jequiá Canal that housed the
first fishermen that formed Colony Z-1, which later, after some administrative
changes, became Colonia Z-10. Walkyria, the granddaughter of a fisherman that gave
the name to one of the streets at Z-10, rua Hipólito Nascimento, was born in 1932 in
the colony:
My grandfather was from Zumbi, my mother came from Cabo Frio, and
many, many people here came from Piratininga. My father was a fisherman,
and fished shrimps with a fishing net, but later he went to work for Shell. The
fisherman suffered with the abundance of shrimps, there was too much, so
they had to sell it cheap. There was nothing here. Luiz Victorino, Alexandre
Rosa and Hipólito Nascimento, my grandfather, were the first fishermen to
settle here and form families. They built the first houses. I miss my colony.
There used to be only three streets. My grandfather came here when the
Navy conceded the land. The streets here have names of residents. Our way
of life and work was collecting shellfish; we survived and were happy that
way. The river had crystal clear water and was full of little fish and crabs.
Our mum would boil salted water in a pan so it would be ready for us to put
the crabs in as we arrived back from the mangrove. By the front door there
were three size-moulds11 for fishing nets: one for my sister and me, one for
my mum, and one for my dad. We used to collect shellfish and sell fishing
nets, with the money, my mum would buy what we needed. When the tide
was high, we would swim, there wasn’t all this mud. We would get crabs
when it rained and they would come out of their holes and we would get
them with a fork-like hook, the bucket would be full to the brim with
11
Those were the templates for the different sized nets.
95
shrimps. The well was near the Base.12 Half of our garden was a vegetable
patch, and in the middle of it there was another well, the water from it was
rather salty, but good enough to water the plants. There was no sewage
system, but each person had his own pit. The water was not polluted. I used
to love it before, the Navy didn’t let people build brick houses, now
everybody can do what they like, if you have a plot of land of three feet, you
will sell it and ask to keep the upstairs. Before, if you fell ill, people helped
you, this used to be a community. Everybody knew each other. If you arrived
at the bridge and asked for me, people would bring you here. Now all you
see is north-eastern people.
Georgina was born in 1936 in Praia da Rosa, but used to come to the beach to
Z-10 to get clams and shellfish until she got married to a local fisherman and came to
live at Z-10:
The mangrove was the best beach in Zumbi. I moved here when I was 16.
There used be carnival balls in the colony’s headquarters, and they even had
a queen. When the tide was empty we would cross over right there, there
wasn’t a bridge then. The way to the colony was through the Navy. It was
wonderful, one house here, another over there. There were only fishermen
here, almost everyone here is family, my cousins, my nephews and nieces.
When the tide was full the water would come all the way here to the middle
of the streets. The houses were made of wood, it was much nicer; there
were fences instead of walls. The plots of land extended from one street to
the next. I had 12 children, but only 9 survived childhood. My husband fished
since he was sixteen, and my father-in-law, Abrilino, used to live in
Piratininga, in Niterói, and was a fisherman too. There was already a colony
when they arrived here. Here we brought our children up getting shellfish to
sell. Now there is too much mud for shellfish to survive, before it was just
12
People usually refer to the Navy grounds, or to the street next to the Navy, as Base.
96
white sand. Now it’s no good anymore, too many houses, pollution, there is
no shellfish, no beach for us to swim.
Irene, was born in the colony in 1947, and is the granddaughter of Alexandre
Rosa, another street at Z-10. Margarida calls her ‘church cockroach’ because she is
always doing voluntary work at the church and is one of the main organisers of St.
Peter’s celebrations and procession. Over the years, she has had many jobs: cleaning,
ironing clothes, and looking after elderly people:
My grandparents moved here from Ribeira. The only proper fishermen, who
made a living from it, were those of the first generation. My children fish, but
only as a hobby. When I was a child, there only few houses here, there was
no electricity and we used to sleep outdoors in the street. We would stay in
the field [the area which today is a football pitch] till late. There wasn’t a
church then. The gardens were really big, we had sugar cane, and there
wasn’t water in the house or walls between them. The houses were shacks.
At this time of the day, we would go for a swim in the mangrove, mothers
would go there with their children and would sit by the mangrove shore.
Things were very different then. At high tide the water would flood
everything.
It is worth noting that I made a point of not mentioning the mangrove, instead,
I only asked them to describe their life in the colony in the past. In those three
accounts the mangrove appears as a necessary part of everyday life, enmeshed as it
was with the tides.
97
The bridges
After the bridge in Ilha was built, everything became this mess.
Georgina
The bridge Georgina refers to is the one that connects Ilha to the mainland of
Rio which was built in 1949, and coincides with various advancements in the areas of
water and electricity supply, sewage systems and paving of roads. But the first bridge
that connects Z-10 with the rest of Ilha was built in 1893 by the Navy. At the
beginning of the twentieth century, fishing was the strongest commercial activity in
Ilha.13 By the time the first oil companies arrived in 1914, the population had reached
5,616 inhabitants. Shell was the first one, followed by Esso, shortly after.
Petrobrás,14 the Brazilian oil company, would only arrive in the 1950s, along with a
number of other major developments, such as the installation of a tram system, the
establishment of the Air Force in the western side of Ilha, the construction of the
main campus for the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro over eight islands and
much later, Galeão, the International Airport of Rio de Janeiro. Those developments
are crucial to understand the rate with which people migrated to Ilha from many parts
of Brazil. But perhaps the most important and still recalled change to the landscape
was the construction of the bridge that connects Ilha to the mainland of Rio.
13
The spread of a particular type of ant, the saúva, had plagued farm produce, fostering in turn
the industry of ant insecticides.
14
A national oil company founded in 1953 at the end of the Vargas period.
98
Figure 12: Paintings by Seu Jordão showing the different style bridges at Z-10.
Seu Jordão was born in 192915
and was known for being one of the
oldest residents in the colony, not
least because his grandfather gave the
name to another of the main streets at
Z-10. The entry to his house has the
name of his grandfather, Luiz
Victorino, written in rope. His wife
Catarina came to Z-10 at the age of
11, after her family received some
compensation for their eviction from
the Island of Sapucaia, one of the
Figure 13: Front of Seu Jordão’s house. Note the
bridges in the background wall, and Guanabara
Bay with the Sugar Loaf Mountain at the top.
eight islands that was used the
construction of the UFRJ campus. For
her Z-10 is now a paradise:
15
Seu Jordão passed away a few months after this interview.
99
You can’t imagine how much time we would spend carrying water on our
backs, we didn’t even have time for each other.
Seu Jordão, then 82, offered his view of the changes:
There didn’t use to be a bridge in Ilha, we would get to places by boat. In
those days the Jequiá river wasn’t polluted. During high tide, I would go out
of my front door and swim, right here. All of this would flood. My brother
and I were born and raised here. My father was a fisherman, Antonio Luiz
Vitorino, and so was my grandfather, one of the founders of the colony. The
Admiral Gomes Pereira gave this place to the fishermen. Here there are
people from Itaipu, from Piratininga, many people from the side of Niterói.
There are only few left, but I earned a living fishing for many years, then in
61, I got a job with the Navy and retired there. We would row to Caju, then
get the trawler from there and go to Ilha Grande, Cabo Frio, Angra dos Reis,
with 20 people aboard. We would fish all night: cavalinha, sardinha, anchova,
terere,16 and we would tell other fishermen about the places where there was
plenty of fish, there was solidarity then. In the 50s, Japanese and Chinese
people would come here to buy our fish. Fishing used to be abundant here,
but then some Portuguese and Spanish boats started to come here and they
would dredge everything. I have many memories of that time, and decided
to draw the bridge of the old colony. I also wrote a choro17 called ‘Naquele
tempo’ [In those days].
16
Names of local fish.
17
A type of slow and instrumental samba, which Jordão performed very well on the guitar.
100
He went on to show me his hand-made objects related to his life at sea:
Figure 14: The boat at the top is a copy of his own fishing boat.
The other three objects are fish traps.
Baixinho was born in 1924, and is said to be the oldest fisherman in the
colony:
I learned to fish with my dad in Maricá, where I was born. We had for horses
and so many goats that they would die of old age. The does would lie down
on the ground so that my brother and I could feed on their teats. We were
brought up on goat’s milk, people say it’s good for your health, and I never
go to the doctor’s or drink any water. My father used to like dark beer. Our
chickens would spend the whole day just running around and eating, we had
so many eggs we would distribute them to the neighbours. There was so
much food, sweet potatoes, and lemons, and no one to sell it to. My father
would take us fishing at night. He was very strict, if we fell asleep he would
throw water on us, that way we would stay awake all night long. Later, when
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my dad started to drink cachaça, our life went downhill. One day we were
having lunch, he arrived drunk, and broke everything, then my mum thumped
him on the head. After leaving hospital he went off to Niteroi and didn’t
come back for 5 years, so my brother and I had to support my mum and our
sisters. We sold fish, and if the customer didn’t have any money we would
swap for other things, like potatoes, bananas, oranges, then we would
exchange that with the fishermen for more fish, and that way we managed to
get by. Then five years later my father showed up, and took us to live in
Niterói, and then we went to Piratininga.
We used to have a canoe in Piratininga and catch about 50 to 60 kilos of fish,
but there was no one to sell it to in Piratininga, so we would row to Praça
XV in Rio to sell the fish. There wasn’t an engine on the boat, so our hands
were always swollen. One day in 1945, during the war, we were going back
to Piratininga and the Navy didn’t let us through because there was news
that a foreign boat was sailing on Brazilian waters. There were some mined
floats spread around the Guanabara Bay, any boat that hit it would explode.
So we went back to Praça XV and went to sleep in the house of a friend’s
relative, here at Z-10. I liked it here and decided to live here, there were fig
trees where the church is. Three years went by and I was always thinking of
coming back here. One day I came here and talked to the president and he
allowed me to build a wooden house. I made one right at the top by the
mangrove, and brought my family here. All the houses were made of wood.
Then this place started to develop, and develop and develop. Some people
tried to install a dope selling point (boca de fumo), but I and some others
didn’t allow it, and we went to complain to the commander at the military
post. Some years ago, people started selling laje and everything is becoming a
mess (bagunça). People come to drink here because there aren’t fights, and
there’s only one exit, that’s the only factor that keeps it respectful. If we let
it, it will become a mess. The APARU was a good thing, because it provided
jobs to some people, and it brought the mangrove back to life. Today it’s still
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calm here, but before it was much calmer. Children could play out day and
night. I wouldn’t leave here for any place in the world. This is packed every
weekend, because there’s no place like this.
From the life stories narrated by Walkyria, Georgina, Irene, Seu Jordão, and
Baixinho, there is a clear longing for a place, notably a community whose life was
intertwined with the flooded plains they inhabited, and which is seen as irrevocably
gone along with the activities that were inseparable from their sense of place. A few
points in common can be drawn from the accounts by Walkyria, Georgina, and Irene,
besides a sense of longing for the colony of their youth. The observations regarding
a) colony and the mangrove constituting one place; b) everyone was family in the
colony, as opposed to strangers such as people from the northeast; c) space between
houses and land to plant; d) abundance of fish and fishing as work activity; e) clean
waters as opposed to pollution; d) order as opposed to bagunça, or mess.
This longing is also evidenced in the place the past occupies in people’s
present perception of the landscape features such as the bridge. The bridges,
including the one from the colony to the mainland of Ilha, and the one that connects
Ilha to Rio, not only serve as a temporal markers, as seen from the image that
decorates Seu Jordão’s walls, or from Georgina’s indication of the turning point for
Z-10, but also as topographical markers in the larger Guanabara Bay that point to Z10. The bridge at Z-10 and the mangrove are obviously complimentary.
The nostalgic accounts about the past way of life nurture people’s ethical
sensibilities towards the mangrove. It is the memory of the clean waters that make
them judge those who pollute the mangrove; it is the fact that they swam in its waters
that makes them think of the colony and the mangrove as one and the same thing. But
not all is lost, Baixinho, for example, sees the passing of control over the mangrove to
the city council as providing more job opportunities for those who needed them,
while Catarina believes development granted her more time. I shall now move on to
explore what constitutes the environmental assemblage around the mangrove
surrounding Z-10, and how people tap into new discourses, as their practices and
strategies of survival adjust to.
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From nature to environment: home and land
As mentioned before, up until 1993, the colony was under the supervision of
the head of the Navy Radio Transmitter that occupies the tamed green grounds next
to the colony. The commander at the Navy had the role of keeping order in the
adjacent colony, and held the title of ‘mayor’. Authorization for any construction
taking part in the colony had to be granted by the Navy. The Colony was, while under
the auspices of the Navy, occupying a place where there was order and law. There are
many accounts of how people had to smuggle bricks in tiny boats in the middle of the
night to build an extra room in the house, and as the community changed its social
landscape and the population of fishermen became smaller, people would lie to the
authorities in the Navy pushing the numbers up, since if that was no longer a fishing
community the Navy would be under no obligation to grant them access to land.
At the time of the Navy, there used to be a sergeant who would go round the
colony to survey the houses to see if there was any work needed. Each house had a
document with the respective ground plan at the back, called a House Registry Form
(Ficha Cadastro de Benfeitoria), and any house extension or sub-division of plots
had to be authorised by the Navy. That said, outsiders were allowed in through
marriage. As seen in the stories above, many of the first fishermen who inhabited the
colony were from Saquarema or Maricá, fishing communities to the north of the state
of Rio de Janeiro, thus splitting of land between siblings in need of more space for
their growing families was commonplace. For example, Walkyria, lives next door to
Margarida, her sister-in-law, on the same plot of land that once belonged to her
father. The land was divided between the four children, and then subdivided between
the grandchildren, who went to occupy the second floors. So, Margarida’s house is
where the garden used to be three generations ago, and Walkyria’s house accounts for
one third of the original house. Other interviewees described similar arrangements:
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This plot of land belonged to my father. It went from here to that road
there. When he died my brother and I divided it between ourselves. - Seu
Jordão
I had all my 12 kids at home at my mother in law’s house. Later we moved to
this house, now the plot has been divided up, and there are lots of families
living here. - Georgina
My father bought the house at the front here, when I got married he gave me
the back of the house, and when my daughter got married, I gave part of it to
her, and the upstairs to my son. But one doesn’t own the plot of land here,
no one has the deeds for the houses. - Irene
My father had a big plot of land that was given to him by his mother’s father,
later the land was divided between myself and my brother and sisters. My
sister built a house, and then sold it, she now lives out of the colony. It is my
father’s house but the deeds are with the Navy.-Didil.
The above stories talk about re-arrangements of houses and illustrate the
recurring observation by older residents that ‘aqui todo mundo era familia’, ‘here we
were all family’. Ivana is Walkyria’s niece. She lives with her aunt next to
Margarida’s house. She worked for a long time as a secretary for the colony’s
association, and also for the Residents’ Association:
When the Navy passed on the area, the colony had around 135 properties
registered. The original documents are inside a file at the Navy, and there are
photocopies of them in the Fishing Colony’s Association. I asked
authorization from the captain to photocopy everything because I got scared.
Many times the form would get to the Navy with a fake name, and without a
copy of the originals it would be impossible to trace the rightful owners. But
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if people really got the ownership of their houses they wouldn’t like it
because nobody wants to pay taxes. This is a piece of paradise, but it doesn’t
exist. One day, a woman came into the Association and asked me to give her
a document proving the house was hers, threatening to sue me if I didn’t give
it to her. So I told her to first prove that the colony really exists. - Ivana
The comment by Ivana that ‘the colony doesn’t exist’ infers the sense of
precariousness and insecurity with regards to house ownership and permanence of the
community on the land that was donated to fishermen in 1938. Having a registered
house offers some security, but an ambiguous one. Ivana’s comment is illuminating
insofar as it matches the legislative limbo of the APARU as a decree that was never
turned into law, a topic that will be expanded on in chapter 6. In addition, its ‘nonexistence’ in terms of house ownership can be desirable, since legality would imply
tax-paying obligations. That said, some years ago, one of Ilha’s long-standing
politicians18 allegedly granted some type of deeds, or leasehold, to people at Z-10, a
controversial action that is again taking place under the current management of the
Residents’ Association.
The issue of land is important here, for when the navy ceased to have control
over construction, there was also a commodification of housing with the land gaining
value, which reflected in the commodification of the mangrove. If in the past people
had to lie about the numbers of fishermen living at Z-10 in order to keep the land,
after the passage of the colony to the city council, a corollary of the mangrove being
turned into an area of environmental protection, people not only started to build
almost indiscriminately, but also to sell houses. Ribamar, who has a background in
Environmental Engineering and Urban Architecture, I asked him about the passing of
control to the City Council:
The government had cut down the numbers in the military forces. It was
becoming harder for us to supervise the colony. Now, I am responsible for
18
Ilha is supposedly run by two political clans and another three individual politicians.
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the Navy’s urban and heritage patrimony, because of the old buildings here,
and of the mangrove area. The environmental management plan only arrived
in 2002 when the environmental issue became more evident. We don’t cut
any trees in the Navy grounds; if one is about to fall we will call the fire
brigade to remove it. People start to gain consciousness and learn what they
must and what they mustn’t do.
Ivana offers a different version:
The Navy didn’t want the responsibility anymore, so they set up a circus:
they put a stage in the middle of the round,19 the Navy commander came and
so did a council representative, then they signed a piece of paper. They are
mocking my intelligence. Nothing was passed really. There was a time in the
past when the Navy wanted this space, but they couldn’t have it because they
had donated the area to the fishermen in 1938,20 so they put a fence between
us, and later a wall. Every so often they would do a survey to check the
number of fishermen, since they cannot kick us out because the fishermen
protected the country during the war; it’s an exchange of favours. It’s not
about a law, it’s about values. So, we were told to lie about the number of
fishermen. This place is becoming a favela now. It has been like this ever
since the Navy passed it to the City Council, in 1993.
19
This is the place in the centre of the colony, next to the football pitch, where children normally
play in the evenings, and collective events are held, such as speeches by the president of the
Residents’ Association, or the public mass during St. Peter’s celebration.
20
Ivana is referring to Document number 90 (24/11/1938) which establishes the area that is being
donated to the fishermen.
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Disorder, favelas, and the intangible mangrove
If I could, I would make this whole place sink.
Zé Luiz
Once the mangrove was turned into preserved area by the municipal Decree
12250/93, and the administration of the area went to the City Council/Secretary of the
Environment, there was no longer a strict control over construction and the vertical
and disordered growth commonly associated with favelas took off. Some residents
felt liberated by the newly granted freedom and immersed themselves in house
improvements and extensions. One of the first sounds one hears when waking up in
the morning is that of construction work taking place somewhere in the vicinity. In
2001, eight years after the mangrove had been turned into an APARU, the Rio
Comunidade Colônia Z10, a Project by the City Council of Rio de Janeiro, started
construction work in the community to provide paving, draining and sanitation,
including the installation of 1,971 metres of pipeline for sewage and rain water. This
involved an influx of migrant workers from the north who, perceiving the community
as an ideal place to settle down as opposed to the more violent and urbanised
surroundings, started to offer the residents free house improvements in exchange for
part of the land, or for the second or third floors they would build on top of the
existing houses.
While demographic expansion had been going on for decades, the influx of
people after the construction work started was much more intense, and involved
outsiders with no connection with the fishing activity. Wilma came from Maranhão in
the north of Brazil to Ilha, moving to Z-10 in 1996, three years after the creation of
the APARU. Back then she worked on municipal buses collecting fares and had no
connections with the fishing activity. She remembers the changes that took place in
the space of two years, as part of the developmental plans for the colony:
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The construction firm Mendes Junior arrived here in 98, I remember because
it was the world cup, I shouted when Brazil scored a goal and ended up
falling into one of the construction work holes. They started the work here,
and brought lots of north-eastern people with them to do the building work.
It had to be quick because those jobs made by the government are always
rushed. Because those builders liked the place they started to offer people
here, who are very naïve, to have their house done up in brick and
everything in return for letting them put a concrete slab [laje] over the top,
so the builders would then keep the second floor for themselves. So they got
rich, and the people who regretted later had no come back, because by the
time they realized what they had done, they couldn’t get rid of the
newcomers.
Stories narrating the houses of the past and contemporary real-estate
speculation illustrate how the passage from the Navy to the City Council changed
house ownership, and the colony as a whole. Order appears frequently in
conversations when people compare life now to how it was in the past when the Navy
exercised its control over the territory of Z-10, implying that now there is less order
than in the past. Ribamar talks about the moment when the Navy passed the APARU
to the city council, using the same expression that appeared in Zé Luiz’s account in
chapter 1:
The Navy gave the child to someone, but that someone is not looking after
the child. There is no monitoring of construction work, it is instead a political
‘shop window’. Nowadays people do anything without permission, before we
would have to investigate what was going to be built with the bricks. Look at
that house over there, before 93 there were no big houses like that, look at
that window without proper framing, what makes it look like a favela is this
lack of organization when people do whatever they want: so one guy puts in
a veranda, the other a pillar, and another uses steel.
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Irene, however, argues that things have improved in some ways:
Nobody used to
have bathrooms in
the house, we used
to carry the water
on our backs.
Otávio: But we lost
fifty per cent of our
freedom.
Irene: But this is
Figure 15: Otávio and Irene.
progress, isn’t it? The
world has changed, we
can’t complain. Some things changed for the better, others for the worse.
Otávio: We still have freedom to move around21 because of the values of the
old folks here. There are no drugs here, the Navy prohibits it, and there’s
only one exit.
Irene: There’s no better place than the colony. I went to Guarabu22 the other
day, and I had to walk through armed men. Here I spent two years without a
door and a window. It’s not a mess (bagunça) here. People who left regret it
because now they want to return and houses are really expensive.
The lack of freedom Otavio is referring to is associated in Brazil with
increasing violence of urban centres affecting people’s sense of security, but it is also
connected with the perception of sharing an existence with people who are not
family. But despite the fact that Z-10 displays some characteristics associated with
21
‘Liberdade de ir e vir’. freedom to move around, is an expression associated with the rise of
violence in big cities in Brazil, and with favelas in particular. It has its origins in restrictions
imposed by drug lords, and limitations in moving around the area freely lest one may be caught in
the crossfire between rivalling gangs.
22
A favela in Ilha.
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favelas: disordered growth, uneven house numbers, areas with open sewage, the
majority of people I talked to, both insiders and outsiders, do not consider it a favela
for reasons associated with people’s conceptions of moral behaviour, mostly
perceived as the following of rules. Often the mourning of the end of order goes
together with the longing for past values, mostly associated with the fishing tradition
and the Navy:
This place is like it is because fishermen are people with morals. –
Teresina, an environmental education teacher from nearby Ribeira.
The debate around how many floors can be built on houses inside the colony
demands attention. The very dramatic vertical growth of recent years supposedly
compromises the marshland terrain where the islet is situated, and some claim it will
eventually collapse. The argument that three floors or more could compromise the
long-standing permanence of a house not only jeopardises its real-estate potential, but
also places the mangrove as the material justification against vertical growth:
How can people build three floors on a swamp? This area has been
filled with soil; can you see how dangerous it is? - Irene
In the past, people would go from one place to the other in the
colony on a canoe, then it got filled with soil for houses to be built.
Those two and three storey houses compromise the whole area of
the colony – Lucas, the environmental guard.
As observed by Irene, the mangrove constitutes risk, after all it is a waterlogged area and people are building on potentially shifting ground. The norms by
which people define the ethics of existence, in this case clearly supported by customs,
may defy institutional categories, thus Maria, the wife of a fisherman, was very upset
when she saw that the council administrative map had marked Z-10 as a favela:
Z-10 is not a favela, because there are no dealers or drugs here!
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Nevertheless, Z-10 appears in Google maps, as well as in administrative maps,
indicated as ‘favela’, though with the particularity of being an area of environmental
preservation. Curious to find out how children perceived the mangrove, I ran a
mapping workshop at CEA (Centre for Environmental Education) with nine children
aged between 7 and 13. We started by looking at Google maps, where Z-10 was
signalled as being a favela. A spontaneous discussion then started between the
children about how appropriate its favela status was:
Rafaela (11 years old): The colony is like a favela because here there are
gossipers and barraqueiros [term used for people who argue in public].
Luana (10): But Boogy Woogie [another favela nearby] is much worse, and
Dendê [another favela] is even worse.
Lucas (12): No, this isn’t a favela, it is a good community; there is a park
with swings and slides.
Walter (12): This is a community. Community has families, favelas don’t.
Here in the colony, people have to turn the sound off at 10 at night. In
favelas, the music goes till the next morning.
Jorge (13): This isn’t a favela because there are no guns. People are
workers here. There’s no milícia.23 There are only families here.
Walter (12): Of course there are guns here, your dad fired his gun the
other day.
Jorge (13): But that’s because he’s a policeman, and someone stole his
budgie, that’s why. It was worth 15 thousand reais.
The voicing of those highly charged preconceptions of what constitutes a
favela, reveals the very process through which those children become moral subjects,
as well as the habitus (Bourdieu 1977) informing those values. Their drawings
23
Originally meaning militia it came to signify, in the context of favelas in Brazil, groups of
armed citizens who take on the protection of a community.
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indicate the places of their everyday practices: the Redondo, a concrete round space
where community activities are held, and where they play on hot evenings; the
bridge, the main access to the colony; and the mangrove, the boundary that delineates
the space the colony occupies:
Map 8: Maps made by children.
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While the landscape consists of houses and purpose-built public spaces, the
colony is clearly defined as a place contained within three major boundaries: the
Navy, the bridge that connects it to the rest of the island, and the mangrove. Note that
the bridge appears in all those drawings as the main access route, while the
mangrove, blurring into the sea, grants contour to the colony. Whether as a green
smudge of colour at the margin, or as a background for other man-made features, the
mangrove appears as the borderline. This marginality, and yet ubiquitous presence of
the mangrove, is partly explained by the way it disappears with the high tide to soon
reappear again. But most importantly, this apparent invisibility is due to the alienation
of the mangrove from people’s lives.
In the fifty years that separate the childhood of most of the interviewees from
that of the children who drew the maps above, the mangrove went from being part of
people’s work and leisure activities, a socio-economic whole, to a place that stands
outside their everyday practices, save for few children who may collect the resilient
crabs that withstood the environmental changes, or accompany relatives on fishing
trips. For most children at Z-10, the mangrove is no longer where one swims, but a
place to be preserved. In addition, CEA employees lock the entry to the mangrove
path lest the children should come across drug users or fall into raw sewage. As for
the APARU, the name given to the mangrove after 1993, it amounts to a house with a
playing area outside and indoor activities during holidays.
That said, houses at Z-10 are described as a desirable commodity because the
community is considered crime-free, and the mangrove, while remaining marginal, is
seen as a protective boundary, and by extension, an ethical agent that boosts prices of
properties. This characteristic has made Z-10 one of the most expensive districts in
Ilha, even though all properties are passed to the buyer without proper deeds, and
what one buys is the ‘right of donation’. Visitors to Z-10 are constantly reminded
how different this community is to the nearby favelas, and the most appealing trait of
the community residents constantly remark on is the issue of security, often explained
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by the presence of the Navy next door, its fishing history, and the mangrove. In sum,
though distant from people’s everyday lives, the mangrove is seen as a moral agent:
There is no crime here because it’s difficult for people to escape. There’s
only one access, the bridge; the Navy is on one side and the mangrove at
the other. No one dares escape over the mangrove. - Margarida
Conclusion
The accounts above reveal a multi-faceted mangrove that changed over the
years; a mangrove which is/was many things: a canal into the sea, a home for spirits,
a place to fish, to swim, to anchor a boat, a link into a past way of life, a real estate
risk, or a protective border. The mangrove appears as a living process, constantly
being sculpted both actually, through man-made actions, and potentially, in people’s
imaginary. In the process, those storytellers enact the mangrove as nature, for they are
referring to a particular mangrove with specific ‘natural’ characteristics, now with a
numerical decree that identifies it. The life stories tell us of a mangrove that is no
longer. Yet, rather than having something subtracted from it, it had things added to it,
more mud, and more pollution. There are however, some perceptions that clash: the
mangrove is polluted, but it serves as a protective boundary, the Navy is no longer in
charge, but its physical presence is still by the colony’s entrance.
We can infer that there was a system of favour exchange between the
fishermen and the Navy which seemed to work effectively for many years, and to
provide an ethical framing, coming to an end when another form of State control
came into being. It appears that the those personal relations of tutelage were
determinant and are looked upon with nostalgia by the fishermen, and though they
may still be present now in subtle and unspoken ways, ingrained in the social
relations that permeate parts of the broader network, they have not migrated to the
governmental environmental assemblage.
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In an instance of history repeating itself, first time when Araribóia engaged in
a system of favour exchange with the Portuguese colonisers and was subsequently
evicted from his place of origin, and nearly five hundred years later, when the
fishermen formed an alliance with the Navy and nearly evicted again due to the
effects of capital over their means of production; the exchange currency was the
promise of a watchful eye over the much coveted Guanabara Bay in return for some
form of protection and access over land. If that pattern is anything other than a
historical coincidence, it could suggest that lessons were learned from the past, while
offering a twist to the model of myth preceding history (Sahlins 1981, Lévi-Strauss,
1978), seeing that Araribóia became a mythical entity in Umbanda. The dynamics
surrounding the indigenous inhabitants of Ilha and the colonisers echo still today,
albeit subtly, as in the case of the spiritual entities found in the cosmology of
Umbanda, a psychogeographic24 example of what lies beyond the objectively
observable.
The socio-economic changes narrated above play a role in people’s moral
stances towards the mangrove, for they directly affect people’s working conditions.
As for nostalgia, it takes the form of an ethical stance by mediating the tension
between tradition and progress. Many of those interviewed were wage labourers, even
if the fishing tradition still lingered in the family history, often as a hobby. That said,
they were all involved with manual labour: cleaning, cooking, ironing, repairing,
doing odd jobs, caring after the elderly. It is also apparent that there was a shift from
the mangrove being perceived as a stage for creative action, including swimming,
football, gathering shellfish, and actually playing an active and dynamic role, to the
object of an institution, represented by CEA, the Centre for Environmental Education.
Until the 1990s the value of the mangrove was mixed in with personal experiences,
while now its value appears limited, since it rarely interacts with people.
24
Psychogeography, in a definition by Guy Debord, is the study of the precise laws and specific
effects of the geographical environment, consciously organised or not, on the emotions and
behaviour of individuals.
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We can also observe from the narratives an emphasis on what is described as
‘the fishermen’s morality’ associated with hard work, knowledge about the
environment, good relationship with the Navy, and respect for St. Peter, all
characteristics that converge with the mangrove as a topographic boundary. The
interesting point to observe here, is that, as the mangrove ceased to be economically
valuable, in the sense that it no longer provides income to the wives and children of
fishermen who used to pick their shellfish there, it gained newer forms of value, such
as job opportunities, environmental capital in the form of local NGOs, and an
environmental education centre for children. Even though the mangrove is not an
object in circulation, it has an exchange value insofar as it is involved in economic
exchanges that take it into account, such as real estate. Later, as vertical expansion
started, the mangrove acquired yet another value, one based on its function of a
boundary between the colony and surrounding areas. It is as if the ‘structural
nostalgia’ (Herzfeld 1990) of a timeless mangrove was refashioned in the contingent
way the mangrove became a moral agent, re-negotiating the paradoxical outcomes of
the passage from nature to environment.
The accounts of the elderly informants also shed light on how the conditions
of both the mangrove and the sea affected the working conditions, pointing to more
than ‘structural nostalgia’ at play. The marks of reciprocity and self-enforcing rules
coincide with a less polluted landscape and more autonomous labour practices. Those
were the days when fishermen, though poor, enjoyed the freedoms of selfemployment, when they could choose who they were going to fish with, and how
long they would be away from home. That type of autonomy is another characteristic
of that nostalgia: within the boundaries of the mangrove, families had their homes,
their means of production, their vegetable patch, and the water to keep the plants
alive. Work was at the core of their relationship with the mangrove, fostering
productivity in the community.
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It is interesting to note that the idea of a surrounding mangrove with the
community in the middle explicit in the maps made by children only came about once
the Navy landfilled the area where all houses are now located, and ‘donated’ the land
to the fishermen. For those that are old enough to remember living in stilt houses, the
mangrove was everywhere. That said the image of the mangrove as a containing
vessel still applies since in the accounts by the older folk the mangrove held all
aspects of their lives. As its bi-tidal daily rhythm dictated the architecture of the
houses, the crops to be harvested, whether crabs, shrimps, sugar cane or greens, and
the activities to be performed, it provided the space of play and of work. This
container could be open, as in low tide when it permitted people to cross to the other
side, or closed, at high tide when people could only leave through the Navy grounds.
The mangrove also contained ‘a big family’ made up of uncles, aunts and cousins
connected by permeable fences, and duly separated those who were not kin.
In sum, the accounts by the old and the young coincide in the way they situate
the colony within a boundary, and perceive the mangrove as both inclusive and
exclusive. The colony is everything within that mutable boundary, even if the bridge,
a landscape marker for the younger generations, turns the openness of low tide into a
permanent feature. For the children this container holds ‘families’, ‘workers’, ‘a
park’, and strict norms, while excluding gossipers, milícia and guns; for the older
generations it holds ‘fishermen’, ‘morals’ and excludes ‘drugs’. It is this borderline
aspect of the mangrove, both physically and meta-physically speaking, and how it ties
to people’s ethical sensibilities, that I shall turn to in the next chapter.
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Part II – Social Natures
Chapter 3 – Jequiá
About the mangrove’s grandma you asked, I told you she was near us:
a crab entering its hole, a leaf that falls,
a saracura1 that sings,
the smell of the vergamina,2
and the breeze that runs through your hair.
That’s vovó do mangue [mangrove’s grandma].
Zé Luiz
Figure 16: The mangrove of Jequiá.
1
A semi-aquatic bird, the saracura inhabits water-flooded areas.
2
A plant found in the mangrove.
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Jequiá is a tupi-guarani word which means a trap to capture fish. It is also the
name given to the only river that runs through Ilha and to the mangrove, a canal that
stretches from the river source and ends in Guanabara Bay. Both an inlet of the sea
and a bay formed by the river, Jequiá is ontologically ambiguous, encompassing
river, sea, and mangrove. Now, the difficulty of dealing with the epistemological
hurdles of a social nature like the mangrove, prompts the researcher to explore the
practices around it, by paying close attention to how this mangrove is performed and
enacted. Thus, this chapter will focus on the practices around the mangrove and on
its constitutive elements, such as plants, the sea that feeds it at high tide, the mud and
pollution that surface at low tide, to then enter the imaginary via a ‘poetics of
dwelling’ (Ingold 2000:26) that living by a mangrove entails. If the previous chapter
accesses the mangrove through people’s memories historically situating it in an
interplay with a variety of social actors over time, this chapter addresses the physical
and imagined relationships between humans, non-humans and the landscape, seen as
permeable and mutual, and occasionally excluding and selective. The historicalpolitical development of the environment that encompasses Z-10 presents us with
what has been referred to as ‘heterogeneous assemblages’ made up of socio-material
worlds (Blaser 2014), which in turn entail multiple ontologies. Yet, alongside an
ongoing process of hybridisation, attempts to separate nature from culture do persist,
and not only under environmental governance, as we shall see.
I have argued in this thesis that as the mangrove becomes environment it
changes both as a thing and as concept, the former having an impact on the latter. The
mangrove is of course, always changing and in process of becoming, but the concepts
that emerged from the environmental assemblage that formed around it changed the
mangrove in a particular direction. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell suggest that
‘concepts can bring about things because concepts and things just are one and the
same’ (2007:13). This chapter unravels how this polysemic mangrove forms two
clusters in the assemblage, an environmental one that performs the mangrove as an
impermeable boundary, and an ecological one that is more open-ended and
permeable.
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To address those clusters, I will explore how the experienced and the
imagined mangrove overlap, and how the mangrove is enacted as a bio-system, and
as a boundary. But, as seen in the previous chapter, the mangrove is also the result of
a dialectical encounter between humans and development, encompassing a variety of
social actors both from inside and from outside the community who re-signified, or
re-framed the mangrove. The many parts that are assembled around the mangrove
including fishermen, politicians, environmentalists, Umbandistas , herons, crab,
bacteria and sewage make this whole much larger than those stories of a past
mangrove suggested in chapter 2.Thus, while trying to unveil the ethical sensibilities
aroused by people’s conceptions of, and behaviours towards the mangrove, some
categories came to the fore which implicitly, or explicitly, spoke back to the
mangrove, such as ‘tempo’, the weather, ‘lama’, mud, and ‘evolução’, evolution.
I will start by laying out what constitutes this particular mangrove, how it
interacts with the tides and with a multitude of social actors, and how the relationship
between this quasi-object/subject (Latour 1993), a nature culture hybrid, unfolds in a
dialectical fashion. I will then shed light on the different elements assembled round
this network, and what role they play in shaping the mangrove’s present composition
of river, sea water, and sewage. Next, I will focus on the semantic make-up of the
mangrove, addressing a common reading of it as a place of ambiguity, both from an
analytic point of view, in the sense that the meanings attached to it are not fixed, but
also from a symbolic perspective. I will make an analogy between the mangrove and
a local spiritual entity, Seu Toquinho, a highly regarded Exu (see the section under
characters in the Introduction to this thesis) and one of the most popular local doctors
in the colony. Finally, I will suggest that the mangrove, and its metaphysical
counterpart, ‘perform border’ (Green 2010), both as a place and as a line.
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Washed-in and washed-out
I woke up at 4:30 in the morning, had a coffee and left to meet Didil by the
bridge. It was still dark as we went passed the lit shrine with an image of
Saint Peter in it, also known as Xangô by Umbanda followers. The tide was at
its highest, and it would be at that level again at around 5:15 pm: two tide
cycles a day with a delay of 45 minutes each day. The faded light was
beginning to show in the east. The rising sun with its gentle heat, the motion
of our bodies pulling the net, each of us standing on either side of the little
boat to keep it balanced, the fish starting to appear and being taken from the
trappings of the net; it was a vision of abundance and made me think of the
biblical passage of the miracle of the fish. It was a pretty good catch:
anchovies, mullet, a 3kg. piraúna, a raviola and a sea urchin. I got squeamish
and left the handling of the fish him.
Time and space regulate the activities of the fishermen, punctuated by the tide
which relentlessly dresses and undresses the landscape surrounding the colony. As
those who have ever lived by the sea know, there are two changes of tide per day, and
a set of two low and two high tides constitute a full cycle of 24 hours and fifty
minutes. The fishermen calculate that the tide comes in with a 45 minute delay every
day. For instances, if the tide started to go out at 5:30 in the morning today, tomorrow
this will happen 45 minutes later. In addition there is the spring tide when the
gravitational pulls of the sun and the moon are combined, and which happens twice a
month. Fishermen avoid fishing during full or new moons, preferring the quarter
phases, or the neap tides,3 when the daily flow of the tide is not so strong.
Gravitational forces vary in time and space, and sea levels are also vulnerable to other
weather phenomena such as winds and storms.
3
The neap tide occurs when the sun and moon oppose each other generating the lowest difference
between tides; spring tide by contrast happens when the sun, moon and earth are more aligned, at
full or new moon, causing very high or very low tidal levels.
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In old English, tide signified time, but tempo, the Portuguese word for ‘time’
permeates this ethnography not only as the controller of the fishing activity in its
connection with the tides and moon cycles, but also in its connotation of weather,
including Umbanda ’s understanding of it as its dual dimension of time and weather
phenomena. At high tide, the view from the bridge is quite stunning, and the water
covers all the human elements that decorate the earthen surface, except for the boats
and herons. At low tide the landscape surrounding the colony expands onto a mud
bank, and crabs surface all over it, curiously exploring the new human artefacts
brought by today’s tide, from car tyres, to torn flip-flops. The novelist Amitav Ghosh,
writing about the tide country in West Bengal, notes that mangroves ‘erase time’ as
they ‘recolonize the land’ (2005:50) and ‘silt over its past’ (Ghosh 2005:69), keeping
a balance between ‘the wild and the sown’ (ibid: 103). In the novel, crabs, tides,
winds and storms have appetites.
Figure 17: High tide.
Figure 18: Low tide.
Didil is a fisherman who was born in Z-10 and belongs to one of the oldest
and biggest families there. He has to take all those factors into account when he sets
off on his own in his little boat to drop the net in the Guanabara Bay. His knowledge
of the natural environment is a given that comes with his working activity and which
he learned as a boy helping his father to fish. His skills at sea were plain on the few
occasions we went out fishing together. If we were out to lay the fishing net, he
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would row his small boat for about half an hour finally stopping not too far from an
abandoned island, which had been formerly owned by Texaco for oil storage and was
now visited sporadically by fishermen, as well as locals in search of a deserted place.
Didil looked around and ‘marked’ where he would start laying the net by
means of tracing an imaginary line between the tip of an oil storage tank in
the distance and the third pillar of the Rio-Niterói bridge. Those were manmade landmarks in an otherwise natural landscape, the Guanabara Bay. It
was hard to believe that such an imprecise reference would be of any use
for finding the net later in the day when he came to collect it. The fishing
net had to stay hidden with no evident float attached to it due to the high
incidence of fishing net robbers in the area.
Fishermen get no compensation for the loss of a net, and in such eventuality
they have to rely on family and fellow fishermen for support. Losing a net usually
means being confined to the mangrove area where fishermen who do not go out to sea
anymore stay repairing other fishermen’s nets or doing odd jobs on people’s boats, or
having to rely on the solidarity of fishing mates who may lend nets and boats.
Usually, by the time we were back at the colony, the tide was almost completely out,
so the boat had to be moored quite far away since the waters were too low to even
push the boat to Z-10. We would then have to walk back bare foot through what
makes up the local mangrove nowadays: sea and river water combined with nontreated sewage from about 100 thousand people per day. The mud which constitutes
the solid part of a ‘clean’ mangrove is supposedly medicinal, but not here. I prayed I
would not slash my foot open on glass or a rusty can.
The first time I ever set foot on a mangrove, a different one from the
mangrove that surrounds Z-10, I was told I had to trust God. I was in the state of
Bahia, and the terrain of the mangrove was of thick mud with little shellfish that
dwell in it, called sururu, which I was there to catch. That was a ‘natural’ or
‘uncontaminated’ mangrove, and by that I mean that the elements that constituted it
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were not man-made. But after days of being in the colony, surrounded as I was by sea
and mangrove, cranes, crabs and freshly fished fish, it dawned on me that I would
have needed to see the mangrove through the eyes of those story-tellers in chapter 2
to have a glimpse of a ‘natural’ mangrove. That is when I realised that the mangrove
was the embodiment of the multi-faceted concept of the environment in the 21st
century, and that nature as a habitat free of man-made objects such as plastic bottles,
constituted not only an ethical sensibility, but also an aesthetic one by no means
widespread at Z-10.
The mangrove invites a synchronic as well as a diachronic analysis, in that
while being the object of current discourses and material pursuits it is also a
geography that holds and invokes changes over time. Its perception is not only
informed by people’s memory of how it used to be, as seen in the previous chapter,
but also by its presence in the daily rhythm, itself predicated on the tidal changes:
When I was young, there was
nothing here, only shacks. When
my son was little, he would get
my wash basin and some wooden
spoons and would leave the
house rowing on it. There used
to be sea water right here where
we are standing. The shack was
high up and there were some
stairs to get into it, when the tide
was high, the water would flow
under my house. – Diná, born in
1922.
Figure 19: D. Diná.
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To bridge the gap between the biological and the cultural organism, Tim
Ingold follows the lead of Gregory Bateson4 to argue for an ecological approach to
perception (Ingold 2000:3) to break with the Cartesian dualism by starting off from
the premise that the person is the organism, not as an individual entity, but placed
within a field of relationships. In this ‘relational view of the organism’, related
characteristics arise as a result of growth and development within a given
environment, a strand of biological thinking quite akin to the ecologicalpsychological view of James Gibson.5 By scrapping the idea of an organism
composed of mind, body and culture, an alternative view of ‘creative growth within a
continually unfolding field of relationships’ (ibid.:4) may emerge. The purpose of this
section was to give a more phenomenological view of the mangrove and the fishing
activity around it. Next, I shall delve into a view of the mangrove mediated by the
biological sciences.
The mangrove as a living eco-system
Constituting an ecosystem of transition between the land and the sea, the
mangrove is subject to the tides, the main mechanism through which salt water
penetrates the mangrove. Those periodical floods favour mangrove vegetation by
excluding species without the means to withstand salt. The range of the penetration of
sea water determines the extension of the mangrove. While the mangrove roots retain
the mud and floating sediments, its leaves expel the salt. Its vegetation is adapted to
mud, to environments with low levels of oxygen, and to broad ranges of salinity and
moisture. Its roots have adapted to the oxygen-depleted mangrove environment by
4
In his seminal work Steps to an ecology of mind (1972), Gregory Bateson suggests that mental
processes always have a physical representation.
5
In his introduction, Ingold refers to James Gibson and his work The Ecological Approach to
Visual Perception (1979), as the most influential work in the period of writing The Perception of
the Environment.
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means of finger-like tubes which spring from the mud to capture the oxygen, called
pneumatophores.
The mangrove also provides protection, serving as a barrier against the act of
erosion from waves and tides; purification, acting as a biologic filter resulting in the
natural production of gases (methane and sulphur); nutrition, accumulating food for
various organisms; renovation of fish stock, acting as breeding ground for many
species; and shelter, due to the enclosed areas where it normally grows around bays,
lagoons and rivers. The fine sediments that accumulate at the bottom of mangroves
act as filters for a variety of heavy metals. Its location is restricted to intertidal areas,
making it a connection point between maritime and terrestrial environments. Because
it is located in the liminal zone between sea and river, the waters are a mixture of
fresh and sea water.
Zé Luiz makes a distinction between the mangrove biome and the mangrove
vegetation. In the past, he explains, the area surrounding Z-10 was already a
mangrove biome in the sense that it had some of the species typical of that biome
such as molluscs and crustaceans, but it did not have much vegetation:
The Sack of Jequiá used to be wider. This used to be a sandbank with salty
water, and the current used to flow much faster. The mangrove vegetation
used to be restricted to where the Navy is now, because there was some
sediment there, so the plants started to grow. This used to be a lagoon and
because it was deep the propagos 6 couldn’t germinate, they wouldn’t hold
here. It was a mangrove but with very little mangrove vegetation. Where
Margarida lives, it was a beach. In the 1930s the Navy pulled down a hill over
there and brought the soil here to make the football pitch. The fishermen,
very few then, lived more at the back. There were only stilt houses. In the
1940s mangrove vegetation started to grow next to the Navy grounds, like a
6
Seeds found in the red mangrove biome resembling darts, with one of the extremities being fine
and round, and the other being heavy, thick and pointed. They hang from the extremities of tree
branches and, if they come loose during high tide, they fall in the water, float and are then taken
by the current. When inversely they drop during low tide, when the soil is exposed, it gets stuck in
mud and a little bush may start growing under the “mother” tree.
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fringe. As they narrowed the Sack of Jequiá to make the canal, the mangrove
vegetation started to spread. There would have been vegetation on this side
if they hadn’t cut it down to make houses. In 1977 they started to widen the
Jequiá road, but we managed to stop it. From 1980 we started to plant
mangrove seedlings, 60,000 per year. This mangrove we know as a native
species is the outcome of human action.
He goes on to explain that for the mangrove vegetation to grow, it needs other
elements such as soil, and that sewage also contributes with nutrients:
Everything in the world evolves: the volume of sewage made sedimentation
increase, but because the mangrove is a son of a bitch it just resists
everything.
Figure 20: Zé Luiz looks for polychaetes, also known as bristle worms, an important link in the food
chain of the mangrove since it feeds on the nutrients from it, including elements that constitute
sewage, while serving as food for a variety of fish and maçaricos, a bird from the Scolopacidae
species.
The view that the mangrove has a strong constitution is commonly held:
The mangrove is a very strong system, that’s why it resists all this sewage
being thrown in it. – Lucas, the environmental guard
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Generally speaking, mangroves have a big percentage of organic matter and
salt, but the characteristic of the substrate varies according to the percentage of those
elements. With the volume of sewage increasing exponentially in the last decades, not
only plants have thrived with the extra amount of nutrients, but many forms of
bacteria as well. Zé Luiz says that without proper technical analyses it is impossible
to know what really constitutes the mangrove, but he attests to the presence of
cyanophyta, or cyanobacteria,7 also known as blue-green algae, whose multi-layered
colonies can create areas of impermeability at the bottom of the mangrove, not unlike
plastic bags, and hinder other forms of life.
Anna Tsing remarks that when researchers investigate changes in the
environment, they ought to be aware of ‘the social worlds other species help to build’
(Tsing 2013:33). However, while observing those relations helps one break with
‘human exceptionalism’ (Haraway 2008),8 they do raise concerns about how social
we want those relations to be. Take sewage for one: because it smells, it is rather
conspicuous and is experienced as repugnant and as such, authorities are supposed to
isolate it from social life on health and ethical grounds. No matter how open-minded
one is, it is difficult to think of the life present in sewage as companion-species
(Haraway 2008). Sewage is also an interesting hybrid of man-made and ‘natural’
waste, and a reminder of the contentious distinction between the two; its
anthropogenic character truly confuses the nature/culture opposition, not least
because the negativity attached to this natural substance is essentially cultural. But
most pertinent to our discussion here, is that however natural sewage is, it is
unanimously perceived as an element foreign to the mangrove. So after the less
mediated perception of the mangrove in the first section, and the biological
7
It is generally believed that cyanobacteria turned the past reducing atmosphere of the earth into
an oxidizing one by producing oxygen as a gas, thus stimulating biodiversity.
8
An expression used by Donna Haraway to refer to the idea that humans occupy a differentiated
and unique place in the hierarchy of beings.
129
understanding of it in this section, I shall move to how nature is conceived by those
who were raised by the mangrove.
The mangrove as nature
As already elaborated in chapter 1, the conceptual separation of nature and
culture was enhanced by the capitalist mode of production, as natural resources
became more scarce and less freely available. This process, together with Arcadian
representations of nature in literature and the visual arts, fostered its objectification,
especially amongst the urban population for whom nature was not part of daily
activities in the same way as for rural dwellers. Along with most environmentalists I
came across in the research, the view I held, as an urban dweller, was of such
objectified nature: a unifying whole with abundance of vegetation and/or water, free
of debris and man-made objects. It took some adjusting to realise this way of
perceiving nature was not shared by most people in the community. Initially, the
references to nature I heard seemed curious and varied:
Nature is something fabulous: how can ships, with all that weight on top of
them, float? – Didil
Nature is funny, gold is worth a lot, but it weighs like hell. - Zé Luiz
My mother-in-law was very dedicated to nature stuff; she had lots of plants
and pets. - Paulo, a participant at the memory workshop9
9
I held a one day workshop during fieldwork when I worked with photo elicitation using old
photographs of the colony.
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Everybody loves the colony, it’s to do with life here, and with nature. – Vera,
a resident attending the memory workshop.
Strathern observes some systematic selections made when the categories
nature and culture are deployed (Strathern 1980:176), even if dichotomies are not
consistent and may be challenged in given contexts. In her ethnographic study in
New Guinea, one of these selections is ecological, placing the wild in opposition to
the domestic; while another opposes biology and the man-made. Nature, at times,
stands for women, wilderness, and the private sphere, as opposed to culture, standing
for men, cultivation, and public life. But nature is also seen as a privileged realm with
laws of its own, such as the physical properties that regulate natural phenomena, as
opposed to the erratic aspect of cultural phenomena. While those dichotomies may
not correspond to Western oppositions of nature/culture, there is still a clear sense of
defining one in opposition to the other: people at Z-10 oppose pets to people, or the
colony to the city.
While the othering of nature is apparent in the comments above, Didil does
not perceive nature as separate from his activity as a fisherman. When rowing his
boat in one of our outings, Didil told me about the orixás who taught him to play the
drums at the Umbanda terreiro run by his brother, the pai de santo at Z-10. Familiar
with the commonly held perception that the Afro-Brazilian entities known as orixás
are forces of nature, I was somewhat puzzled when he told me that orixás were
‘tempo’, the Portuguese word that means both time and weather phenomena. What do
you mean by ‘tempo’?, I asked.
The thunder, sea, waterfalls, wind, mud, fire…- He replied.
In Didil’s view, those ‘forces of nature’ are perceived as living agents. This
dynamic view of the orixás can also be extended to a dynamic view of nature, after all
these are fishermen, or children and grandchildren of fishermen, used to an
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autonomous way of life whereby one creates his working schedule according to the
rhythm of the tide, decides where to set the net, rows to the desired spot in the sea,
sets the net, rows back, and sets off again a few hours later, making sure the time is
right and that he does not get caught up by a coming storm. On returning they may
experience joy after a good catch, or profound disappointment in the case of the
increasingly common periods of poor yield. The fisherman or woman will then sell
the fish at the local fish stand by the entrance to the colony, or to the middle man who
buys the whole lot for a cheaper price for resale. The periods of spring tide, when the
fishermen avoid fishing, are used to repair the nets or boats, or to construct a boat. As
evident from the process, the activity implies a rhythm of production quite different
from the more clock-dictated forms of wage labour. Even those whose contemporary
lifestyles are detached from the fishing activity, still experience the tide rhythms as
they cross the bridge to go out of the colony. Almost everyone I talked to at Z-10
included the tide in everyday conversations and had past experience of going fishing
in one of the boats moored by the bridge.
The fisherman’s relationship with nature could be described at times as purely
practical, with the worker making full use of the means of production to which he or
she has free access. But that relationship is also of a phenomenological kind, as when
the fisherman pulls his net, speedily separating the good catch from the fish without
commercial value, totally absorbed in what seems like a dance between body, fishing
net, fish, seagulls and whirlpools. That form of relating resonates with Tim Ingold’s
‘sentient ecology’ (2000) since it refers to a form of knowledge ‘consisting in the
skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of
conducting one’s life in a particular environment’ (ibid.:25).
The reality of fishing families up until the 1970s followed a broad division of
labour whereby women and children would catch the freely available crabs, shrimps
and shellfish to complement the family income, while the men would go out with
their boats, traps, nets and fishing rods, to face the uncertainty of the sea. Back then,
it could be said that this was a community of foragers, and as such, people were
highly aware of their surroundings and life forms found therein. Hence the lingering
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perception of nature as a dynamic component of people’s lives, and as discrete units
or differentiated aspects of natural phenomena: wind, storm, sea, rain, mud, all parts
of a chain of cause and effect. Such view of nature with agency kept coming up in
people’s accounts of daily affairs:
When there was thunder, the mangrove would become all dark, covered up
with crabs.– Margarida.
And a strong wind announcing a storm that started blowing when Margarida’s
son was getting married was a sure sign that the respective union was doomed, since
the wind is associated with a spiritual entity that presides over tempests, Iansã.
On another occasion, I asked the pai de santo to explain what he meant by
‘tempo’:
Tempo (time/weather) is all the orixás. When you want something you say:
tempo from north to south, from east to west, I need this and that. Tempo is
the Caboclo, is Iansã, Oxum, Iemanjá. Take the wind: you can’t see it, but
you feel it, could you have bigger proof than that? That nature is a living
body?
Are the orixás nature?- I asked.
They are global nature. The Caboclos10 inhabit the forest, Xango the quarry,
each has its own legend, and they all form a celestial body, they are all
messengers. – Toninho replied.
10
As the entities in the cosmology of Umbanda have a large number of ‘doubles’, the caboclo
gets multiplied to represent certain archetypes of rural background, such as the boiadeiro, the
cowboy, and even different types of Exus.
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While those explanations of nature differed from my own understanding of it,
on re-visiting those interpellations, I could not help but make a connection with the
view held by scholars from a fairly distinct background. The mathematician Alfred
North Whitehead (1920) stated that ‘nature is that which we observe in perception
through the senses’ (ibid.:3). Drawing on Newtonian physics and Einstein, Whitehead
makes the point that ‘nature is known to us in our experience as a complex of passing
events’ (ibid.:166) and sees nature as that which structures events in time and space.
Spending a great deal of their lives at sea, fishermen experience nature as inseparable
from the meteorological phenomena, which respond to the variables in the
atmosphere of the earth. Through the senses, they perceive the winds, the currents,
the force of gravity, the effects of the moon over the tides, and of the tides over the
quantity of fish, constantly exposed to the laws of nature. One senses the permeable
boundaries between the laws that rule life around the mangrove and that of the daily
activities in the colony. The next section focuses on a less permeable conception of
the mangrove that came into being when it entered the environmental assemblage.
From nature to environment: perceptions of the APARU
Zé Luiz tells me that the turning point that made relevant actors realise that
the mangrove was ‘worth saving’ came after a conversation he had with a biologist
who taught him a great deal about birds. When she arrived there years before the
APARU, there was little mangrove vegetation and she could only see white herons,
birds that are commonly associated with ‘degenerated’ landscapes. It was then that Zé
Luiz mentioned the piruinhas, a local denomination for birds otherwise known as
maçaricos, a specific variety of sandpipers. When she realised which bird he meant
her appearance changed, since those sandpipers are migratory birds that travel 20,000
kilometres every year and are considered a valuable environmental asset. Zé Luiz is
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convinced that if it were not for the maçaricos, the Jequiá would not have secured an
APARU.
With the mangrove becoming more distant from fishing activities, the distinct
areas along its banks signal the penetration of other forms of livelihood in the
community, along with the circulation of goods: the area closest to a beauty salon has
a pile of empty nail varnish bottles; surrounding the fish stand, there are remains of
fish scales left by the fishermen; the area to the back of households has carrier bags
full of kitchen waste; to the back of CEA is the area where boats are repaired; while
further into the dense part of the mangrove, one may come across the cellophane
wrappers used for selling drugs. Associated with pollution, waiting periods in the
fishing activity and macumba,11 the mangrove is also used as a hiding place for
crime-related activities,12 the main reason people told me not to go down it by myself.
Although generally speaking people in Z-10 see the community as drug-free, having
managed to keep out the infamous ‘bocas de fumo’, or dope selling spots which
characterise other favelas in Rio, drugs have become a major source of income for
people from nearby communities who apparently have some clientele at Z-10.
Besides, in overbuilt urban spaces there are not many spots where one is away from
the community’s eye, and the fact the mangrove is distant from people’s lives makes
it attractive for illicit activities. Drugs feed the imagination of people who see the
mangrove as a place of potential contamination, thus constituting a link in this
assemblage.
But while rubbish and drugs are things negatively associated with this
exclusive assemblage, the passage from nature to environment did foster
environmental-oriented concepts. In its capacity as APARU, the mangrove inspires
11
Also called ‘trabalho pro santo’, work for the saint, or despacho, macumba is a generic term
used for offerings laid in public spaces for the spiritual entities. It may take the form of
sympathetic magic someone performs to have an effect on the individual towards whom the
magic is directed. Macumba is also a generic denomination for anything associated with AfroBrazilian religion by those not familiar with distinctions between Umbanda and Candomblé.
12
In 2011 some drug dealers from nearby shantytowns were hiding horses there. The current
Residents Association president managed to get enough votes to be re-elected with the promise of
getting rid of the horses, the drugs and the rubbish.
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both despair and a sense of wonder, as evident in the samba lyrics by local composer
Marconi commissioned by COMLURB13 to create a song for its campaign:
Mother nature cries full of sadness/Progress should be about growing and
preserving/I want to see human beings living in a better future/Hand in hand
with nature in the APARU do Jequiá.
Wilson, a 67 year-old former fisherman, who works for the city council
cleaning the mangrove daily, sums up the difference the APARU made for him:
When I was a kid this was nothing to me. I just swam in the mangrove and
picked mussels and crabs. We used to jump from the bridge straight into it.
There was even sand here, really white sand. But now I know how important
it is.
Wilson’s differentiated perception of the mangrove is informed by his daily
activity of classifying what ought to be by its shores, and what should be removed.
Underpinning this process there is a clear sense that the mangrove’s boundaries
should be made impermeable to some man-made stuff. Now, what should be allowed
in that environmental assemblage is in turn dictated by so-called specialists. In
August 2012 a collective walk along the mangrove was organised with some major
stake holders, such as the Director for Environmental Education from the Municipal
Secretary of Environment of Rio de Janeiro, a representative from CEDAE, the Water
Board department, the Head of Environmental Issues from the Navy Radio Station,
the coordinator of the environmental department at the Federal University of Rio de
Janeiro, to name a few. They all hold different stakes for different reasons, and the
‘environment’ is a necessary rhetorical tool in nine out of ten political candidates in
13
Municipal Company for Urban Cleaning.
136
that electoral year. CEDAE had been called by the Secretary of Environment because
of the raw sewage going untreated into a preserved mangrove. Elmo, a very active
environmentalist in Ilha involved with the cause of Jequiá for twenty years, was part
of the political campaign of Marcelo Freixo, a candidate of the far left PSOL party.
Before the walk there was a photo session, recording of interviews, and a
short visit by the city deputy mayor. As the local mangrove specialist, Zé Luiz led the
way, stopping every so often to point at the effluents of raw organic matter flowing
straight into the mangrove, at a different crab species, or at medicinal plant deemed
‘good for the kidneys’. The walk happened without too many obstacles, though the
head of the Environmental Education at the City Council complained several times
about the smell and showed genuine concern about risk of contamination from the
open sewage. The navy representative offered his view:
Human beings are adaptable. The person in need will find a way of living in
whatever conditions. Look here, this house has invaded a protected area,
now, it is impossible for anybody to remove these people. But Brazil does
not invest in prevention. When people repair things they get votes, if you
invest in prevention, no one sees your work.
At this point Zé Luiz remarked:
From here onwards we can only enter with the permission of the
mangrove’s grandma.
Who is the mangrove’s grandma?- a few people asked.
She looks after the mangrove. Always when I come here I bring three cloves
of garlic and some cachaça and I give it to her. Now come and see where I
sleep sometimes.
137
There are a few excited voices asking about stories of the enchanted ones. ‘It’s
a very old legend. Cobra Noratu, Martin Pereira’, says Zé Luiz while showing us the
mark on his leg from when he was bitten by a snake at this very place. I was struck by
the sudden change in people’s focus of interest after the above interaction. It was as if
there were two discursive threads at work, one with a focus on separation and
purification with the predominance of terms such as ‘contamination’, ‘invasion’,
‘removal’, and one of respect and kin relations with the ‘mangrove’s grandma’ and
the exchange of goods between parts.
So far, the accounts in this chapter suggest that the mangrove of Jequiá holds
visible man-made elements such as plastic bottles and car parts; it thrives on invisible
man-made organic substances; it houses supernatural beings, medicinal herbs, 67
species of birds, and some varieties of molluscs and crustaceans, as well as being a
political and legal entity.14 As a bio-system all of its own, it invites many different
conceptions of nature/environment, as varied as the characters who voice those
views: the environmentalists, the Navy, the state, the politicians pursuing votes, the
residents and their rubbish, or the pai de santo. In sum, the mangrove constitutes both
a geographical and a metaphorical territory. I shall move on to a metaphorical reading
of the mangrove.
The mangrove as culture: mud, Exu and the embodiment of
ambiguities
In a paper exploring the sea as a ‘theory machine’, Stefan Helmreich notes
how water was used by anthropologists as a ‘common basis for the construction of
meaning’ (Helmreich 2011:133 citing Veronica Strang 2005), fostering connections
between fishing cultures and magic through its association with unpredictability, and
with globalization via the trope of currents, and flows. On a similar note, some
suggest water should be treated as a ‘total social fact’ due to its materiality
14
See chapter 6.
138
(Helmreich 2011:137). In the case of the mangrove, its material changeability
dictated by the twice-daily tidal alternations prompts similar connections in the realm
of immateriality.
There are many legends associated with mangroves, including folkloric
characters of indigenous influence, such as Boitatá and Biatatá, and ‘encantados’,15 a
denomination that rests on the mutual influence between indigenous and other
folkloric traditions, such as the Sereias do Lagomar (Lakesea mermaids), Capitão do
Mangue (Mangrove Captain), Vovó do Mangue (Mangrove’s Grandma), João
Calafoice, Cobra Norato, and Matita Pareira, to name a few (Vergara Filho &
Villas Boas, 1996). In the candomblé cosmogony,16 the orixá that represents the
mangrove is Nanã, the mother of all the water-related orixás, who lives at the point of
contact between the salt water and the fresh water. She is also referred to as grandma
for being the first mother of all humanity, and is said to decant the impure matter
produced by people. Nanã is also the mother of Margarida’s head,17 my fieldwork
godmother. But how do those mythical entities adjust to a mangrove that is composed
of more than water and mud? I thought that perhaps Umbandistas at Z-10 could point
me in the right direction.
Almost everyone I met at Z-10 was either an Umbanda follower, or had at
some point in their lives been one, and all of those were great admirers of the main
entity that rides the pai de santo18 Toninho, the Exu Seu Toquinho.19 The Tenda
Espirita Caboclo Arranca-Toco (full name of the terreiro at Z-10) is attached to the
house where the pai de santo grew up and where his main guide Caboclo Arranca15
Many ‘encantados’ (enchanted ones) are maritime or aquatic entities, though there are also air
and forest ones, often associated with the fishing tradition, a condition of existence for many
people throughout Brazil. This is a denomination used throughout the country, but more so
amongst the forest peoples.
16
With African roots, candomblé is a religion that developed in Brazil with influences that
encompass Yoruba, Gêge, Ketu and Angola traditions.
17
The term ‘head’ is used in Afro-Brazilian religions to refer to the spiritual part of the body
where the entities inhabit.
18
Pai or mãe de santo, literally father or mother of saint, is the person who initiates the neophyte,
and tells him or her who his or her spiritual guides are.
19
Seu Toquinho is the Exu that ‘comes down’ on Toninho.
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toco, an Exu associated with the forest, first descended on Toninho. In 2013, the
terreiro completed 42 years of existence, having started in 1971, just before the big
fire that swept across the mangrove and prompted Zé Luiz’s to fight for Jequiá. The
story goes (retold by a few people in the colony) that when Toninho was about
fourteen he was making a kite with his brother and an Orixá came down and
possessed him. For a while his mother took him to a number of terreiros, until a pai
de santo told him he had his own work to do. He started a terreiro at his parents’
house at the age of sixteen. Nicinha, Toninho’s elderly mother who passed away
shortly after I finished my fieldwork, who was also the daughter of Paulo Jaú, one of
the founding fishermen in the colony, told me her version of the story:
Toninho had never gone to any terreiro. One day he was making a kite, he
was only fourteen, and started crying: ‘Mum, take this thing away from me!
Get it away!’. He kept saying that there was a dog following him, but it was
already his guides. It was me and Antonio [her husband] who did his work.20
We took him to Quebra Côco, up on the hill, it was the forest, the Caboclo
said to us: “You and you are going to put the crown on my aparelho”
[apparatus or device]. The Caboclo made a mat out of mamona21 and kept
telling us how to do the work. It was the Caboclo that taught us, he would
take us everywhere, the waterfall, the beach. It was beautiful, just the three
of us.
Caboclo, the first entity that rode Toninho is related to Exu, and can
sometimes be a form of Exu, as in the case of the main entity that descends on
Toninho, Seu Toquinho. This is the myth of Exu as told by Sandra, a resident at Z-10:
Nanã is the mother of all Orixás. When Omulu was born, he was sick, all
covered in wounds. She asked the pantheon for a beautiful son, they told her
20
‘Work’ in Umbanda means the process of being spiritually prepared for sainthood.
21
A type of plant.
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they would give him a beautiful son, and that he would represent the opening
and the closing of life. That is Exu, Leba or Lebara. So she refused Omulu,
who then was looked after by one person or another. But Exu, was a lad, he
would do anything people asked him. He would play, he would do mischief,
so people misinterpreted things. Exu is not evil, is not a blood drinker that
comes to kill. Exu must be respected as an Orixá.
Exu is a controversial entity: Considered a disobedient orixá in Candomblé he
has to stay far from the space for the saints. For that reason his house is on the
roadside, or restricted to an outdoor section of the terreiro. In Umbanda a distinction
is made between the pagan Exu (Exu pagão) and the christened Exu (Exu batizado).
The former is the marginal Exu, without light, who can work for good and for evil.
The latter does good and is going through an evolutionary cycle; it is evolving.
If you observe you will see that nature is the most amazing thing; it is
abundant with joys and with war. Nothing I know was taken from
books. The orixás gave me everything on a plate, the order of nine
orixás, each with their own work. I simply wanted to show that
everyone is equal. There’s no fallen angel. – Toninho
It is through acknowledging displacement, dirt, ungroundedness that Exu is
prompted to act, to clean, to order. Exus are often seen as the caretakers of terreiros at
those centres that accept them as regular visitors, not least at Z-10, where Exu
Tranca-Rua is the official caretaker of the house. Generally speaking, Exu is seen as
the entity in charge of keeping the house in order, and the mediums safe. Pombagiras, their female counterpart, also help to clean and open the ways. Thus, Exu
represents tension, for if it negates the orderly world, by introducing the transgressive
element, it does so through very strict propositions.
The coupling of oppositions such as the polluting and the cleansing aspects
within the same entity are quite commonplace in anthropological works of myth
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analysis. One such example can be found in Ranajit Guha’s analysis of the multiple
versions of the Rahu myth amongst different casts in India (Guha 1985). In the
seminal work La Pensée Sauvage, Lévi-Strauss noted that mythical thought was
grounded on an awareness of a series of oppositions and a tendency towards a
progressive mediation between them. The trickster character, for example in the form
of the coyote as found amongst the Pueblo in North America, would stand for the
intermediary between the herbivores and the carnivores, which mirror the role of
clothes as the mediation between nature and culture, or of the rubbish as the mediator
between the village and the forest (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 260).Likewise, the mangrove
is the mediator between the river and the sea; the mud, between the water and the
soil; and Exu at the crossroads, between rural and urban ways of life, or tradition and
progress.
Arguably the most well-known folklorist in Brazil, Câmara Cascudo (2011),
studied the interface of meteorological phenomena and common sayings in his
analysis of tradition. In what he described as ‘folk science’, the fishermen are familiar
with the traditional knowledge of winds, rain, storms and tides, and respect the waters
because they hold more life than soil or air, being the breeding ground for the very
first organisms on earth. Thus, grounded on sympathetic magic, sacred images get
immersed in water to attract rain (ibid.).
The metaphorical relationship between mud and harm, in a mimetic
association with the sensorial experience of mud, is commonplace at Z-10. Fofão, the
head of the carnival percussion band at Z-10, who is employed by the city council to
clean the mangrove on a daily basis interpreted a doll found immersed in the mud of
the mangrove as macumba, or work done following the principles of sympathetic
magic: ‘Crabs live in mud, so people make macumba to bury the person they wish
harm in mud’.
Thus, a doll that is found immersed in the mud could have an effect on the
individual towards whom the magic was directed. Margarida also used the metaphor
to explain the downgrading of a samba school in Ilha, saying that the group was
‘atolado na lama’, ‘stuck in mud’. The sensation of stepping on the mud of a
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mangrove is quite unique because of its texture, thick and sticky, and of its
opaqueness. One cannot enter it with shoes or flip-flops for they would only get stuck
at the bottom. One has to go for it, to trust the mud is not going to cause any harm.
Lucimar, a highly praised medium at the terreiro, is the daughter of the former pai de
santo before Toninho. She works as a cleaner in a ‘casa de familia’, family house in
Copacabana, a wealthy part of Rio. Like Didil, she also comes from a fishing family.
Lucimar has an Exu in her (that means she receives it during trance), and sees the
mangrove as a spiritual realm:
There is power here because the fishermen are devoted to Yemanjá and to
St. Peter. The colony is the foundation for the terreiros, and spiritism is the
power of faith and nature. St. Peter commands the sky and the weather, and
the fishermen are under the forces of the Yemanjá, the sea, the mangrove,
the mud. And because of the mangrove, there are many spirits of the mud.
In Umbanda, the connection between Exu and mud is a genealogical one since
his mother, Nanã, inhabits swampy landscapes. But that relationship, I argue, is also
metaphorical. Christopher Tilley explains the metaphor as ‘a primary way in which
persons and cultures make sense of the world. When we link things metaphorically
we recognise similarity in difference, we think one thing in terms of the attribution of
the other'(Tilley 2002:24). David Harvey, drawing on Kuhn (1988), notes that
metaphors presuppose a literal meaning, and that they are powerful exactly because
they are grounded on experiences of the world (Harvey 1996:164). He goes on to
suggest that the values that people see in nature, are actually a product of the
metaphors and of the inner workings of imagination expressing practices in the
material world (ibid). Following that line of reasoning, Exu can be seen as a way
people make sense of the transformations around them. Associated with urban living,
dirt and crime, he protects against dangers of a different kind, urban dangers, while
143
also bringing order to the house.22 Next, I shall explore the nature of those marginal
beings.
Living on the edge: how marginal beings perform borders
‘...performing border is a means to make relations happen through extensions
across the differences that borders both make and mark, and that is part of what
generates a sense of ‘border-ness’.
Sarah Green (2010:272)
So what do the mangrove and Exu have in common? And what can Exu tell us
about people’s conception of the mangrove after it entered the environmental
assemblage? People’s discourses related to the mangrove appear to be loaded with
semantic content, as do people’s descriptions of Exu. Thus, I compiled the following
list of descriptive terms people use to talk about the mangrove: ‘muddy’, ‘manmade’, ‘dangerous’, ‘polluted’, ‘borderline’, ‘boundary’, ‘barrier’, ‘nature’,
‘heritage’, ‘dump’, ‘meeting point of sea and river water’, and ‘place where people
have sex and take drugs’. As for Exu, he is described as: ‘go-between’, ‘messenger’,
‘boundary crosser’, ‘deceitful’, ‘trickster’, ‘amoral’, ‘communicator between the
living and the dead’; and is associated with ‘crossroads’, ‘cities’, ‘bars’,
‘underworld’, ‘cemeteries’, and ‘promiscuity’. Impenetrable, muddy and home for
vermin and mosquitoes, the mangrove is also seen by biologists as a biological filter.
If it weren’t for the mangrove filtering everything, no one would stand the
smell here. The mangrove is just like the vulture, it cleans the impurities. Toninho
22
The terreiro is often referred to as ‘our house’.
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The contradictions associated with the mangrove mirror equivalent features
found in Exu who is often depicted as the ‘dustbin man’ who clears the rubbish from
people’s souls. In brief, it appears that the mangrove, a highly ambiguous
space/object, and Exu, an equally ambiguous entity, encompass right and wrong,
male and female, sacred and profane, rural and urban, clean and dirty, while
confusing any possible distinction between nature and culture. Moreover, both are
seen as lower forms of life which evolved through adaptation. But they do not display
a progressive evolution, given that theirs is not a teleological trajectory from
simplicity to complexity. Instead they have mastered the challenge of living in
between worlds. They are boundary objects par excellence. They do, however, evolve
in distinct ways: while the mangrove’s evolution follows the model of the biological
understanding of evolution as a process without a specific end, in tune with Darwin’s
use of evolution as ‘descent through modification’; Exu’s evolution projects the
Kardecist23 understanding of the term grounded on the mainstream misguided
conception of evolution as a teleological progression towards perfectibility, a spiritual
evolution from ignorance to enlightenment, not unlike the type of progress many
environmentalists preach. In other words, Exu in some ways incorporates the same
positivist aims of order and progress present in the national agenda of the young
Brazilian republic at the end of the nineteenth century, by reinterpreting AfroBrazilian culture with the lenses of the values compatible with a new social order,
dressing the past, the traditional, with new significations which are themselves
constantly being produced as the country develops. It is because Exu is ‘evolved’ that
his ambiguous character can be conceived as highly moral.
Due to its focus on evolution, within Umbanda there is a spectrum of purity
and Exu represents the least ‘pure’ of all Umbanda entities, hence the custom in
some terreiros of drawing a curtain over the other entities when Exu appears, usually
23
The term is after the founder of modern Spiritism in nineteenth century France, Allan Kardec.
Rather than granting religion a supernatural status, Allan Kardec, who was also a positivist,
offered its followers a ‘science of the spirits’, predicated on the natural sciences with a focus on
evolution, and adoption of terms such as ‘order’, ‘progress’, and ‘development’.
145
after midnight, lest he should ‘contaminate’ the others. However, this is not the
procedure adopted at Toninho’s who affirms that ‘Tranca-rua, the Exu that guards our
house, has proved it has evolved, so as an entity, he can come any time he wants’.
I asked Helena, Toninho’s wife, how Exu evolves:‘He does charity work’ –
she said, and added:
When Exu descends on someone, he is already baptised in order to make
the medium evolve. When the medium is born and bred in the saint, Exu
comes already with a name, he traces the ponto riscado,24 he already drinks
and smokes, he’s already baptised. In our house we reversed the process of
the pagan Exu. The more charity work they do, the more light they gain.
Note that when Helena says that Exu is already baptised, she is implying that
being baptised refers to Exu’s introduction to the cultural world of social beings who
have names, knowledge, and who drink and smoke, which by extension, is the world
of pollution. Well, I have already observed that despite being more polluted, the
mangrove conceptually gained environmental capital when it became an APARU. In
sum, both the mangrove and Exu have been ‘baptised’ in a way, the former by
becoming an area of environmental protection, the latter by being socialised and
‘domesticated’.
In an analysis of the changes in the Yonggom ritual in Papua New Guinea,
Stuart Kirsch observes that ‘symbols are only powerful repositories of meaning when
the referents are familiar’(2001:258), and that in the case of the Yonggom, mythical
characters stopped sharing people’s landscape under the impact of the Ok Tedi
copper and gold mine. What is interesting about Exu, is that he provides an updated
24
The pontos riscados, which are mandala- like drawings made on the floor with chalk, are also a
feature of Preto-Velhos at the Terreiro Caboclo Arranca-Toco.
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version of the environment inhabited by orixás, embodying contemporary ambiguities
of both the landscape and life styles of those who live therein. For Luz & Lapassade
(1972), who were writing in the context of the countercultural movement of the
1970s, the baptised Exu eventually succumbed to the mainstream ideology (ibid.:60),
thereby ceasing to be a transgressor. However, I would argue that the figure of Exu in
Toninho’s terreiro stands for a counter-structure, in Victor Turner’s sense, since it not
only provides a mirror-image of the environmentally disturbed landscape represented
by the mangrove with its negative semiotic signs such as pollution and sewage, but
most importantly, it welcomes this state of liminarity, along with its marginal
elements.
In a study about the performance of borders in the Aegean sea, Sarah Green
draws attention to how the separation that borders imply also generate connections
and zones of exchange (Green 2010:263). I would argue that both the mangrove and
Exu are boundary subjects in that sense; being associated with transgression, they
also offer the potentiality for transformation and evolution, which is why, as marginal
beings, they can hold such contradictory elements. If Exu can drink and smoke
because he has ‘proven’ he has evolved through charity work, the mangrove, polluted
as it is, has proven it can co-exist with sewage and still thrive. Both Exu and the
mangrove are prime links in this urban ecological assemblage since they sustain life
through their cleaning skills, they add rather than subtract, and are not the ‘urban fall
from an edenic nature’ (Hinchliffe 2008) some would claim. Thus, unlike the
environmental governance representatives who currently enact the mangrove as a
boundary, a line25 between community and pollution that has to be purified in order
for the mangrove to be enacted as environment, others enact the mangrove as a place,
as a boundary subject with a metaphysical counterpart.
25
Sarah Green (2010) makes a distinction between border as a line and as a place, the former
referring to an abstract political line, the latter to the visible regions the borderline creates.
147
Conclusion
The Portuguese word for time, ‘tempo’, meaning both time and weather
phenomena, is the living conception of nature for the fishermen, who have to rely on
the tidal changes to go fishing, and for Umbanda followers, for whom weather stands
for the Orixás, often explained as nature with agency. The idea of nature as a separate
realm which often appears in environmental discourses is rarely seen as such by most
people I encountered at Z-10, for whom the differentiated aspects of natural
phenomena are parts of a chain of cause and effect. People’s social relationships are
interwoven with a mangrove that embodies changes both as a thing as a concept.
Being literally under people’s feet, as seen in the account from Diná, and
dictating the architecture of their households, the mangrove belongs to people’s
experience of place. As a biological species, as fishermen, and as members of
families whose lives depended on the yield from the sea and mangrove, people were,
and still are, though to a much lesser extent, part of that ecosystem. But the cultural
significance of the mangrove, and of the sea by extension, though still present today,
is rather subdued. The surface needs to be scratched for one to see just how present it
is. While trying to unveil the backbone of a belief system whose higher entities are
interpreted as forces of nature, some categories came to the fore which implicitly, or
explicitly, spoke back to the mangrove. As cultural beings, people have developed
concepts and doctrines about nature, and practices enmeshed with nature, that
maintain the permeability of the borders between them and the mangrove. Later,
under environmental governance, there was an attempt to make those boundaries
more excluding, mostly through cleaning practices (see chapter 5), placing people
externally to the mangrove.
I have argued in this chapter that while the mangrove is enacted as a
biophysical entity under the environmental paradigm, it is also perceived as a
metaphysical one. If in animism, non-humans, and sometimes landscapes, are
endowed with human qualities, here we are faced with an alternative version:
148
supernatural entities take on the qualities of the landscape. Broadly speaking, nature
provides interpretative frames since its mutable aspects are a mirror of the ever
changing social landscape people inhabit. More specifically, the mangrove, and the
mud that constitutes it, is the physical counterpart of the metaphysical Exu. Both the
mangrove and Exu balance things out, allowing pollution to co-exist with order.
Ethically speaking, the mangrove and Exu embody the paradoxes and the
complexities of its constitutive elements, inviting a distinctive moral stance towards
the environmentally protected APARU which lies in the concept of ‘cleaning’ with
all the spiritual baggage it entails.
149
Chapter 4 – Tronqueira1
Your thesis about nature is really about Umbanda because the thunder belongs
to Xangô, and the rain to St. Peter.
Lucimar, a medium at Terreiro Caboclo Arranca-Toco
Figure 21 - Didil at the former Texaco island where he cleans his fishing net.
1
Originally used for the thick wooden poles that sustain a wooden gate as those used in farms, the
tronqueira in Umbanda refers to a space full of plants generally recognised as the house of Exu
where all negativities are released [descarregadas].
150
The previous chapters suggest that there are in fact many mangroves,
depending on whether the onlooker is a city council official, an environmental
activist, a fisherman, or an Umbandista. It is also apparent that in the context of this
encounter between development and a mangrove, some things emerge which are
social natural, such as the water that constitutes the mangrove which holds oil,
sewage, plastic, and the metaphysical entity Exu. But while in the previous chapter I
focused on the borderline characteristics of both the mangrove and Exu, here the
mangrove will appear only marginally, and the concept of nature, and ritual practices
with elements of nature, will take centre stage.
The argument here is that Umbandistas’ relationship with nature, which
includes the mangrove and Exu but is not restricted to them, is grounded on a
perceived need to domesticate natural traits, and to culturalise nature. This is what
Umbandistas understand as trabalho, a work that is productive insofar as the worthy
medium is in constant process of development, desenvolvimento, and evolution,
evolução, in this two-way exchange between nature and nurture, between the nonhuman and the urban world. I also argue that Umbanda assembles ecological aspects
that encompass natural and cultural elements and a particular ethical disposition
towards cleaning, both with regards to their spiritual inner world, and to the urban
landscapes they inhabit. I will conclude by arguing that despite the fact that
Umbandistas are not ostensibly involved in the environmental assemblage, the role
they play in the ecological assemblage is significant given how many residents in Z10 have family connections with the fishing activity and share an Umbanda-informed
understanding of nature, and ethical dispositions towards it.
The inclusion of Umbanda in a study about the assemblage around the
mangrove is justified not only by the fact that nature is at the core of its practices and
doctrines, but also because those practices unveil an inclusive ecological assemblage,
rather than the exclusive environmental network. In the Umbanda collective, the
polysemic signifier nature encompasses physical and metaphysical social natures,
with spiritual guides signifying both natural and cultural places, and related signifiers
such as ‘natural’, ‘by nature’, or ‘innate’, acquire a multi-natural logic. This multi151
faceted view of nature warrants our attention because it provides a path into reading
against the grain (Spivak 1988) of current naturalist and environmentalist discourses.
I shall start by presenting a brief account of the origins of Umbanda, its main
doctrinal aspects, scientific pretentions, and connections with the nationalist agenda.
Next, I will focus on the moral tenets that guide people’s everyday lives and indicate
their relationship with entities, introducing the reader to ethnographic terms such as
‘development’ and ‘work’ in the ‘evolution’ of the medium. In order to domesticate
nature, mediums need to ‘know’ their spiritual kin and nurture reciprocal relations
with them. I will then focus on the ritual itself, to illustrate the phenomenological
aspect of the relations between mediums and entities, and how nature and culture
feature in the intermingling of physical and metaphysical realities. The section that
follows will then identify the four main understandings of the term nature in
Umbanda practices: 1- nature as a place, as an all-encompassing realm 2- nature as
‘tempo’, meaning both time and weather; 3- nature as an innate characteristic,
something one is born with; and 4- nature as a resource for healing practices, namely
the leaves, grains, flowers and fruits. In the last section, I will address the ontological
issue and identify potential points of connection with the broader environmental
assemblage to explore the ethical role of Umbanda. I will look at a policy currently in
place elsewhere in the city of Rio de Janeiro which includes followers of AfroBrazilian religions in the environmental assemblage as an example of how public
policies can encompass different magisterial.2
Scratching the surface
One of the first times Seu Toquinho, the spiritual entity that descends on
Toninho addressed me, it was in the middle of a gira, the fortnightly Umbanda ritual.
2
This is a reference to the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1997) who coined the term
‘non-overlapping magisteria’ to critically assess Religion and Science as separate domains of
authority and concerning distinct matters of inquiry.
152
He called me to the centre of the room with all mediums standing around, and said I
was welcome there because I was a historian, like himself and all other orixás. And
indeed, the entities in Umbanda can be seen as representations of national stereotypes
who lived at different moments in Brazilian history. The birth of Umbanda has been
traced to Zélio Fernandino de Morais, who in 1908 was possessed by a Caboclo3
spirit in the municipality of Niterói, the town founded by Arariboia mentioned in
chapter 2. Having its origins in modern naturalism, Umbanda has often been
associated with processes of industrialization, urbanization (Brown 1985; Fry 1986;
Ortiz 1978;Turner 1987), and class formation (Willems 1965; Maggie 1977; Birman
1995).
It is important to note that it was only after the 1970s that Umbanda started to
be studied by intellectuals and anthropologists and stopped being interpreted as a
degeneration of Candomblé, considered a superior and purer form of Afro-Brazilian
religion. For the general public not familiarised with those practices, the term
macumba started to be disseminated in late nineteenth century connoting degenerated
African practices (Giumbelli 2006). It is still used generically as an offensive way of
referring to Afro-Brazilian practices. Its derogatory connotation probably comes from
its association with sympathetic objects believed to potentially inflict harm onto
others. The term has been appropriated by Umbandistas themselves like Zane, a
former fisherwoman, who observed that ‘Everybody in the colony is now a
macumbeiro!’ when she saw how crowded Toninho’s terreiro was. But as seen in
chapter 3, for many Umbandistas macumba is the name of the work they make for the
entities.
Paulo Barreto, a.k.a. João do Rio,4 who wrote The Religions of Rio (1904),
describes some ritualistic practices of Afro-Brazilian origin in the streets of Rio at the
3
As the entities in the cosmology of Umbanda have a large number of ‘doubles’ or variations, the
Caboclo figure is multiplied to represent certain archetypes of rural background, such as the
boiadeiro, or cowboy.
4
Having been described as an Oscar Wilde from the tropics, João do Rio’s text in prose form is
ethnographically rich, including dialogues with ‘informants’, songs from terreiros, and countless
anecdotes.
153
turn of the century and portrays pais de santo as con-men who would fake being
possessed by spirits to get money out of people in need. From around that time
onwards, the Angola tradition, which was later associated with Umbanda, became
predominant in Rio de Janeiro, and its main entities, the Preto Velho and Caboclo5
started occupying a position below that of the orixás. At first it was believed that such
spirits had to be segregated, not being accepted in the Kardecist, or Spiritist centres in
Rio. Early researchers perceived the Angola tradition as less ‘pure’ than the nagô
tradition, since its entities were like amalgams of national constructs, rather than the
more ‘authentic’ African deities. The folklorist Édison Carneiro observes that the
religious traditions from Angola differed from those from the Nagôs, an African
ethnic group, who followed a more structured and hierarchical order. The perception
of Umbanda as degenerate persisted, not least in the realm of anthropology. City of
Women (1947), an ethnography on the practices of Candomblé in Bahia by Ruth
Landes, refers to terreiros with Caboclo practices as less authentic.6 Followers
themselves thought of those spirits as lesser entities. Thus, Umbanda started off in
limbo, being rejected by both its African and European origins.
After the 1930s when urbanization, industrialization and class society become
social realities in Brazil, this new religion started to be organised. While the
anthropologist Diana Brown identifies the founding members of Umbanda as
belonging to the middle classes of Rio, others observed that this religion attempted to
bridge the resulting contradictions brought about by the transformations from rural
and collective living to more urban and individualized life styles, associating it with
populations of freed slaves or poor immigrants. This emerging proletariat lacked the
necessary skills to integrate the growing class society and were marginalised and
pushed towards the peripheries of burgeoning urban centres. Not surprisingly, the
5
Caboclos, Preto Velhos, the Child and Exus are sometimes referred to in capital letters as
individuals with a past life and full names, and at others as generic entities in lower case. For the
sake of consistency I have opted for the use of capital letters.
6
For more on perceptions of Umbanda as a degenerated religious form in relation to Candomblé,
see Fry 1986; Serra 1995; Dantas 1988).
154
new entities that started to descend on mediums were referred to as ‘povo da rua’,
‘people of the streets’.
Some scholars have explored the notion of Brazilianness during spirit
possession (Ortiz 1978; Fry 1986;Turner 1987),7 and nostalgia (Carvalho 1988)
showing how Caboclo, the entity that stands for the generic Amerindian, a major
component in the construction of the national identity,8 mirrors the nineteenthcentury romantic representation found in the literature of that time. The Preto Velho,
an old black man who is humble and full of arthritis, is an entity that stands for the
spirit of slaves, while Zé Pilintra, one of many Exus, is an entity dressed in 1930s
clothes and a facsimile of the malandro,9 a mixed-race spiv who manages to ascend
without working too hard thanks to his charm.
Some readings of Umbanda see it as a religion that represents submission by
omitting the brutalities of slavery and depicting Preto Velho as a humble old man,
bent with arthritis. By contrast, the cult of Exu would stand for a ritual of liberation
(Lapassade & Luz 1972). The sociologist Renato Ortiz (1978) sees two simultaneous,
and seemingly contrasting, processes: that of whitening, via the assimilation of
Kardecist and Catholic values, and that of blackening, with the inclusion of African
elements and entities. Broadly speaking, there is a general understanding that the
origins of Umbanda are related to a process of social legitimation (Giumbelli 2006;
Ortiz 1978).
7
It is worth noting that some authors see Umbanda as the religion that best reflects the
construction of the Brazilian identity.
8
The second phase in Brazilian literature is often classified as romantic nationalism, covering
most of the nineteenth century between independence and the proclamation of the Republic. The
Republic is then sub-divided in old and new republics and Brazilianism emerges as a movement
corresponding to the latter, with Caboclo representing the roots of the new Brazilianness (Lang
2009). A similar strategy was observed by Elizabeth Povinelli in the context of Australia (2011).
9
A ubiquitous representation during the New Republic of President Getúlio Vargas, the malandro
penetrated other realms besides Umbanda. After Walt Disney came to Rio in 1943, as part of the
American ‘good neighbour’ policy, he created the character Joe Carioca, inspired in the already
existing malandro representation, a Brazilian parrot who befriends Donald Duck. Joe Carioca
drinks cachaça (a sugarcane spirit), is always coning people to make money, but is nevertheless
liked by all. The anthropologist Lilia Schwartz (1998) suggests that the malandro is an indication
of the relevance of the issue of miscegenation for the national agenda of that period.
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Those readings resonate with the socio-economic trajectory of Z-10 where
most of the fishing families were migrants and experienced significant
transformations brought about by development and industrialization. But however
relevant such commonalities are the practice of Umbanda at Z-10 has idiosyncrasies
which I argue are informed by both the fishing tradition and the ontologically varied
world of urban social natures. In contrast to readings that see Umbanda merely as a
means to integrate the class society, I would argue that the practices at Tenda Espirita
Caboclo Arranca-Toco display anti-establishment traits when it welcomes Seu
Toquinho as the most sought-after guide in the house, even if it does so through an
adaptive, productive and moral framing.
In Brazil, Exu has been syncretised with the devil because of its seemingly
amoral behaviour and trickster nature, even more so after the advent of popular forms
of Protestant evangelism which demonizes Afro-Brazilian religions in general. On
one occasion when I was leaving the terreiro with a ‘saint work’10 in my hands I was
told to cover it up, lest people from nearby communities should see me. This
marginalized status of Umbanda explains why, despite its ubiquity in terms of how it
informs people’s cosmologies, it remains underground and remarkably invisible to
the unwatchful eye. However, contrary to popular belief, Umbanda is a highly moral
practice, with the natural realm granting the raw material to remedy wrongdoings. I
shall now turn to two concepts in Umbanda that guide the prescribed order of things,
namely ‘development’, and ‘work’, the means to achieve it.
Work, war, order and development: domesticating nature
In Umbanda, the evolution of a medium is based on a progressive
development through the performance of ‘works’ and the practice of charity.
Compliance with those principles is a condition for staying in the terreiro, and ritual
practices are not only seen as trabalho, ‘work’, but also involve a great deal of
10
Offering to the entity often laid out on a terracota tray.
156
dedication, such as weekly prayers at the houses of those in need. This obrigação,
‘obligation’, expected from all mediums, was pointed out as something that made
people stop going to the terreiro. Margarida was one of them: ‘I just did not want all
that work anymore’.
Gira, the fortnightly ritual is one of those commitments, albeit a more pleasant
one given the element of music and dance. It usually lasts about two and a half hours
and consists of prayers, drumming, singing, spells of sermons by the pai-de-santo,
spirit possession by the mediums who have the ‘gift’ of incorporating the guides, and
rituals involving the manipulation of plants, grains and popcorn. In some initiations,
the neophytes have to walk on dried leaves to then be washed with grains and water.
The work during ritual and as part of the medium’s development involves thinking
through, and working with nature, and it is this productive manipulation of materials
from nature that makes the medium worthy of some return, not unlike John Locke’s
suggestion that labouring the land could somehow grant ownership over it.
Food and drinks as objects of exchange are of extreme importance during
ritual, and trance, or the incorporation of what could be described as ancestor spirits,
is an essential part of healing. At the terreiro, trance is a language just as the rite is
(Lapassade & Luz 1972), and beginners have to learn that language. Natural
landscapes are also an essential component of ritual beyond the space of the terreiro:
works may be placed by the sea, by a waterfall, or by the mangrove, depending on
what the entity demands. As we shall see, this network of mediums, works, and
charitable practices lies beyond the geographical space of the colony, for many
mediums come from afar due to the reputation of Toninho and Seu Toquinho at
Tenda Espirita Caboclo Arranca-Toco, and works can also travel to other places.
The content of messages during giras is impregnated with nation-oriented
overtones, including idioms with military roots and sermons that speak about the
pursuit of order and work. The pantheon of entities is structured hierarchically like an
army, and terms like ‘soldiers’, ‘war’, ‘army, and ‘legion’ are used, as well as
imagery of weapons such as swords, bow and arrows, and knives. The orixás form
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lines, or phalanxes, which are associated with places, and within this hierarchy
(according to some sources, at the bottom of the structure) the ‘inferior entities’ of
Umbanda form the legions. Umbanda is not a codified religion11 and entities, the
lines they belong to, norms and practices, can very according to terreiros and to
followers. Due to these factors, most tables of entities found in ethnographies about
Umbanda proved rather useless to understand the cosmology at the terreiro in Z-10.
Moreover, those armies are complex and numerous, and rather complicated
since the cabalistic number 7, inherited from the occultist strand of Umbanda, is used
to multiply all figures. To obscure things further, each centre has different variations
of the lines and associated entities, and since mediums may have belonged to
different terreiros in their lives, they will use the selection they are more familiar
with. Most academic and online sources (there is a vast number of terreiros with
websites for public use) identify seven lines, but at Toninho’s most people agree there
are nine mentors of the house. The table I compiled with the help from Umbandistas
at Z-10 would look more or less like this:
Sky
Quarry
Sea
Waterfalls
Iron
Forest
Mangrove
Thunder
& Wind
Margin
& Illness
&
Popcorn
& Rivers
Jesus
Christ
St.
Peter
Nossa
Senhora
dos
Navegantes
Nossa
Senhora da
Conceição
St. George
St.
Sebastian
Saint Anne
St.
Barbara
St.
Lazarus
Oxalá
Xangô
Yemanja
Oxum
Ogum
Oxossi
Nanã
Iansã
Omulu
or
Obaluayê
In an overlap of African deities and Catholic saints, the Caboclo and the
Boiadeiro are syncretised with Jesus (referred to as Oxalá), or with St. Sebastian
11
There have been attempts to make Umbanda more uniform since at least 1941, with the I
Congress of Umbanda Spiritism (I Congresso de Espiritismo de Umbanda), followed by the
creation of other national and regional associacions.
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(referred to as Oxossi). Exu is syncretised with St. Lazarus (referred to as Omolu)
and its female counterpart, Pombagira, with Nanã. There are a few Pombagiras at
Toninho’s terreiro, but the most popular is Maria Padilha for whom red roses are a
necessary prop. Interestingly, there is a female medium who sometimes receives
Zé Pilintra, a male Exu, in a curious instant of cross-dressing. There are also the
Pretos Velhos, the line of souls (almas), and Erês, the line of children. Because
Umbanda entities are ‘personalised’, in other words, there are many different Exus,
Children, Preto Velhos and Caboclos, each with its particular forename, the list
under the above table would be very big indeed. So, for example, the line of
Oxossi may have as some of its guides Caboclo Arranca Toco, Cabocla Jurema,
Caboclo Araribóia, Caboclo Guiné, Caboclo Arruda, Caboclo Pena Branca and
Caboclo Cobra Coral. There are also many Exus: Sete Encruzilhadas, Caveira,
Tranca Rua, Exu do Lodo, Exú Tronqueira, Marabô, dos Ventos, da Praia, Zé
Pilintra, and of course, Seu Toquinho. Exus may appear under any of the above
lines, though they often work under the line of Ogum, the warrior, and are almost
always associated with Omulu, the entity that rules over disease and who,
according to the myth told by Sandra in chapter 3, is Exu’s brother.
The use of terminology related to warfare by the entity Seu Toquinho not
only conveys the everyday struggles of human beings to survive, but also of
Umbandistas to lead a moral existence in their path towards development. The
premise that Umbandistas are warriors at war, within themselves and with the
world, legitimates the ‘work’ that is being demanded by the entities, and points to
the tensions underlying the maintenance of order, such as the two personal dramas
narrated below.
.
It was early morning and Didil rowed the boat to where he had left the
fishing net in the previous evening recalling the reference line between one of
the supporting pillars of the Rio-Niterói bridge and the oil container in the
Navy grounds. Due to thieves at sea, it can be risky to attach plastic bottles
to nets as floats to indicate to the fishermen where they left their net, one of
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the city-related problems fishermen must take into account. ‘Can you see
how the tower in the Navy grounds is in line with the bridge?’ I couldn’t
quite see the imaginary line he was tracing, but trusted he would after fifty
years at sea. We couldn’t find the bottle he had attached to the end of the
net and I started to get very apprehensive recalling in my head what he had
said the previous day: ‘Let’s see if you are pé quente’, an expression used to
refer to people that bring others luck. If he lost his net with me on the boat I
would be seen as a bad omen and no fisherman would ever want to take me
out again. We looked for the net for almost half an hour. The day was
getting lighter. I started to think that his brother, a renowned pai de santo at
Z-10, would want to do some ‘work’ on me to get rid of whatever I had that
brought Didil bad luck. A new net would be: 1,000 reais, around £350,
equivalent to approximate six weeks yield. To my relief, we did eventually
find the net. The wind had been unusually strong during the night and had
pushed the middle of the net away from Didil’s marking. On the way back he
kept repeating ‘Did you see the state I was in?’ To buy another net Didil
would have had to borrow money, and it could take him years to pay it back.
A few months later his net did get stolen. At that time people associated his
misfortune with the fact that he, a married man, was seeing another woman
from a different community: ‘He messes around, that’s why stuff like that
happens. He’s deep in mud’, a common friend said.
After Didil started ‘messing around’, he stopped playing the drums at the
terreiro. No one would stop him from going, but it was assumed that his guides may
react since they rule over the wind that can push the fishing net away from where it
had been placed, over the sea that he has to face every time he goes out to earn his
living, and over the mud that may smother his progress in life. In other words, his
‘development’ as an Umbandista, and more specifically, as an Ogan, had been
thwarted by his wrongdoings, hence the metaphorical reading that he was ‘deep in
mud’. Years ago, Lucimar’s father Março also found himself at odds with his guides.
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Março, a former fisherman who worked as a gardener and odd-job man for the Navy,
was also a renowned pai de santo during the 1950s and 1960s in Z-10:
My father used to be the main pai de santo in the colony before Toninho
opened his centre. You should have seen the line of cars that would park
near his terreiro. But when he started having an affair out of wedlock with a
cambona,12 his orixás left him one after the other. Eventually, he stopped
receiving the guides and had to close the centre.
The seeming boycott from the part of Março’s guides reveals that reciprocal
relations with the guides are based on moral predicaments in the mediums’ daily
lives. In the cosmogony of Umbanda every individual has a superior and an
inferior ego, and past experiences influence the future, following karmic law.
Work must be done under the orientation of guides to domesticate pagan spirits
that may be causing harm. I was intrigued to understand what ‘pagan’ meant, since
it stood in opposition to the baptised Exu who smokes and drinks. Lucimar shed
light on the matter when she told about her pre-disposition of having Omulu as her
head’s father when she was born. Her Omulu was then a pagan entity:
When Omulu first descended on me, I was having an asthma attack and my
body was covered in open wounds. He was angry when he came down. He
should have been ‘worked’ on before. When my father [Toninho is her father
in sainthood] arrived, he took him out of my body and started to talk with
Omulu using a dialect of his time. Toninho had me do a lot of work for
Omulu. Nowadays, I only have asthma once a year and the medicine works.
It didn’t before because Omulu hadn’t been worked on and was inside me.
This pagan Omulu is understood as an inner harmful trait, trapped inside
Lucimar’s body. Medicine for asthma will not cure, if ‘work’ is not performed so that
12
Term used to refer to a medium that act as helper to possessed mediums during giras
161
Omulu’s untamed nature can ‘come out’. In other words, ‘pagan’ is untamed nature
and stands in opposition to domesticated, or ‘baptised’. According to Lucimar and
Toninho, although nature gives us predispositions and the condition of possibility of
being a powerful medium, the entity may need to be ‘worked on’ or ‘domesticated’
by means of ‘development’. In other words, nature’s potentiality is achieved through
culture, which explains why Umbandistas ‘work’ nature using popcorn, leaves, fruits
and grains to perform healing ‘works’ for the medium’s development. So nature has
this contradictory role of both granting the possibility of healing, and of needing to be
culturalised, as we saw in the previous chapter with the baptised Exu, an entity who
having been socialised, or indoctrinated some would say (Negrão 1996), knows the
difference between doing good work and evil work. In fact, it is this very distinction
between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ that distinguishes the baptised Exu from a pagan one, and
that goes beyond the limits of Z-10 (see Ortiz 1978; Negrão 1996). In other words,
the baptised Exu has been ‘moralised’ (Negrão 1996).
Some authors claim that the nature-based Candomblé was replaced by a
history-focused Umbanda (Lapassade and Luz 1972), but I was led to believe that
here history penetrates the realm of nature. Toninho once said that ‘If somebody in
this house gives you a rose petal, don’t throw it away, because that petal has culture’,
his use of the term culture suggests that the petal has a history and should be valued
for that reason. Following that reasoning, the mangrove as the dialectical product of
history has value. It has developed, it was domesticated and baptised, and now it is
thriving as social nature; it is nature and it has culture. But it became clear to me that
the ‘natural’ orixás were cultural too when Toninho explained that ‘The waterfall is
the culture of Oxum’. Not unlike Viveiros de Castro’s notion of perspectivism
(2004)13 amongst Brazilian Amerindians, Toninho is saying that from the perspective
of Oxum’s body the waterfall is culture. And indeed, when an entity descends on a
13
The logic of perspectivism is based on a dualist model predicated on similarities between
bodies (we are all nature) and singularity of souls (individual cultures), as opposed to the
Amerindian thought of differentiation of bodies with a common soul. The latter logical structure
is what makes blood be like manioc beer to the jaguar, for the soul of man and jaguar is but one.
Likewise, from the perspective of an orixá who inhabits nature, the waterfall is her culture.
162
medium, the former assumes the body of the medium and sees things from that
perspective. Now, if the waterfall is the culture of Oxum, I thought the mangrove, as
the embodiment of contemporary ambiguities, must be the culture of Exu. Fearful of
reading too much into this metaphor, I asked Toninho what he thought of my
interpretation, to which he replied: ‘I take my hat off to you’. Drawing on Roy
Rappaport who, among the Tsembaga, noted that ‘ritual not only expresses
symbolically the relationships of a congregation to components of its environment
but also enters into these relationships in empirically measurable ways’ (Rappaport
1984:3), I shall now turn to how those relations are manifested during gira.
The Gira
Religion, like art, lives in so far as it is performed, that is, in so far as its
rituals are ‘going concerns’
(Turner, 1996).
Mediumship involves vocation and embodied knowledge, and a great deal of
the transmission of that knowledge is through empirical experience and repetition,
even if some mediums did mention that they search the web for bits of information,
or occasionally read books on Umbanda. ‘You will soon learn’, or ‘You have to ask
so and so, she’s more experienced, I’m just a beginner’, people kept telling me.
Toninho was nevertheless adamant: ‘I never read anything, I hate reading. Everything
I know is because of the orixá who gave it to me’. Likewise, Didil told me he had
learned all the atabaque rhythms from the orixá himself who descended on Toninho.
This embodied experience also follows a liturgy and starts as one arrives for a
gira which usually happens once a fortnight, and lasts about two and a half to three
hours. Roupa de santo, saint’s clothes, is an important aspect of Umbandistas’ lives,
and neophytes are told not to wear those clothes outside the terreiro. The women and
163
men get dressed in an annexe room. Women wear long skirts and loose blouses of the
colours of the entity to which homage is being paid, while the men mostly wear white
clothes. Starting from the greeting of images in the sacred space, there is a fixed
script for most of the embodied sociality around the terreiro, and how comfortable
one is with the symbolic language of a particular house indicates how knowledgeable
the adept is, leaving little room for improvisation. Before stepping in the main room,
one should take the shoes off, and enter by a side door, avoiding the front one. Once
inside, the medium goes to each of the images that are around the many walls to greet
them, after rubbing their hands in water, not forgetting to also greet the drums. Those
who frequent the place carry in their body language the assertiveness of knowing how
to greet saintly folks. Once all have congregated inside the main room, Toninho gives
notification of future events and prompts a medium to start with a prayer to the
Virgin Mary or to Our Lord, or by singing a song. When Toninho asks the ogans to
play a barravento, a very fast rhythmic beat, one knows that the gira has started.
The concern with the overall aesthetics of the session is evident in the way
lighting is manipulated. There are many light switches to produce distinct visual and
sensorial effects: dimmers, florescent lights, bright lights and fans, and only very few
will dare touch the switches at the prompting of Toninho. During moments with fast
drumming and singing, usually before spirit possession starts, the lights tend to be
quite bright. By contrast, just before Toninho re-appears from the little room where
he changes into the clothes of Seu Toquinho, the Exu that descends on him, the lights
are dimmed. In this semi-darkness, soothing for bodies tired by the physical exertion
of dancing and incorporating, Seu Toquinho starts to speak, almost always focusing
on moral issues such as the behaviour of mediums, the type of demands being made,
and shortcomings regarding duties in the terrier, with the idiom of war being
constantly deployed to refer to the misfortunes inherent to life. Once a year, the
terreiro goes on a day trip to a waterfall in areas specifically designated for the
practice of Afro-Brazilian religions.14
14
The photographs in this section were taken at one of those annual events. The main reason for
this being that when I first started fieldwork, Toninho asked me not to take pictures inside the
164
Figure 22: This privately owned area, ‘Ecological park of Orixás',lets out plots for giras for the
duration of about 5 hours. Groups of Umbandistas from a number of terreiros in Rio go there in big
buses booked specially for the occasion. Note the man at the bottom left carrying a box full of leaves
for the gira.
It is worth noting the adjective ‘ecological’ used to name the park, as well as
the variety of elements that are assembled during an outdoors gira: from the orixá
statues scattered through the park (I photographed more than 21 different life-size
statues of orixás and ‘people of the street’) to the leaves collected for the ritual,
including also bottles of spirit, cigars, flowers, popcorn, drums, songs, props for
entities, chairs for the elderly, and a huge amount of food.
terreiro during giras. Following his request, the pictures inside the terreiro are of images alone,
and all those during gira were taken at the Parque Ecológico dos Orixás, Ecological Park of
Orixás, in Piabetá in the district of Magé in the periphery of Rio.
165
Figure 23: On the left, the table laid out with the bowls of corn, beans, and vegetables to be thrown
over the mediums' heads. In the middle, the different ties and cigars for the Exus; on the right, Seu
Toquinho riding Toninho.
During gira, the entities are incorporated by the devices, ‘aparelhos’, or
matter, ‘matéria’, terms used to refer to the bodies of mediums, to the sound of the
atabaques15 and songs (pontos) which work as cues for the medium to enter trance,
triggered by the evocation of a word or phrase in the song, related to a given entity.
Thus, the song below to ‘tempo’, time, is evoking Exu, since Exu lives in the streets:
O tempo não tem casa
Time doesn’t have a house
O tempo mora na rua
Time lives in the street
Mas a morada do tempo
But the dwelling of time
É no clarão da lua
Is in the light of the moon
The adejá, a bell shaped instrument played either by the pai de santo or
another hierarchically important medium, is also used to call the saint, sometimes
played near the medium’s head, sometimes next to the bottom hem of her skirt. Paô
15
Tall, Afro-Brazilian hand drum made of wood.
166
is the term used for the clapping of hands in a given rhythmic sequence, and they can
also work as sound cues. Pontos riscados, a cabalistic drawing done on the floor
using chalk, are sometimes made by the incorporated mediums, or by the filhas de
santo, daughters in sainthood. Even though everyone dances to the songs in the
terreiro, it is only the medium who receives the saint who actually ‘spins’, a term
used to define not only the actual spinning round, but also the jerky movement by the
medium when the saint descends.
When a medium appears distressed, over excited, or when the incorporation is
lasting beyond the time period expected, the pai de santo approaches the entity and
makes a motion over the medium’s head, or ‘crown’ as the head is called, as though
he was pulling something out of it. The medium usually jerks back and then the entity
leaves his/her body. In such situations the medium will inevitably appear overtaken
by fatigue. The incorporation is closely monitored by mediums who do not ‘receive
the saint’ to prevent those who do from getting hurt when in trance. They also ask the
pai de santo to intervene and release the matéria from the entity. I felt distinctive
corporeal sensations throughout
all Umbanda sessions I attended,
despite not ‘receiving saint’,
ranging from pleasurable tingling
resulting from some rites to
extreme fatigue. The gira
experience is mediated by the
body and the senses mostly
through singing, dancing and
clapping, but also resulting from
rose petal baths, and corn under
bare feet.
Figure 24 – Playing the adejá.
167
Figure 25: On the left, Seu Toquinho throws popcorn over the mediums' heads.
One single gira may have as many as twelve distinct little works. The
following is an account of one of such works. Toninho laid out a straw mat on the
floor, and ordered the leaves to be brought in. The assisting mediums brought two big
bags and threw hundreds of big leaves on the straw mat, carefully spreading them out,
then Toninho threw popcorn over them. We were then asked, each at a time, to stand
on that multi-layered floor. A medium that was being ‘worked’ on was asked to sit
down with the other eight mediums which were also being ‘formed’ on that night
around him with their hands touching his shoulders. Then he was ordered to walk
barefoot over the leaves and the popcorn several times. Afterwards, the mat was
carefully taken away with everything inside it.
Props, such as costume accessories, hats, images, drawings, leaves, grains,
drinks, foods, cigars and objects, as well as lighting, constitute the necessary set
design to assure symbolic efficacy for spirit possession and consultation.
Consultation takes place towards the end of the gira, when visitors who stayed for the
whole time in a room adjacent watching the ritual through a window are invited into
the main room to join the mediums. In order to recognize which entity is giving
consultation, one has to be familiar with the lexicon of the props. It is by the gestures
that the entity is identified, out of the vast phalanx it belongs to. The medium often
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carries or is given an object associated with that entity, such as pipes for Preto
Velhos, dummies, dolls and sweets for children, red wine glass and a rose for the hair
of Pombagiras, cigarettes and spirit for Exus, or even a sword for the rare
appearances of Ogum. Those objects
work on direct and indexical association.
Exus and their female counterpart,
Pombagiras, like strong spirits, farofa, a
Brazilian dish prepared with manioc
flower, dendê, or palm oil, and other
strong foods. One of the first physical
changes I noticed taking over mediums in
spirit possession was the twisted knuckles
in their hands that moved towards the
back of the body as soon as the entity
came down. I was then told that happened
because of the arthritis affecting Preto
Velhos. Margarida enlarged on that:
Figure 26: ‘Pai Felipe carries a little cloth
he puts over his legs when he sits down to
give consultation.
The Preto Velho walks bent over, as
does Nanã. There are many different Preto Velhos: Pai Joaquim is not so old,
so he walks more straight.
How can I spot Nanã?16 I asked Margarida. By her dance, she replied, and
added:
She crawls on the floor making the gestures with her hands of washing
clothes and is always covered up. As soon as Nanã comes down, a daughterof-saint comes and places a cloth over her. This is because she is full of
16
The female entity associated with mud and deemed the eldest of all orixás.
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shame: her children were sick and she abandoned them. Pombagira, a woman
of the streets, holds her skirt, laughs and puts her hands on her hips. Ogum
has a sword, he is a soldier. The Boiadeiro [cowboy] makes the motion of
lassoing an animal and sometimes carries a bull’s horn. Oxum dances bringing
the water in with her hands turned down, Yemanjá does something similar
but her hands are facing upwards. Iansã is the wind, she waves her hands or a
fan. Xangô hits both his wrists on the chest, as if holding stones, for he is
related to the quarry. Caboclo shouts, and makes the motion of using a bow
and arrow.
Figure 27: Incorporation.
I then asked Margarida how I could recognize Exu, to which she replied:
‘Exu has no gestures, he only laughs’. I shall proceed by analysing multiple concepts
of nature which are inherent to the cosmology of Umbanda.
The permeable boundaries of nature-culture hybrids
By observing the ritual of gira it becomes apparent that nature matters a great
deal and is fundamentally social because it guarantees contiguity with the world of
entities. One can also identify in the description above five core understandings of the
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nature concept which, as we shall see, are wrapped up in culture, standing for
examples in the symbolic realm of nature-culture hybrids, or social natures.
Nature as place
The distant realm where the orixás live is commonly described as nature, the
forest, or as Aruanda,17 but very few terreiros in urban centres have enough land to
accommodate any natural features at all, hence the popularity amongst urban
Umbanda and Candomblé followers of purpose-designed places like the Parque
Ecológico dos Orixás as seen in the pictures above for special occasions For regular
giras, however, the urban terreiro also denotes nature, albeit in a metonymic way. A
metonymy denotes shared traits associated with an object, a part of a whole, and
works on direct and indexical association. Since the entities’ ancestral home has
changed, the metonymic representation of nature allows the medium to experience
the whole through its part.
Thus, the terreiro, referred to by the pai de santo as ‘nossa casa’, our house,
evokes ‘nature’ in a number of ways: one of the main walls is a mural of a pristine
forest; there are always freshly made arrangements of plates and bowls with corn,
cuscus, and yam, carefully decorated with filaments of palm leaves; and fresh flower
arrangements usually stand next to the images of the main guides.The medium taking
part in the gira de Umbanda leaves the place of the terreiro and enters the space of
Aruanda to receive the Preto Velho, the Caboclo, or the Exu.
This is the waterfall which represents the orixás, and the forest which is
Caboclo, Oxossi and Boiadeiro [the cowboy]. The waterfall has a bit of
everything, the people of the water, the stones that represent Xangô. We
greet all of them at the same time. – Helena, the wife of the pai de santo
17
In Umbanda Aruanda refers to a place associated with heaven, a utopic realm where the orixás
lives.
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That forest is the most beautiful thing in the terreiro.- Valéria
Figure 28: ‘That image has the sense of the forest, of nature inside our house, representing the
culture of the orixás: the waters of Oxum, the sky of Oxalá. The staff and dagger belong to the
line of Exu’. – Toninho
Before going inside the terreiro, more experienced mediums go to the
tronqueira and greet or light a candle to the
Exus, the souls (almas), and the Preto Velhos.
This is our tronqueira where people
come and clap the paô [a rhythmic
clapping of hands]. We put the plants
here to represent the garden. The
tronqueira is the security for
everything; the Exus are the guardians
who look after it. – Helena
Figure 29: The tronqueira at the
terreiro.
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The tronqueira is Exu’s house, its foundation [fundamento] is on the floor,
and the potted plants represent nature and the Exus, which here is the
mangrove. - Toninho
The tronqueira that houses the marginal Exu should be located outdoors, on
the left-hand side of the entrance to the terreiro. In an interesting reversal to the
annual ritual of the St Peter’s procession described in Chapter 1 whereby the statue of
St Peter is taken to the streets of the colony, the tronqueira brings the street into the
domestic space of the terreiro, even if marginally so. By contrast, the congá, or altar,
should be indoors facing those who enter the terreiro.
The opposition between the street and the house was explored by the
anthropologist Roberto DaMatta (2003) to reflect upon the Brazilian national identity,
suggesting that those spaces carry two conflicting, yet complementary, sets of morals,
the former associated with personal relations, and the latter linked to notions of the
impersonal where order is achieved by law enforcement. Some scholars have
interpreted this pantheon of entities as being divided into three parts, one representing
nature, for which the orixás stand, another culture or the civilised world, associated
with Preto Velho and the Child, and a third part, the borderline or marginal world of
socialised nature, sometimes described as ‘social nature’ (Birman 1985, Barros 2010),
typically inhabited by Exus. In that gradient composed of various levels with orixás
on the one end, and the more humanised guides on the other, the nineteenth century
Caboclo, and the humble black slave stand about half-way between the orixás and the
‘people of the street’.
Toninho said that ‘the Caboclos are natures we cannot access’, which
resonates with Roy Ellen’s suggestion that nature cannot be fully apprehended
through language, a cultural tool, since ‘culture emerges from nature as the symbolic
representation of the latter’ (Ellen 1996:31). The use of ‘social nature’ refers to a
nature that has been socialised, culturalised, or baptised in Umbanda terms. The
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people of the street are social insofar as they speak during consultation and live in the
streets; and natural because they share some aspects of the landscape that orixás
represent, such as the forest, the mud or the waterfall.
Exu circulates between the two realms and is the mediator, for he can easily
cross the boundary between the sacred and the profane, the public and the private
domains, carrying signs that belong to the realm of the street while also enforcing the
order. Exu’s main geographical identity is thus the crossroads, hence that being the
place where offerings [trabalhos] are most commonly found. Its equivalent within the
limits of the terreiro is the tronqueira which should be properly secured [firmada] to
guarantee successful works, and keep unwelcome spirits at bay.
Nature and culture are instrumental to understand the relative distances
between all the entities, and how close they are to natural or cultural phenomena. Not
unlike the shamanic experience,18 the body mediates between the natural landscape of
Aruanda inhabited by the orixás, and the streets inhabited by ‘lower’ entities. A
continuum seems to be apparent which includes the forest, rocks, waterfalls, seas,
mangroves, cemeteries, and lastly, the streets. Thus, in this spectrum with natural
landscapes at one end, and urban territories at the other, the tronqueira is the
mediating and permeable space that holds those nature-culture spiritual hybrids.
Nature as ‘tempo’
Nature is time/weather.
Didil
My Ogum is a Time Ogum [Ogum do Tempo]. Time, nature, the Sun, the moon,
storms, all of those elements have spiritual foundation. There are orixás of the
18
Ioan Myrddin Lewis makes a distinction between sorcery and witchcraft, suggesting that the
latter would require external techniques including spells and potions, and would need to be seen
(Lewis 1971:3), Umbanda, with the many elements necessary to perform ‘works’ would be closer
to sorcery. See also Mircea Eliade (1964) for related discussion on shamanic techniques.
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beach, of the waterfall, of time. Time rules over all orixás, that’s why Omulu is
pure time. In our house, everything is about time.
Lucimar
‘Tempo’, a concept introduced in Chapter 3 which is widely employed by
Umbandistas and features in many of the songs in the terreiro is not only associated
with weather phenomena. When Umbandistas say that the orixás are tempo, they
include the natural and geological aspects of the landscape the orixás represent, as
well as their mythical lives. In other words, time/weather encompasses culture and
nature. Thus Oxossi, a hunter with a bow and arrow who rules over the medicinal
plants is associated with the forest. Xangô, who stands for the quarry, is associated
with the stone and with St. Peter. Ogum, being a warrior is associated with tools,
weapons. Because Oxossi is the orixá that has the knowledge about plants, leaves
come to stand for Oxossi; and because Caboclo represents the Brazilian native Indian
who lives in the forest, leaves also stand for Caboclo, who in turn stands for Oxossi:
Figure 30: Both Oxossi, on the left, and Caboclo, in the middle, are syncretized with Saint Sebastian,
on the right, because the latter bears an arrow through his chest, an object associated with Caboclo and
Oxossi who hunt in the forest.
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Omulu, considered by many mediums the most important orixá in Toninho’s
terreiro, rules over a more hybrid territory and is associated with measles, maladies in
general, and death. He is syncretized with Saint Lazarus who bears bleeding wounds
on his legs, and both are associated with Exu because of the latter’s marginality,
sharing also his preference for places such as crossroads, cemeteries and muddy
places. Devoted children of Omulu vow to feed every dog that crosses their pathsince
St. Lazarus’s wounds were healed by dogs. Nanã, who provides the mud from which
human beings were made, is associated with the mangrove. Because she is Omulu’s
and Exu’s mother, and figures in their myths of origin (see chapter 3), both Omulu
and Exu are associated with mud. But Nanã is also associated with the cemetery,
because of Omulu’s association with death.
Figure 31: On the left, a representation of Omulu in an Umbanda terreiro outside Z-10; on the right,
the Exu Zé Pilintra, in one of the rooms at Toninho's, and in the middle St. Lazarus.
Those associations encompass places, weather phenomena, objects and
histories, and compose a cosmology that dictates the ‘lines’, ‘phalanxes’ and ‘armies’
mentioned in the accounts. This is why Lucimar says that ‘everything is about time’,
and another medium described tempo as the ‘very air we breathe’, the condition of
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possibility for life. Umbanda followers may address those time/spaces at the mimetic,
metaphoric and metonymic levels by means of objects and images, thus re-signifying
culture-laden places such as crossroads and cemeteries (da Silva, 1995) and natural
landscapes such as waterfalls and mangroves. As for Exu, he occupies the place
closest to the human, both in terms of time, for he is depicted as the 1930s image of
the malandro or spiv; and space, since Zé Pilintra and Pombagira, his female
counterpart, frequent the streets, the urban underworld. Their moral self is predicated
on the disorder with which they are very familiar. It has been suggested that
Umbanda is a ‘disenchanted’ religion, since its spiritual guides descended from the
supernatural to the natural realm (Negrão 1993:117). I would argue instead that by
favouring Preto Velhos and Exus for consultations, Umbandistas have re-enchanted
the cultural realm.
In conclusion, when Umbandistas equate nature with time/weather they
demonstrate an ecological awareness which is a great deal more encompassing that
the artificially purified nature of the modernist paradigm, ecological insofar as it is
about the oikos as an economic and productive unit grounded on a particular place.
Tempo is also the mediating element between the different spaces humans and
entities inhabit. Tempo relates to the productivity of the world of entities, with power
over stones, minerals, water and winds, and to the historical production of the human
world. Next, I shall explore a genealogical representation of nature.
Nature as genealogy
Everyone has to know what nature gave to us, and which orixá commands our
head. My head’s father and mother are nature itself.–
Toninho
The above was voiced as a sure sign of Toninho’s spiritual vocation, given
that most mediums had their heads ‘done’ by pais or mães de santo. The hierarchy of
entities in the natural/cultural spectrum described in the previous section is also the
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base for the supernatural kinship system of the medium’s spiritual body. The lineage
refers to who the mãe and pai de cabeça are, the head’s mother and father, and
includes the juntós, who are a secondary set of parents. Those four parents are all
orixás, regarded as superior, distant and otherworldly guides. The ‘inferior’ spirits
that make up the phalanxes or ‘army of spirits’, such as Exus, Pretos Velhos,
Caboclos, Crianças (children), Boiadeiros (cowboys), Ciganos (gypsies), are seen as
having a different vibration from that of the orixás and are not part of the kinship
system. However, being closer to humans in the natural/cultural spectrum, they are
the preferred ones for consultation since they know about worldly problems having
once inhabited that world, with nurture overcoming nature in terms of importance.
Such intimacy with folks that are not kin match Margarida’s view for whom
‘family are those who live with you’, suggesting that cohabiting the same place, rather
than sharing the same blood, is what fosters social and reciprocal relations. Likewise,
the orixás may be parents, given to people by nature, but it is the worldly guides, who
inhabit modern times and places, and closer to historical rather than mythical time,
that descend into the medium’s body and actually engage in relations of reciprocity
giving consultation, and healing both emotional and physical ailments. In other
words, while the more ‘natural’ entities are perceived as higher, the more ‘cultural’
ones are favoured.
However, natural (blood) ties are significant, especially when we consider that the
two terreiros of umbanda at Z-10 belong to some of the oldest fishing families in the colony,
and there is an intricate web of kin and affine relations between mediums in the existing
terreiros, and in Março’s terreiro that was there in the 1950s, Lucimar’s father. Even people
like myself, who are relatively new to that web of relations, can sometimes identify during a
gira the presence of as many as 5 generations of Toninho’s family, given that his grandfather,
the fisherman Paulo Jaú who used to ‘receive’ a Caboclo, had 17 children, and three of them
were still going to the terreiro at the time I started writing this chapter. The ‘people of the
streets’, despite not being part of the kinship system, form a line of descent and expose a
genealogy of sorts since they can be inherited from family members, potentially going back
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generations. This can only happen to mediums ‘de berço’, ‘born and bred’ in sainthood, a
highly praised gift:
I was born and bred in Umbanda. My child, Hildinha of the beach, was given
to me by my father. - Lucimar
Furthermore, natural or blood-related kinship is decisive when evaluating the
potential mediumship of a member, and a history of powerful mediums in the family
brings status both for the entity and for the medium. Toninho’s grandfather, Paulo
Jaú, one of the first fishermen to settle at Z-10, used to receive Caboclo dos Astros at
Março’s terreiro.Vera, a medium who was brought up by her grandparents and hardly
ever saw her father, a pai de santo in the area of Manguinhos in the periphery of Rio,
says she is connected to this day with him through Caboclo Pena Branca, an inherited
entity. And many mediums had similar accounts:
My Caboclo, Ubirajara Peito de Aço (Ubirajara Chest of Steel) was a
tupinambá inherited from my father who ran a terreiro in Tauá.19 Most of my
guides were inherited, including my Ogum. – Zaine
My Padilha [a female Exu] is the same that descended on my aunt.- Valéria
Lucimar receives Padre Antonio de Minas, a Preto Velho that used to
incorporate Março, her father. Her Caboclo is a Tupinambá, inherited from her
godmother Joelza who used to have a terreiro in Ribeira, the neighbourhood next to
Z-10. Her other Preto Velho, Maria Conga da Bahia was inherited from her
grandmother. This rich line of descent makes Lucimar a highly sought after medium
19
A neighbourhood of Ilha.
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for consultation because her Omulu is ‘nato’, it is hers ‘by nature’, since she was
asthmatic from birth. The adjective ‘nato’, which translates as either ‘innate’ or ‘by
nature’, appeared four times in one interview held with Lucimar, always to justify her
power as a medium: ‘I have a history; I grew up in a terreiro; I am Umbandista by
nature’. In an interesting overlap of nature and culture, Lucimar’s understanding of
‘by nature’ is synonymous with having a history, as though she was born with that
mileage, in other words, with the culture of Umbanda.
But not all are born with this ‘natural’ genealogy, having to rely on a rite of
passage into the saintly world, ‘to be made in the saint’, and to become acquainted
with one’s ‘family of saint’, which is akin to a process of acculturation. This form of
‘genetic symbolism’ (Lewis 1971) also extends to the relationships between mediums
and pais de santo, which reproduce kinship relations. One’s sisters and brothers of
saint, are those who were ‘made’ with you. One’s father and mother of saint, are the
ones that ‘made your head’. In this section, we saw how nature is understood as an a
priori determination of the medium’s tendency. While some mediums are given those
tendencies by nature, others need to do ‘work’ and to be ‘made in the saint’, in other
words, they must perform culture. ‘Work’ is usually made using a combination of
natural and cultural elements, with the natural ones often serving as channels for the
semantic-loaded cultural objects. The aim of those works is often to cure a ‘naturally’
occurring affliction such as a health, or mental condition, or sentimental misgivings. I
will now turn to nature as a resource for ‘healing work’.
Nature as exchange value
Except for Margarida, who ‘started in sainthood’ because she loved the
clothes and the dance, and Daniel, who was after some magic to make the parents of
the girl he liked approve of him, all mediums I talked to started frequenting the
terreiro for physical or mental health healing. Potential mediumship is most often
identified by corporeal signs and ailments, so if someone starts being ill regularly, it
is often assumed that the person needs some ‘work’ done. Março, Lucimar’s father,
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was in the cinema as a young man, when he started to feel a very strong backache;
Lucimar started to feel her body shaking, her heart pounding, and open wounds
started to appear all over her body; Sandra, a fisherwoman, started to faint on a
regular basis; Walkyria, Margarida’s granddaughter, started to have breathing
problems; and similar stories are told over and over again.
Those problems are generally of organic nature such as asthma, ulcers,
palpitations, breathing difficulties, and are identified as problems that ‘common’
doctors cannot cure. The implication in these examples is that ‘putting on saint’s
clothes’, ‘making the obligation’, ‘working the saint’, are ways of taming that organic
manifestation. But saint work is only possible with resources extracted from nature,
which will later have to be offered back to nature. The offerings left in the sea, by the
side of the mangrove, or on a crossroads are the medium’s part of the exchange for
the favour he or she is asking, making those natural landscapes a crucial element of
the transaction. The Umbanda system of favour exchanges is reminiscent of LeviStrauss’s reading of the system of sacrifice, the objective of which is to establish a
relation of contiguity (Lévi-Strauss [1949] 1993). The contiguity, in the case of
Umbanda, is between the entity and the medium, achieved through the mediation of
nature.
Tomorrow there is a work with leaves, so I went to the mangrove this
morning and picked many there. We will make a carpet of leaves in the
terreiro for the development of twenty mediums.
Each orixá asks for specific plants in the development of the medium, thus
Oxum, Iansã, Yemanjá, Ogum, Xangô, Oxossi use oriri, basil, and arruda. Inside the
terreiro, plants may be displayed in a variety of forms: in the tronqueira, on the
tables, in the offerings, sometimes along with other objects such as little medallions
on a chain to be kept next to the body or inside pockets. For Raul Lodoy (1995), the
plants are the interlocutors between the house and the street, and between the private
and public realms. Some plants are endowed with the power of protecting the
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entrance to domestic and commercial holdings alike, such as the popular arruda,
which supposedly avoids mau-olhado, the envious eye of others, and is good to heal
wounds.One day when I was at Toninho’s house asking after the plants, his aunt
Nilda who is a powerful medium at the terreiro arrived for a quick consultation with
Toninho:
Mario [her grandson] has lots of hard spots appearing all over his body, I
think it’s food intoxication, what can I give him?
Arueira. Make a tea with it, enough to drink and to bathe, leave it to dry on
the body, don’t use a towel. Use it to make amassi20 to strengthen the body,
so that spiritual forces find purity in his body. We have to feed our roots.
Besides arueira Toninho uses elevante, guine, vergamina, erva prata, guine
preto, and erva da flora. Some of these herbs can be found along the mangrove, but
most are bought from fruit markets and plant nurseries.
Today I went to get erva tosão, which is a tuber good for rheumatism,
stomach upsets, and gall bladder. I went all over Ribeira, and ended up finding
it right here in the colony at Joao Carlos’s house.
Cleaning rituals are an essential part of Umbanda, and popcorn is an important
agent in purification sessions:
One of these days I will prepare a pipocã [a great amount of popcorn] for
Omulu, and then I will give everybody a popcorn bath. I also like to use
20
The amassi is a mix of herbs only to be used on the head. It has to go through three phases. If it
passes more than 5 days in a pot, it becomes Abô. It lets out a very strong smell which does not
indicate it is rotten.
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black-eyed beans, dried corn, and chopped vegetables, because they are all
food sources, and have fresh water and part of the forest in them.
Popcorn is also instrumental to bring Omulu out because of its mimetic
association with the entity’s open wounds. Lucimar lay on a table full of popcorn for
two days, after that her wounds disappeared.
One day Toninho saw me and said to Helena that I had the old man and that
he needed to be worked on, he needed to have work [obrigação] done for
him. Toninho told Helena to prepare some popcorn for me.
Here nature is a variety of things, such as the leaves, grains, flowers and fruits
used in rites, and also a number or concepts. Whether it is a place, the air we breathe
and our spiritual guides, a genealogical legitimation, or the exchange currency in the
relationship with entities, the domestication of nature is symbolic and practical, and
always culturally grounded. As for the mangrove, it is the culture of Exu, and the
geographical and doctrinal foundation for the terreiro Arranca-Toco.
From nature to environment: nurturing the assemblage
More than a century ago Franz Boas inaugurated cultures in the plural
(Stocking 1966), so why in the 21st century are we still grappling with multiple
natures? The answer to this may lie in the mostly unspoken imperative that the
modernist model can accommodate the idea of multiple cultures with the caveat that
nature remains in the singular so we humans can carry on trusting that there is but one
reality. Thus, as one tries to penetrate a multi-natural world one may have to address
the issue of ontology, for people’s being in the world in its socio-economic
entanglements differ in substantial ways. The distinction between ontology and
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culture must be underlined here for we are not talking about the multiple cultures
accepted under the modernist paradigm, but multiple realities (Viveiros de Castro
1996).
It has been noted that when the familiar qualities of a given environment are
inhibited, or irrevocably transformed due to changes in modes of living, ontologies
may enter a state of hybridity (Descola cited in Kohn 2009), and the interiority and
physicality of both people and things may play out differently, as in the case of an
urban dweller who talks about her rose bush as though it had a soul (Kohn 2009).
Victor Turner made a similar point by suggesting that in a scenario of drastic social
change ‘the grammar and lexicon may be irreversibly altered’(Turner, 1998:33), and
new meanings may emerge from the imbroglio of people and concerns. Now, we
have already seen that the passage from nature to environment was not an isolated
event that happened just to the mangrove in Z-10, but an instance of a paradigm shift
that included the redraft of a new constitution in Brazil in 1988, and the outcomes of
the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. I would like to focus on how that shift affected
Umbanda practices.
As mentioned above, Afro-Brazilian religious cults suffered many waves of
prejudice, the latest one as a consequence of the growing popularity of neoPentecostal forms of worship. Although Z-10 is atypical in the sense that there is no
religious conflict within the community, people are still reluctant to admit they are
Umbandistas, practices are somewhat secretive, and spiritual offerings left by the
mangrove or on crossroads are looked down upon by some sectors of the population.
In that context, in 2009, the governor of Rio de Janeiro sanctioned Law 5.514/09
which establishes Umbanda as Intangible Heritage21at the state level, and the
possibility of nurturing the environmental assemblage with a spiritual element did not
go unnoticed by the Environmental Department at the state level.
21
Intangible heritage is a category described by Unesco (see Unesco portal 2012) as ‘living
expressions and the traditions that countless groups and communities worldwide have inherited
from their ancestors and transmit to their descendants, in most cases orally’.
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In 2013, the campaign ‘Sem água, sem folha, sem orixá’, ‘Without water,
without leaves, without orixá’, was launched as an attempt to engage followers of
Afro-Brazilian religions in the protection of the waters and forests of Mata Atlântica,
a Brazilian biome, as part of the Programa Ambiente em Ação, the Programme for
Environment in Action, which is also engaged with a campaign against religious
intolerance. The department created a committee with pais and mães de santo from
different areas in the state of Rio, but without participation of terreiros from Ilha,
implying that they were somehow out of the loop. In July 2013 a workshop was held
in the headquarters of the Tijuca Forest National Park, supposedly the biggest urban
forest in the world which cross-cuts 15 different districts in the city of Rio, on
medicinal herbs used by practitioners.
The pai de santo that opened the workshop said that ‘every umbandista or
candomblecista is an ecologist’, followed by mãe Beata, one of the oldest and most
well-known mães de santoin Rio, who taught the audience the prayer one should say
when taking a leaf out of a plant:
Please Ossaim [an orixá that shares similar characteristics with Oxossi, both
belonging to the forest]22grant me permission to enter your thicket. Please
protect me against any snakes that may bite us, and keep us away from that
which is no good.
And another pai de santo added that: ‘the ecological question is in the hands
of the orixás, without herbs, there are no orixás’. The main spokesperson for the
program called the committee ‘environmental guardians’ and presented a historicgeographic grounding for spiritual practice:
22
Reginaldo Prandi (2001) narrates a myth in which Oxossi was kidnapped by Ossaim for
entering his territory. Eventually, after a big escape, Oxossi went back to the forest to live with
Ossaim.
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We, together with the pais and mães de santo, and in partnership with the
federal and state universities UFRJ and UERJ, intend to create a sacred space
in an area protected by law. It’s worth recalling that the Atlantic Forest is
one of the most endangered ecosystems in the world, and the first to receive
the Portuguese. The Africans had a cultural identity with the forest, and
found here a place where they could perform their rituals, and archaeological
digs in the area found remains of ritualistic objects and of those geo-symbols.
The waters and the leaves are of fundamental importance for Umbanda and
Candomblé. Many of us know about their daily use, but ignore the
knowledge behind them.
The way participants and organisers evoked the water and leaves as indexes of
a broader concept of an all surrounding nature, was much in tune with Toninho’s
reading of nature. When I told Toninho about the campaign, he replied:
Every work we leave out there to the guides is perishable. We don’t leave
plates, bottles, nothing; we only leave what is perishable. We follow our
mentor’s orders. So, you see, we are not so backward.
I asked him if Zé Luiz’s activism had influenced him. ‘Zé Luiz and I grew up
together. We would go all over the mangrove and into the thicket barefoot and return
with lots of crabs’. On a number of occasions Toninho suggested we promoted a
cleaning-up event to clear the rubbish from the shores of the mangrove and I
wondered how effective Umbanda could be for environmental education. Because
Exu is seen as a filter of spiritual pollution, mirroring the mangrove’s cleaning
properties, it could be a valuable symbolic connection to be explored in the
environmental assemblage in Z-10. Before leaving field, I went to say bye to Toninho
and asked him what he wanted from my work:
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I want you to disseminate Umbanda, to show people that it is a clean
practice. It is not about killing lambs and leaving them to rot on the
crossroads.
Conclusion
Over the years, some interpreted Umbanda as an expression of a desire to fit
in a society that became stratified, urban and industrialized, others saw the
incorporation of certain entities as a sign of resistance to that very society. This
chapter tries to get away from readings on either pole, pursuing instead the overlap
between its doctrine and ecology. The ritual of Umbanda through the dance of
mediums who incorporate, the manipulation of leaves, the use of grains, and the
words deployed in songs, seek contiguity, the border and contact zone with the
ancestral environment and with urban landscapes alike, while natural resources are
the tangible means to deal with intangible obstacles and afflictions that make one
suffer, especially those that mainstream doctors cannot cure.
This chapter revealed how nature and culture play out over a spectrum of
possibilities, ranging from the realm of natural landscapes of the ancestral orixás,
perceived through metaphoric cues, to more metonymic and talkative manifestations
of social-natural entities. In this anthropocentric vision of Aruanda, the orixás rarely
descend, and ‘the people of the streets’ are favoured for consultation. Exu, in its many
variations, is the main representative of the people of the streets, and as such, he is
closer to human problems, and furthest away from the realm of natural landscapes.
He is however, quite closely associated with the mangrove because both are seen as
being in the borderline between nature and culture. But if lines are drawn between
nature and culture, they are often entangled since Umbandistas’ relationship with
nature is mediated by culture. When Toninho says that ‘the waterfall is the culture of
Oxum’, nature and culture appear as interchangeable and complementary, even if his
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concept of nature is cultural. That said, the terreiro is a place where people are
continuously evoking nature, enacting and manipulating it for ritualistic purposes.
Another relevant aspect this analysis unveils is the practical outlook towards
the natural realm: leaves and water heal, stones and grains are used in offerings, and
the natural landscape is good for rituals. In other words, their praising of the natural
realm is not grounded on a preservationist view of it, even if that view has entered
more recent discourses by a number of Umbandistas, but on its exchange value for
spiritual forms of gift giving, and on its role as a force to be reckoned with. Nature is
important instrumentally, insofar as it helps people materially (leaves) and
conceptually (theories and models). This rather pragmatic view of nature stands in
opposition to more romantic views of a spiritual relationship with nature.
Finally, the many levels of authority which oversee the environmental
assemblage at Z-10 do not take into account this rich terrain of ecological ethics, and
do not realise, contrary to their colleagues at the state level, that the terreiro and its
members could become major environmental allies. This chapter approached
Umbandistas’ perceptions of social natures as theories, in the hope of informing
future environmental policies.
Should we then conclude that by accepting Exu into the broader pantheon of
spiritual entities, the ‘polluting’ elements associated with him are also accepted? I
would argue that there is a social drama being played at the fortnightly gira which
interacts with nature and with the environment. While Exu’s baptism was an effective
way of reintegrating him in the society of the terreiro, he is still not accepted outside
of it. The same can be said about the mangrove, which though being granted the
status of APARU, does not fit in with environmentalists’ expectations. Both have
failed to leave the liminal stage, in Victor Turner’s sense. As neophytes they are both
sacred and polluting, and essentially anti-structural.
We shall now proceed to analyse a more visibly polluting social nature we
define as waste, inseparable as it is from the moral imperative of cleanliness, and how
it is included in, or excluded from, the mangrove and from the environmental
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assemblage. In other words, we shall engage in a little thinking through rubbish in
order to catch a glimpse of the process of ‘othering’ nature and the mangrove, and
answer the pressing question in this thesis of how useful that othering may be for
environmental governance.
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Chapter 5 – A Big Rubbish Dump (or Disenchanted
Arcadia)
For some people here, the mangrove is a big rubbish dump.
Seu Batista, who works for the Mutirão do Jequiá1
Figure 32 - Zé Luiz walking down the mangrove.
Didil and I had set off in the afternoon to lay the fishing net, and a few hours
later we went back to collect it. It was the first time I was pulling a net, and I
was very pleased with all that fish caught up in the net. Then I realised, that
1
A group of ten local residents who work for the city council doing the daily cleaning of the
mangrove shore.
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Didil was pulling the net with one hand, and when possible getting some of
the fish out and throwing them back into the sea. He got rid of dozens of
savelhas that way, a fish related to the sardine but of no commercial value in
Rio because of its many bones. Some of them did not go back to live happily
in the sea, it being too late for Didil to rescue them alive from the trappings
of the net. He was going to dump them in the mangrove area at the entrance
to the colony where herons stand by waiting for fish remains so I asked him
for some because it seemed wasteful to just dump them. Back at Margarida’s,
she taught me how to prepare the savelhas with tomato sauce and onions
using a pressure cooker so that bones dissolve through intense heat making
them taste like tinned sardines.
It is common for savelhas to be discarded along the coast of Brazil due to their
low economic value, just as it is common for people to become outraged with
hundreds of dead fish abandoned to rot by fishermen along the south-eastern coast of
Brazil where that species thrives. The different reactions towards what is considered
waste on the one hand, and wasteful on the other, invites one to reflect upon the
ethics around waste classification, and how relative that categorization is. In a
scenario where waste is determined by market value, as in the story above, that which
is no longer deemed valuable is identified as waste.
Broadly speaking, if under the capitalist model resources are regarded as
being for human use to the detriment of all other species, under the environmental
paradigm resources are perceived as finite, and being ethical translates into regulating
one’s behaviour towards discarding and wastefulness, while taking some species into
account. Concomitant with that, the right to consumption is at the core of
contemporary notions of equality, wealth distribution and democracy resulting in the
need for more environmental policies to cope with waste. David Harvey notes that
such contradictions ‘conceal a concrete political agenda in the midst of highly
abstract, universalizing, and frequently intensely moral argumentation’ (ibid.:174),
thus the moral ‘awareness’ about protecting the environment and some species,
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alongside strategies such as recycling and ‘green’ products, have been accommodated
under concrete neo-liberal agendas whereby market values disguised as ‘market
environmentalism’ can coexist with mass consumption.
The main thrust of this chapter is that the change from nature to environment
not only changed people’s perception on waste, but transformed the mangrove into a
product of policies. In the first volume of Capital, Marx describes commodity as the
instance when ‘labour-power’ is taken to the market (Marx 1976 [1867]) and
commodity values become ‘congealed quantities of homogeneous human
labour’(ibid.:128). The passage from nature to environment coincides with a new
cycle when rubbish, as the discarded product of the human transformation of nature,
becomes commodified. In other words, the environment, as a political moment, has
spawned the commodification of areas considered worth preserving, of labour-power
through jobs, and of the discarded products of human labour, themselves
commodities according to Marx. This chapter intends to explore the wide-ranging
forms of pollution that are assembled in and around the mangrove while critically
assessing ethical behaviours revealed by people’s relationship to waste, and
mechanisms, environmental and otherwise, which monitor those relations.
I was prompted to write about people’s relation to waste for a number of
reasons: first, its sheer ubiquity as a material presence in my fieldwork, as discourse,
and as criteria for judging behaviour of other folk. Secondly, upon realisation that
some people’s idea of nature accommodates the hybrid landscape of disposable
materials, sewage, and plastic bottles in the mangrove, I was inspired to find out
where lines are drawn between what is perceived as polluted, and what is not, and
under what circumstances. Thirdly, the seeming contradiction of having pollution in
an area of environmental protection foments reactions, shedding light on how waste
is disseminated and negotiated across social groups. In a city where green spaces are
increasingly scarce, why is the mangrove still seen as ‘a big dump’ by some people?
The ethnographic accounts in the second part of this thesis present a
conceptualization of nature that blurs the distinction between the human and the nonhuman world and challenge more compartmentalized understandings of the natural
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versus man-made dichotomy. Another key point in part II of this thesis is the cleaning
trope: the mangrove and Exu act as filters, while work for spiritual entities made with
leaves from the mangrove cleans impurities. In this chapter, local perceptions on
waste make the dissolution of this threshold more salient. Thus waste, the mangrove
and Exu form a tripod for local meanings and metaphors which crosses over
boundaries. This chapter explores people’s relationship with waste at Z-10 and
beyond while avoiding the reproduction of anthropocentric and class-centric
environmental agendas. That said, attempts at purification (Latour 1993) do take
place, and waste management is an area where that purification is most poignant. But
is market value the main criterion that defines waste? And are there other criteria
under environmental governance?
I will start by exploring the ambiguity of waste and the resulting ethical
cacophony. Next, I will reassess how the natural/man-made dichotomy is reinforced
or defied in the local management of waste, by looking at how moral judgment is
expressed, and how local actors appropriate practices and ideas from the
environmental discourse, re-cladding them at times according to personal, political
and economic interests. To shed light on how waste is perceived at the local level
and how it serves as links in the environmental assemblage, I will classify the main
forms of visible and invisible waste found in Z-10, and their interface with the
protection status granted to the mangrove. I will then move on to analyse how under
environmental governance the need to separate substances becomes a moral
imperative, and residents at Z-10 adapt by becoming cleaning agents in the
environmental assemblage. Finally, I will explore the ethics and aesthetics of waste in
the wider context of the city.
The ambiguity of waste
The world of nature for the Greeks was characterised by spontaneous
movement, as opposed to inertia, and by the concept of process, which implied a
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distinction between the actual and the potential, and a tendency towards change
(Collingwood 1945:83). Because nature is permeated with nisus, which stands for
tendency or potentiality, there is always an element of unpredictability or
impermanence associated with it, and a lag between actuality and potentiality. This
dialectical rather than Cartesian view of nature was not lost on Hegel who saw it as a
process of becoming, or on Heidegger who through concepts such as ‘being’ and
‘dwelling’ challenged the alienation from nature that so concerned Marx (Harvey
1991). Those thoughts made me ponder the ‘ontological instability’ of waste
(Hawkins 2006:73), given that the term connotes the full potentiality of natural
resources once they become devoid of human interest. The savelha in the story that
opens this chapter is ontologically a fish, but potentially money, food, or bait when it
loses its life in the trappings of the net. No longer breathing, it could go back in the
sea to constitute nutrients to other life forms, or it could go into the pressure cooker to
feed my family, but for the fisherman, it is worthless because it has no market value.
A study about waste is also a study about the pitfalls of development: waste is
paradoxically both the result of development and the reverse of it. As Gay Hawkins
says, ‘the underworld of capitalist accumulation is waste’ (2010:72), though waste
can also serve as evidence of an increase in consumption power of a given
population, and a marker of economic ascension. Janus-faced, waste stands for
progress and disorder, and it is often used as a yardstick to measure how
‘environmentally conscious’ people are. But what comes to be perceived as waste is a
product of culture-oriented classification. For instances, in Brazil, sambaquis,2 the
term in Tupi for shell middens, which are, in fact, very old indigenous dumps, are
now considered national heritage since they are evidence of a long history of human
habitation and a source of information for archaeologists.
Likewise, if two hundred years from now an archaeologist went for a walk
along the mangrove to collect traces of the community that once inhabited Z-10, she
2
Sambaquis, mounds mostly constituted of seashells and fishbone, are perceived as sacred by
many indigenous peoples who also used them as burial ground and territorial landmarks. Many of
them are about five thousand years old, can reach nine metres in height, and are found along the
coast of Brazil.
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could compile a list of the main activities people were involved with just by looking
at some of the rubbish buried in the mud that withstood the passage of time, such as
empty bottles of nail varnish, and thousands of bits of plastic remains from fizzy
drink bottles, long after the beauty salons and bars had disappeared from the
landscape. This hypothetical situation would present an accurate picture of life there:
in the local census undertaken by the Resident’s Association, hair salons and bars are
the most common businesses in the colony. In this perspective from the future, those
objects that once served as tools far outlived the labourers that used them. It is this
realization that makes the open landfill such an overwhelming sight, for it
encapsulates myriad lives and meaningful objects.
If we turn our thoughts to social natures, or to the imbroglio of organic and
man-made things that inhabit the mangrove, we can catch a glimpse of how
something seen as pollution in one context could be regenerating life in another, as in
the case of sewage nourishing the mangrove vegetation (see chapter 3). A similar
point was made by James Lovelock (1979) in the book in which he presented the
Gaia hypothesis proposing an earth system in which living and non-living parts
interact. To illustrate this point, he gives a humbling account of how oxygen became
the chemically dominant gas of the air, a process that started about four aeons ago,
driving anaerobes, organisms that only develop in the absence of oxygen,
underground. These creatures were stuck in that muddy existence at the bottom of
rivers, lakes and seas for millions of years, until they were allowed back in, after a
long exile, to dwell in the thriving environment provided by the guts of animals, in
which warmth and food were generously provided. Potentially, he adds, large
mammals’ role on earth, including that of humans, could be to provide the anaerobic
environment for exceptional anaerobes, and all this as a consequence of the oxygen
pollution disaster. This account not only stands against both human exceptionalism
and binary readings of pollution, but also, and fittingly, concerns creatures of the mud
so dear to this thesis, serving as a living example of ‘interspecies mutuality’ (Tsing
2010; Helmreich & Kirksey 2010). Zizek offers a related reading when he notes that
‘nature is a series of mega catastrophes’, and suggests that ‘maybe we should accept
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that nature does not exist, [at least] the image of balanced and harmonised nature
(2009). Zizek is here referring to the ecological catastrophe that resulted in the
production of oil that makes so many contemporary developments possible. In view
of this, he adds, humans ought to also find an aesthetic dimension to things like trash.
The possibility of seeing dirt as something positive is not uncommon in the
spiritual realm. Mary Douglas (1966) observed in the seminal Purity and Danger
how notions of hygiene were incompatible with charity, while coexisting with
supposedly polluting elements could be considered a path towards sanctity (1966:7).3
We have already seen in the last two chapters, that the mangrove and the local
practice of Umbanda thrive in their transitional state of liminality, blurring those
distinctions. For example, to define the lines of Umbanda at the colony people
describe the smaller terreiro belonging to Toninho’s aunt, Lela’s centre, as ‘Umbanda
limpa’, ‘clean Umbanda ’, as opposed to Toninho’s centre of ‘Umbanda traçada’,4
‘mixed Umbanda ’. Now, the characteristic of being mixed, is generally seen as
positive, even if it stands in opposition to ‘clean’. Also referred to as ‘nação’,or
‘nation Umbanda’, Umbanda traçada, implies a connection with African roots.
Perhaps echoing the valorisation of that heritage in artistic and intellectual circles,
Umbanda traçada is considered more powerful by some Umbandistas. Moreover, the
‘mixed’ element of Toninho’s centre is regarded by some as being more
encompassing, and, offering a thriving environment for the ambiguous and hypersocialised Exu. So, what are we to take out of this? That waste is an ontologically
unstable category inseparable from development, and from what humans deem
valuable.
3
Mircea Eliade also commented on the ambivalence of sacredness, of the sacred and the defiled
(1958:14-15), but concluded that dirt is a sign of disorder, and that the organization of the
environment depends on the elimination of dirt.
4
‘Umbanda traçada’ refers to terreiros that have influence from different African nations, like
Angola, Ketu, Nagô, Jêje. In other words, a type of Umbanda considered closer to Candomblé.
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Waste in the making of ethical subjects
In the past, if you bought a bottle of pop, you had to take the bottle back
to the shop, while today you throw the bottle away. If you buy butter, it comes
with packaging plus a plastic bag. Is that evolution?
Zé Luiz
The morally charged comment above, by no means uncommon, elucidates the
paradox of development from the perspective of an environmentally-minded
individual. Moreover, it coincides with Thorstein Veblen’s understanding in late
nineteenth century of the ‘negative effects of capitalism’ (Bear 2012:186), or the
antithesis of productivity (ibid.:185). In the English language, waste has two
different, albeit complementary, semantic uses: it is a noun, meaning ‘material stuff’;
and a verb, meaning ‘to extravagantly misuse something’, as in the case of the
wastefulness of savelha in the opening story which were perfectly good to satiate
somebody’s hunger. The negative connotation of the verb also has a long
philosophical history, and one that legitimises the accumulation of capital. When
writing on property, John Locke condemns those with a wasteful relationship with
land, so to avoid the wastefulness of perishable goods one is encouraged to value that
which can be saved such as gold, silver and diamonds (1690). It would be curious if
not tragic, that those who end up having to work and live with waste are the very
people who are dispossessed as a result of further accumulation of stuff that does not
decay.
Whether we analyse it as a verb or as a noun, we are dealing with a morally
loaded signifier, but as we shall see, while waste mostly refers to man-made stuff,
naturally occurring unwanted elements can also be thus classified. Furthermore,
although the focus in the chapter is waste as a noun, the moral imperative against
wasting natural resources embedded in discursive forms of environmental ethics will
also surface at times. Zé Luiz despairs as much about the material waste that fizzy
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drinks leave behind, as about the wastefulness of the natural resources that could be
used. An Australian company that deals with recycled goods advertises in its website:
‘waste is a waste of potential ingenuity’,5 and indeed attempts to make what is
deemed waste lucrative have occupied the keen minds of alchemists for centuries. But
we will further see that waste, and related activities such as classifying, recycling, and
managing stuff, are imbued with expectations of particular forms of behaviour,
whether from the part of individuals, corporations or governments.
Catherine Alexander and Joshua Reno (2012) note that political intervention
to control material waste emerged alongside an enforcement of the private and public
division, for if its production had to be concealed, its control belonged to the public
realm. And here it is worth calling attention to another parallel that can be made
between the governmental initiative of creating the fishing colonies, and some of the
aims in the current environmental governance, two instances of public intervention at
Z-10: if the former intended to teach notions of hygiene to fishing communities in the
1920s as described in the introduction to this thesis, the latter is set to ‘educate’ locals
to keep their environment free from material waste. It must be added that in the
current configuration, another actor emerges that breaks the public/private
dichotomy: the corporations. As we shall see, this third party is not only involved in
the dynamics around waste as culprit, producer of one of the most offensive foreign
elements in the sea, oil; but also as a facilitator of policy-making, by providing the
necessary funding for waste-related policies.
How waste is managed, disposed of, and disguised is a way of measuring the
degree of sophistication of a given place, with common associations made between
countries’ success in doing so and their level of development. Rubbish-laden places
with poor sewage systems and unclean water are often associated with underdevelopment, a judgment extended to poorer constituencies within the same nationstate, or poorer areas within the same city. From a particular vantage point across the
5
http://www.garbologie.com/
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mangrove when approaching Z-10, one can see both the squalor produced through the
excess of commodities, and the vibrant green in the distant part of protected area that
still belongs to the Navy, which as little as seventy years ago made up a big part of
the local landscape. Thus waste is not only ubiquitous and conspicuous, but it is also
a fairly recent protagonist, which explains why the ‘white sands’ of the past figure in
so many narratives in chapter 2.
A great deal of the reading, insights and occasionally note-taking that make up
this study was done on my commuting from home, in the south zone of Rio de
Janeiro, to Z-10, situated at the far end of Ilha do Governador in the north zone, a
two-bus journey covering about 30 kilometres which can take anything from 1.5
hours to 3 hours. One of the markers that signals the approaching of the peripheries,
which coincides with the passage from the wealthiest to the poorest parts of the city,
is the increasingly conspicuous piles of rubbish unattended by the roadside. This
consequence of modern living is not so visible in the wealthiest parts of the city due
to more efficient disposal systems, and to different style of housing, mostly consisting
of blocks of flats which usually include paid janitors who store the rubbish in big
bags and then place it in the street to be picked by the COMLURB truck at collection
time, making those areas surprisingly trash-free. Communities, on the other hand,
characteristically consist of houses, and it is up to the residents to take the rubbish out
at the right time, or leave it by the door early in the morning on collection day.
Rubbish collection happens three times a week in Z-10, with more populated
places such as Complexo do Alemão, an area encompassing 14 favelas in the north
zone of Rio, having a five-day-a-week collection. During summer, bags start to smell
less than 24 hours later, being common for dogs to tear bags open in search of food,
so how people avoid making the place smelly and messy is part of daily
conversations and gossip. Margarida, having the privilege of owning a big freezer, is
adamant that the best solution is to tie the bags really well, often using two to three
plastic bags, and store the bags inside the freezer until collection day, a perfectly
functional strategy that may be looked upon with horror by hygiene-fussed people.
But not many in Z-10 have freezers or thought of that strategy, so the day before
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collection day, the place is invariably littered. But what moves people at Z-10 to
make judgements about the way their neighbours deal with rubbish?
It has been noted that discourses on waste have a direct impact on the socalled practices of the self (Hawkins 2001 citing Foucault 1988) and on the conduct
of ethical bodies within a historically informed ethos (Foucault 1988), or habitus
(Bourdieu 1977). This reflexive dialogue between the self and the material world is
described by Hawkins as ‘embodied sensibilities’ (2006:5). In the case of Z-10, the
penetration of other forms of manual labour including the creation of the APARU
have added complexity to the ethical stances informed by the fishing tradition within
a particular geographical location, the mangrove, and a specific historical framing,
the colony. The resulting micropractices work as thermometers in relation to what
people perceive as dirt, while serving as tools that separate the ethical and aesthetical
order, from disorder (Hawkins 2006).
Most of the judgement people make with regards to waste is informed by the
practicalities of the day-by-day of those who live at close proximity with each other,
and by shortcomings in local waste management. When women gathered for a coffee,
conversations often included judgement on the way people look after their homes and
kitchens. The cleaning idiom appeared not only in connection with people voicing
their ethical stances regarding dirt, and Umbandistas talking about ‘work’ to clean up
body and soul, but was also an integral part of people’s labour practices. Margarida
started cleaning for other people at the age of seven, and most of my female
acquaintances at Z-10 have done cleaning or cooking at ‘casas de familia’, ‘family
houses’, at some point in their lives. It is also common for men to find waged work
doing cleaning in residential buildings in the neighbourhood, or for the Navy in the
past.
It is often the Residents’ Association that has to find ways of dealing with
ever growing amounts of litter. In 2011, at the start of my fieldwork, the former
president of the Residents’ Association called a General Assembly, held in the main
square in the community, to announce his desire to be re-elected. His extensive
speech focused on the lack of initiative from the part of the vice-president in dealing
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with the problem of rubbish, and on issues of sanitation and disorder, indicating a line
of connection between the three:
The problem is the lack of unity in Ilha. The mayor6 doesn’t realise that each
real (the Brazilian currency) invested in sanitation means economy in health.
We can’t stand this anymore, this place is a dump. The colony is today left
abandoned. I will call COMLURB to come here and clean up.
Many of the residents I talked to had ambiguous feelings towards Augusto,
but the overall consensus was:
It’s bad with him, but worse without him.
He’s a necessary evil.
When he was the president there wasn’t as much rubbish lying around.
I don’t like him, but he gets the rubbish cleared.
One of the employees at CEA, says Augusto has good contacts, meaning he
knows people with political power, even if he is often described as ‘171’, an
expression that in Portuguese refers to people who achieve ends by dubious means.
People wanted the big pile of rubbish at the entrance to the colony cleaned, and
whoever cleaned it would be remembered. A few days later, COMLURB did come,
then a dispute started over who actually called them: was it Augusto’s or the vicepresident’s achievement? As it turned out, Augusto was re-elected for the
Association. He was also allowed to have an office at the CEA building, sealing an
alliance between the Department of Environment and the Residents’ Association. A
year after my fieldwork, rubbish was once more generating severe discontentment.
6
Ilha do Governador has a vice-city mayor.
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The agents that were then working at CEA decided to contact COMLURB and told
the residents to put all the rubbish out. The story goes that because they did not ask
for permission from the Residents’ Association, the collection by COMLURB was
cancelled, the colony became a mess, and the agents were fired. In sum, waste is not
only a big bone of contention, and an issue through which ethical subjects are
produced; it is a political stake with environmental implications. But to understand
why waste is such a contentious issue one must first attend to what people at the local
level consider waste to be; what aspects of discarded material are deemed useful,
useless, or recyclable; and how the management of ‘polluting’ stuff has changed with
the APARU.
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Classifying pollution and the life cycle of matter
Figure 33: Barriers made out of plastic bottles.
Classification implies the presence of boundaries and of separations, including
man-made and natural boundaries, yet categories around pollution can be
interchangeable, and are anything but static. Moreover, the way those categories are
managed has also changed over the years. Some would suggest that, in order to
ensure that natural resources can be equally shared, a new approach towards the
environment is necessary, and one that acknowledges social natures, and the
mutuality between human and non-human beings. But how does one decide which
hybrid things and beings should be allowed in the collective?
The threats commonly associated with waste are those perceived as
‘anthropogenic substances’ considered harmful to life and which include ‘solids,
liquids, gases and sludges’ and encompass the realm of ‘morality, human rights,
environmental justice, structural violence, sustainability, social suffering and the
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political ecology of health’(Singer 2012:5). As we shall see in the accounts below, we
could also add religion and material culture to this list. While waste is often perceived
as a contaminating factor of both culture and nature, Singer suggests that it could be
seen instead as the very thing that links nature and culture. Following a similar line
of reasoning, Hawkins sees dirt as a category that ‘makes systems of order visible’
(2006:2). In this section I will look at some things/concepts classified as ‘dirt’ in my
field and at the ‘purifying’ practices (Latour 1992) that strive to separate culture from
nature, man-made stuff from the mangrove, in order to foster a locally-oriented
debate on which social natures should be part of the ecological assemblage around the
mangrove.
Visible pollution: plastic and rubble
Plastic bags are the plague of the fishermen
Paulinho, a fisherman
I heard this analogy a few times from fishermen at Z-10, and saw the strength
of its literal source: plastic bags and bottles are everywhere, and are constantly being
pulled out of water by fishermen. Just as snow hides trash under a white carpet, the
high tide veils the plastic which sprouts as soon as the tide starts going out.
Fishermen say that the sea bed is covered in plastic bags, and that they stifle life in
the mangrove by holding the mud in place and preventing fish from breathing under
it. Aesthetically speaking, plastic often invites repulsion by individuals who perceive
it as one of the most offensive materials in so-called natural landscapes: try taking a
stroll through the mountains, along a tropical beach, or in the peak district in the UK
and test your reaction to plastic seeping out from the soil.
But while most people react negatively to plastic perceiving it as an invasive
element, it is also an item with many utilities. I always took empty plastic bags with
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me to give to Margarida and to fishermen for they are valuable to store rubbish and to
put fish in. Empty plastic bottles can also be stored in a big container in the colony to
be re-used at handicraft workshops at CEA and to make waste barriers for the
mangrove. However, with higher consumption power over the last years also comes
more fizzy drinks with most households consuming an average of two bottles per day,
which multiplied by the more or less 800 households at Z-10, makes a total of 48,000
empty plastic bottles per month. No matter how many handicrafts or plastic bottle
barriers are made, that plastic is not going to be used up anytime soon.
Besides, it is common knowledge that hundreds of years after most traces of
human life vanish from the world, plastic molecules will still remain ingrained in
whatever matter is left. Does that knowledge reinforce the idea that plastic is not
natural? It is easy to fall into the contradiction of describing plastic as a non-natural
material, even if its composition is taken from nature and made by biological beings.
But whether something is ‘natural’ or not is not a unanimous criterion that makes
something be perceived as polluting. Toninho has a little shack by the mangrove,
from where he leaves every weekend to go fishing with his wife. He took me there to
show me the state of the mangrove and all the waste lying around:
People leave the boats, the wood rots and the mud increases. Fishermen say
they can’t fish anymore because of the rubbish, but they are the ones who
throw all the remains of fish straight into the mangrove.
While some people would find the fish remains less harmful to the mangrove
than plastic, categorising the former as organic and degradable matter, and the latter
as manufactured waste, for Toninho, fish remains are worse because they smell. In
brief, although plastic is seen by many as an environmental villain and by fishermen
as a plague, others find it an invaluable household item and do not see it as an alien
element in the landscape. Another common feature at Z-10 is the deployment of the
laje, already mentioned in Chapter 2, the concrete slab used to create extra floors in
houses, seen by many older residents as a symbol of ‘crescimento desordenado’ or
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disordered growth, and the materialisation of disorder. A direct outcome of the
vertical growth is the rubble produced through house improvements which piles up
by the side of the mangrove shores. Similarly to plastic, rubble clashes, aesthetically
speaking, with ‘natural’ landscapes, but it is also a sign of development, increased
income through renting, and people’s upward mobility. Moreover, rubble has
acquired market value for it is used to land fill areas of mangrove to expand housing,
another example of conflicting views on the same form of waste.
Smelly pollution: sewage and fish scales
Sanitation is a priority here in the APARU. Children step on shit when
they are flying kites and this is against the idea of a preserved mangrove.
Elmo
In the twenty years between the creation of the APARU and my fieldwork the
mangrove went from being a place of environmental protection, becoming part of
schools’ planned outings for children to learn about different crabs, herons, and
mangrove species, to an area which is locked up to prevent public access. ‘How can I
take the children from the school where I teach to come and see raw sewage?’,
exclaimed Teresina, an environmental educator, while the head of Environmental
Education at the City Council level, looked at me with contempt when I suggested
that children should see the raw sewage as part of their environmental education. In
other words, the mangrove that the Department of Environment wishes to enact is not
one with sewage, which explains why the area is locked up and the signs that point to
the APARU are rusty.
Sanitation is a common problem in poor urban communities throughout
Brazil, Z-10 being no exception. First, the Jequiá river passes through a few
communities before arriving at Z-10, and in its trajectory it receives raw sewage from
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about forty thousand households. Secondly, even though some effort was made by the
city council to solve the situation back in the 90s some maintain that the job was
carried out unskilfully: because the colony is basically a swamp area which was land
filled over the years, some houses are below the level of the street, so pipes that
transport sewage would have to be raised above ground level for the system to work
properly, and the ‘elevatórias’ a pumping system, needed for that, were not built. The
solution to this problem is political: the City Council pushes the solution to CEDAE7
which claims that the households should cover the costs of re-structuring the pipes,
while these in turn refuse to be charged for something they say is not their
responsibility.
As observed by the president of the Residents Association in the previous
section, sanitation is also considered a health issue, and a major environmental stake.
Even something like food security intersects with it. In the case of Z-10, for example,
the high consumption of fats in the kitchen affects the functionality of the sanitation
system since the fat that is disposed of down the kitchen drain blocks the pipes that
carry the sewage, causing clogging and overspill of organic waste into people’s
houses. So while most people at Z-10 would agree that sewage is a form of pollution
that should be separated from communal life, the daily release of organic waste into
the mangrove is a major practice with no easy resolution. But does the sewage make
the mangrove less ‘natural’? Tons of sewage flow into the mangrove every day, and
vegetation, crabs, herons and all kinds of interesting life forms living in the hybrid
mud of Jequiá, directly or indirectly, feed on it, so as far as some life forms are
concerned sewage could be part of an ecological assemblage, but in the passage from
nature to environment, sewage is certainly an unwelcome participant.
Marginal pollution: macumba
It’s a shame about all this macumba; they should clean up after themselves.
7
The State Water and Sewage Company (Companhia Estadual de Águas e Esgotos).
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Rogerio, a tour guide in Ilha.
As already observed in chapter 4, some people see Umbanda as a polluting
practice, and macumba, the offerings made for the saint usually placed at crossroads
and green spaces, as pollution. In 2012, the State Department of the Environment in
Rio de Janeiro issued leaflets giving orientations for devotees of Umbanda and
Candomblé about how to clean up after ritual practices and dispose of the remains of
despacho to avoid littering environmentally protected areas. The orixás usually give
strict time and place directions. For that reason, religious leaders, the only ones with
authority over such norms, were recruited by the Secretary as advisers and instructed
to intervene, on behalf of the entities, so that such ‘works’ would be duly removed
after a certain period of time.
Figure 34: Information leaflet on ‘sacred rubbish’. Issued by the State Department of Environment.
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The anthropologist Mariana Renou (2012) who followed the cleaning-up of
offerings made by Candomblé devotees at Cachoeira do Caonze in the district of
Nova Iguaçu, observes how categories changed in the space of 15 minutes from
‘work for the saint’ to ‘sacred rubbish’. The pai de santo of that terreiro, following
instructions by the Department of Environment, established that after 15 minutes the
deities would have already received the offerings, so the ‘saint work’ would turn into
rubbish and would be ready to be cleared by city council rubbish collectors, who also
had to receive new training on the matter as many of them would be reluctant to
touch that type of ‘sacred litter’.
Although the mangrove is sometimes used for offerings, similar policies are
absent from Z-10, probably resulting from the marginal place the mangrove occupies
in relation to other preserved areas in Rio. Yet, Toninho often remarks that his centre
is ‘different from others that place rotting animals by the crossroads’, a reference to
terreiros that still perform animal sacrifice, adding that ‘we are dirty bodies, and we
need the entities to clean our souls’. Still, the payment for this spiritual cleaning work
is the material macumba that may be placed by the mangrove, blurring further the
cleaning and polluting categories.
Invisible pollution: dengue and oil
In this rich biome also lives dengue, the name of the viral disease transmitted
by the Aedes Aegypti mosquito, its main vector. Dengue can be fatal and the fight to
eliminate it has been part of governmental initiatives, as have other bacterial and viral
diseases since the beginning of the twentieth century when the first hygiene-related
policies were imposed on the population. The favourite spot for this mosquito to
reproduce is stagnant water, so after the first epidemic of dengue in Brazil more than
a decade ago, policies were elaborated to reduce the incidence stagnant water. For
that reason, the dengue agent came onto the scene and became a familiar face in most
communities, knocking on people’s doors on a regular basis to check for possible
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breeding spots for the mosquito. At Z-10, Health Vigilance Agents gather outside
CEA three times a week before they go on their regular check along for potential
focus spots along the mangrove, due to the great amounts of untreated water that get
trapped in accumulated rubbish when the tide is high.
Finally, oil is a form of pollution that should not be ignored, not only because
it was an oil spill that brought on the ethical moment that unravels this story, but also
because oil is seen by many local environmentalists as the biggest culprit of all. The
Navy area adjacent to the colony comprises three sectors: the radio transmission
station, the research centre and the fuel deposit, and all three of them have a plan of
environmental management with weekly classified waste collection. There also carry
out monthly simulations of oils spills in a partnership between the Navy, Shell and
the colony, namely Zé Luiz, when they practise the separation of oil from the
mangrove area by positioning ‘barriers for the contention of oil’, barreiras de
contenção de óleo. Informed by environmentally-oriented purification efforts, a
physical barrier is built between man-made and natural stuff to stop ‘polluting’
material from entering the mangrove. Dengue and oil have acquired visibility as
environmental concerns, becoming additional links in the assemblage, but most
importantly, attempts to segregate those elements from the mangrove have gone
beyond everyday gestures, becoming systematic strategies informed by the
environmental paradigm.
Useless Stuff
There used to be a lot of things dumped in the mangrove. The mangrove was not
fenced off, so people would come with their wheel barrows and dump everything
straight into it. It changed after the mangrove became a preserved area.
Teresinha
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As evident in the comment above, the mangrove was being used as a dump
before the establishment of the APARU. After 1993, policies were created to monitor
people’s behaviour around the mangrove, alongside educational projects by CEA to
raise the ‘awareness’ of the population about their newly acquired preserved area. But
as time passed, politicians’ interest and projects in the APARU dwindled, together
with people’s ‘awareness’. More than one year after Augusto took over the
association for the second time, I asked him about the issue of waste management in
the colony. The once archenemy of Zé Luiz, who now also runs an environmental
NGO and writes angry letters in newspapers accusing CEDAE of neglecting
problems with sanitation, declared:
Now I understand why Zé Luiz is so revolted. If I threaten the guy who
throws inservíveis[useless stuff] in the mangrove with a gun, I’m committing a
crime, but he is committing an environmental crime and nothing happens to
him. So they throw old fridges, stoves, kitchen waste in the mangrove and
there’s nothing we can do.
‘Inservíveis’ is a category used to refer to manufactured commodities which
are no longer useful, such as fridges, settees, stoves or cars. The compilation of
polluting stuff elaborated above shows that it is not easy to define what constitutes
waste, let apart to define whether something is man-made or natural. The category of
inservíveis, however, is a less ambiguous one, in the sense that most people have no
use for a broken fridge or television. Furthermore, rubbish collectors may refuse to
take those items away because of their sheer size, so dumping them may be the only
easy solution. After the APARU was created the Department of Environment
imposed some regulations whereby people could be fined for dumping stuff into the
mangrove, but proper control was never enforced making the legislative mechanisms
lose their raison d’être.
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However ambiguous the ‘polluting’ stuff classified above may be, as objects
of classification they stand outside nature, even if in practice they transgress
categories. Some forms of pollution require proper management to alleviate matters,
like rubble and plastic bags, since they can be used by some people and are loathed
by others. Dengue and oil have strategies already in place, while sewage is a political
problem with no short term solution. While ‘purifying’ efforts are part of the broader
ecological assemblage, the passage from nature to environment did foster reflexive
practices that translate into new ethical and aesthetical sensibilities. There is however
an evident lack of waste-related policies in the APARU, not to mention perceived
‘problems’ that the Department of Environment does not acknowledge and that could
potentially be tapped into, such as the issue of macumba already being dealt with
elsewhere. Next, we shall look at some policies that did emerge in the passage from
nature to environment.
From nature to environment: jobs and recycling in the afterlife of
waste
This is what fishermen do now, we collect rubbish. That’s what you should write
about.
Pombo Velho, a fisherman.
Rubbish has provided jobs for some residents at Z-10 who would otherwise
have to rely on the unpredictable yield through fishing, or lack of income altogether.
The Mutirão de Reflorestamento, or Reforestation Collective, popularly known as the
Mutirão do Jequiá, a project by the Department of Environment which has been
running more than twenty years, is a sought after source of employment. It started as
a public policy just after the mangrove was turned into an APARU in 1993. There
was then plenty of political will to invest in the area, motivated by global interests in
the aftermath of the Rio Summit in 1992. CEA’s administration was outsourced,
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boasting a thirty-strong workforce, including permanent staff and volunteers, and
employing local people. Besides the Reforestation Collective, which back then was in
charge of planting the saplings being raised in the greenhouse sponsored by Shell and
managed by Zé Luiz, there was Guardiões do Rio, the River Guardians, responsible
for the cleaning. Funding also supported a percussion project with instruments made
from rubbish found in the mangrove, and a theatre project showing plays with the
environmental theme.
Those were the golden days for the environmental project planned for the
mangrove, result of a partnership between private initiatives and public power which
soon faded away, as most policies do in Brazil with their short-term, election-driven
motivations. Nowadays, the level of pollution in the mangrove is the main reason
‘nobody from private corporations wants to fund Jequiá’, I am informed by an
employee at the Department of Environment. I counted more than two hundred
entries in the main local newspaper over the period between 1993 and 1998,8 when
news about the activities at CEA were common and Zé Luiz was portrayed as a
‘mangrove-saving hero’. Nowadays, the APARU is only occasionally mentioned, and
usually in connection with its current state of abandonment. The Reforestation
Collective managed to survive, but it now combines both cleaning and reforestation
employing around 10 people who receive a minimum wage for part-time work. In
interviews, comments by people who do the cleaning say they feel different about the
mangrove now.
The fishermen too have engaged in similar programs paid by the polluting
industries to clean the shores of Ilha. The oil spill caused by Petrobrás in 2000 meant
that fishermen are a priority if funding becomes available for the social responsibility
department.9 In spite of feeling that being a rubbish collector is a downgrading from
8
The main library in Ilha, located in the district of Cocotá, has a file exclusively on newspaper
articles related to the colony, the great majority of them focusing on local initiatives to protect the
mangrove, which points to the importance granted to the APARU of Jequiá in the context of Ilha.
9
Those departments supposedly follow the guidelines of Agenda 21, already mentioned in chapter
1, which, according to its official website (see UN webpage 2012) intend to introduce a new
paradigm based on a ‘reconversion of the industrial society’ and the ‘reinterpretation of the
concept of progress’. Agenda 21 often cropped up in conversations with political actors, either as
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being a fisherman, Pombo Velho kept asking me to find a project like the one he took
part in a couple of years ago by the city council called Baía Limpa, or Clean Bay
which paid the fishermen to go with their boats around the shores of Ilha do
Governador to collect rubbish. They received a minimum wage which provided some
security in times when fish were hard to find. But the palliative, not to say cynical
side of those solutions do not go unnoticed, as evident in Pombo Velho’s comment
that opens this section.
So, if the protection of the mangrove now provides wages, could we say that
the mangrove has been commoditized? The environmental scientist Braden R.
Allenby’s defines commoditization as ‘the process through which capital market
changes things that were previously not regarded as economic goods into something
with a price, and, concomitantly, into part of the economy’ (Allenby 2005:22).
Insofar as the mangrove and its cleaning enter funding bids, we can say that the
mangrove became commodified by generating new forms of labour-power (Marx
[1867] 1976). Moreover, by providing jobs for those who in the past would have
earned their yield from fish in the sea, rubbish collection policies in Z-10 have
created an economic alternative without having to touch upon the core problem of
polluting industries, of indemnities that have not been duly paid, and of problems in
the management of rubbish collection. Thus, an added sub-product of the passage
from nature to environment was the change in the exchange value of the mangrove,
which now provides jobs instead of seafood, even if it carries on accommodating giftbased relations of exchange, as seen with the Umbanda interactions.
the main body behind initiatives such as workshops on co-management, or as a target for criticism
from the part of the most sceptical who saw it as the palliative representative of corporations such
as Petrobrás, getting involved with the community in order to show an effort to amend
wrongdoings to the fishing community whose produce dropped due to oil spills.
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Here, the hybrid economy
model on the right is useful to
elucidate how people engage with
different conditions of production.
Thus, fishermen who stand for the
customary sphere coexist with wage
labourers, located in the market
sector, and with grantees of
government subsidies that compensate
Diagram 1: The hybrid economy model
formulated by the anthropologist Jon Altman
(2010) to analyse the work by aboriginal art
producers.
for loss of produce at times when
fishing is not allowed.10 More recently,
fishermen-turned-rubbish-collectors and the cleaners of the Mutirão occupy the
section in the middle where market, customary practice and state overlap in the
environmental assemblage. Another example that can be placed in that middle area is
Marconi who composed the samba lyrics for a campaign by COMLURB (Municipal
Company for Urban Cleaning).While people like the Umbandista Daniel, who travel
long distances to Cabo Frio in the Lakes Region to buy shrimps cheap and resell them
at the fishing stand in Z-10, could be placed in the space between customary and
market.
In brief, with little yield from the sea, people pursue whatever means available
to make extra cash, and rubbish collection has become one of those means. Not
without some sadness I would regularly watch one of the oldest fishermen in the
colony walk backwards and forwards with a big black bin liner to collect cans, which
as recyclable items can be exchanged for cash. Moreover, ‘cleaning the mangrove’,
has assumed ethical overtones and is now synonymous with environmental
10
Fishermen receive a benefit, called defeso, during temporary paralysation of the fishing practice
for the reproduction of species, with different species having different periods. Depending on how
the fisherman is registered in his colony, he may be able to get the benefit for shrimps and
sardines, for example, at different times, so it is quite useful to be registered as a fisherman of
different species.
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preservation. This ethical dimension is also present in another activity fostered by the
passage from nature to environment, recycling:
This work is like mental hygiene to me. – Zaine, commenting on making
carnival costumes with recycled materials.
Zane’s choice of words signals not only yet another instance of the cleaning
metaphor, but also new sensibilities being aroused by recycling, an acquired
behaviour which is now part of everyday practices. As I watched Zane removing
rows of sequins from a throwaway headdress to attach to the Baiana11 skirt for the
Carnival Bloco12 the embodiment of that reflexive action was apparent. Margarida
also took a great deal of pride and pleasure in that activity often remarking that ‘the
Baianas were all made of recycled material’, and that she ‘created costumes out of
stuff discarded by bigger samba schools’, pointing to the creative aspect of figuring
out ways of using up materials. While recycling for Margarida and Zane is triggered
by need, it is nurtured by ethical sensibilities that happen to overlap with
environmentally-oriented ones.
The difference between morality and ethics in Gay Hawkins’s investigation of
waste, is pertinent here: the former stands for practices seen as good or bad, the latter
for ‘cultivations that afford opportunities for reflective modification of the self’
(Hawkins: 2001:7). Contributors to a volume that explores practices of recycling
around the world (Alexander & Reno 2012) have telling ethnographic examples of
the effects of recycling on people, and how sound it is as an environmental practice.
Focusing on a recycling cooperative in Buenos Aires, Karen Ann Faulk observes that
the creation of moral frameworks are context-based; while Kathleen Millar, who
worked in a rubbish dump in Rio de Janeiro, not far from Z-10, concludes that the
materials collected in the dump connects people to national and global industries. It is
11
Baianas are an essential section of a samba school representing candomblé women from Bahia.
12
A Bloco isa very small community-based samba school.
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this refashioning of oneself through new acquired practices such as recycling that
interests us here.
I would argue that recycling, a concept introduced after the mangrove entered
the environmental assemblage mostly through craft workshops held at CEA, is an
example of a new ethics, and a conceptual as well as a material link in the
environmental assemblage. The most popular workshops at CEA, for example, are
those that use recyclable materials. The women I met saw a practical dimension to
recycling which struck a chord with them because they can use up things they have
too many of, like empty milk cartons or coffee jars. Likewise, the men who work for
Mutirão do Jequiá often comment on the wall they constructed out of old tyres to
support the mangrove bank, and the long barriers made with plastic bottles that stop
material waste from coming into the thicker part of the mangrove.
But here labour-power goes beyond being a commodity as it enters the
market. The women who make the costumes, and the artefacts, and the men who
build the barriers enjoy the embodied dispositions that come with that manual work,
and the sense of achievement from making artefacts out of rubbish. Similarly, Velho
do Rio, an artist who lives in a favela nearby and produces remarkable sculptures out
of discarded telephone and electric wiring, is invited to all major events held at CEA
and his work is permanently displayed in the main room of the building at Z-10. The
change in behaviour instigated by new perceptions of the value behind re-using
unwanted items however distracts people from the culprits responsible for the biggest
part in the problem of waste, such as construction and oil corporations, by focusing
instead on individual behaviours (Graeber 2012).
Penny Harvey (2013) observed that recycling may destabilise previously
made categories of waste, and the vitality of matter, including for example, the
resilience of plastic. I would also add that it destabilises common consumption and
labour-power patterns, and does not easily fit in the model of hybrid economy above.
More importantly, comments reveal a return to a creative transformation of naturein
this everyday practice, this time a transformation of commodified nature, since
recycling re-forges the ‘congealed quantities’ of human labour Marx associated with
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commodities ([1867]1976:128).In an analysis of the commonalities of the prefix
‘eco’ in economics and ecology, David Graeber notes its roots is oikos, the selfsufficient household in Greek times, with the family standing for an economic and
ecological unit (Graeber 2012:283). He goes on to observe that contemporary
understand of the discipline Economics only came about with the Industrial
Revolution when the household went from being seen as a unit of production to one
of consumption (ibid.:284). It seems that the new ethical practices related to waste
described above are welcome because they make it possible for this unit to be
sustained, and for a dialectical outcome between production and consumption. I shall
now turn to the commodification of rubbish outside Z-10 to explore waste in the
broader environmental assemblage.
Use-value re-signified: the politics and poetics of waste
To find poetry beyond waste, as proposed by Slavoj Zizek, one has to see the
mangrove beyond its smell and plastic and to explore it as a social natural artefact.
Regarded as one of the biggest environmental problems in our era, solid waste, the
contemporary denomination for rubbish, is a major political stake. Law 12.305 from
2010, known as the National Policy for Solid Waste (Política Nacional de Resíduos
Sólidos), established the requirement of ‘reverse logistics’, based on shared
responsibility by different parts of the chain, from manufacturers to consumers.
Apparently, some of the new enterprises for handling solid waste are receiving
environmental licences to operate without being required to treat the leachate
(chorume), a polluting liquid of dark colour and strong smell resulting from the
biological, chemical and physical processes during the decomposition of organic
matter. It is also believed that half of that substance is ending up in Guanabara Bay.
Following a denunciation of illegal use of dumps, a special committee from Alerj, the
Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro, went on a monitoring visit led by the state
representative Janira Rocha on May 10th 2013.
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I was invited by Elmo to accompany the visit to three different dumps, all in
the Niteroi area, a municipality on the other side of Guanabara bay from Z-10. The
rubbish that goes to former Lixão de Itaoca, in São Gonçalo comes from a variety of
places in Rio, which means that rubbish from Z-10 could potentially end there. It
receives an average of 36 thousand tons of waste per month, with a capacity of 44
million cubic metres. The company that won the bid to administer it has reforestation
plans for some of the land. At the plant they drain the leachate from the waste so it
does not contaminate underground water sources. The forecast is that the place has
capacity to receive rubbish for the next 70 years. Morelli, a filmmaker who was
accompanying the visit said it was a cosmeticised dump, that the city council has
failed with regards to proposals for selective collection and recycling, and that the
country is burying an average of 8 billion tons of recyclable goods per year. The site
manager who showed us round the plant, told us about the economic history of those
fields: a couple of hundred years ago, they were used for sugar cane crops, then the
oranges took over, then cattle. Now it is rubbish; the new cycle in the
commoditisation of nature is discarded nature deemed unusable by humans.
The outcome of the visits was that INEA, the State Institute of Environment,
was accused of giving out licenses to private companies interested in managing waste
and telling the media that the dumps were being pulled down and deactivated, while
they were still being used. The legislation is apparently being ignored, there’s no
monitoring, and judging by the smell of sulphur the sites could be a health hazard. In
the fields next to one of the ‘disused’ dumps, cattle being raised for sale to the meat
market were quenching their thirst with brownish water, clearly contaminated with
leachate, from a nearby stream.
To the other side of the former dump we found a community of approximately
786 former rubbish collectors. Supposedly, they no longer live as rubbish pickers, but
because they have not received any indemnity the whole community still makes a
living from trying to find whatever scraps from the now illegal dumping.
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Figure 35: Cizino, a former fisherman.
Sharing their lives with an impressive number of pigs, vultures and dogs, this
is one of the most sobering sights of the lumpen, in Marx’s understanding of the term,
one is ever likely to see. Amidst them I met Cizino and his wife Maria José who have
8 children, six of them are rubbish pickers living in nearby shacks. Cizino was once a
fisherman and knew a few people at Z-10 like Baixinho, Geraldão, and Pombo Velho,
giving the comment that opens the previous section an uncannily prophetic ring. He
stopped fishing because there was no money in it anymore, now he can still find
copper, cans and plastic bottles in the officially deactivated dump. Things are
changing for them now since rubbish, and its collection, is being privatised with
companies entering bids for the business. But it is not only big corporations that are
exploring this controversial matter.
Not unlike the alchemic project of transmutation of common elements into
noble ones, the poetics of waste has also been widely explored in the documentary
genre in Brazil for almost two decades. One of the first films on this sub-genre of
waste was Isle of Flowers (llha das Flores), by Jorge Furtado, from 1990, which
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follows a rotten tomato in its narrative. Isle of Flowers is the name of a rubbish dump
in the South of Brazil where the rotten tomato finally becomes food for those who
scavenge out of necessity, after its extensive trajectory that includes bring grown in a
farm, being hygenized for consumption, being part of the salad bowl in a middleclass family, and being discarded. In 1992, Eduardo Coutinho made Garbage Mouth
(Boca de Lixo), and in 2005 came Estamira, a film by Marcos Prado which received
nothing less than 16 prizes. In 2010, a partnership between Brazil and the
UK13produced Waste Land (Lixo Extraordinário), a documentary about Vik Muniz,
one of the most well-known visual artists in Brazil today, and his work with rubbish
pickers in the assembling of enormous collage works made with bits of scrap found in
the rubbish dump of Jardim Gramacho, which used to receive a large percentage of
the waste produced in the city of Rio de Janeiro until it was deactivated in 2012. The
wise fool character Estamira, the protagonist of the film mentioned above, gives her
version of environmental education:
To preserve things, is to protect, to clean, and to use them as much as
possible.
13
Directed by Karen Harley, João Jardim, and Lucy Walker.
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Conclusion
The dialectical outcome of the encounter between development and a fishing
colony that turned the mangrove, in some people’s perception, into a rubbish dump,
also produced the APARU offering former fishermen the prospect of jobs to keep the
area clean, a vision far removed from the biblical Peter, the fishermen’s patron saint,
whose image greets all those crossing the bridge to Z-10.While the commodification
of the mangrove through environmental policies is not unethical per se, it does avoid
confronting the invasive economic and political agendas that prevent fishermen from
having access to their means of production in the first place. That said, the
precariousness that resulted from environmental transformations fostered new ethical
practices, resulting in an environmental endeavour that revived the mangrove of
Jequiá making it an example of a biotic community, notwithstanding the
overwhelming presence of material waste.
This chapter elaborated on this social natural mangrove through the polluting
aspects that constitute it, which are inseparable from how people view the mangrove
conceptually. But while a great part of the broader discussion on waste is predicated
on an opposition between natural and man-made matter, with nature being defined by
the non-existence of rubbish, we saw in this chapter that those boundaries are blurred.
Waste can be both man-made and natural; plastic is seen as a plague, as raw material
for handicrafts, and as instrumental for daily life; sewage is both looked upon with
disgust, and nourishing stuff for some forms of life in the mangrove. Although
moralities around the mangrove are negotiated by means of oppositions, namely that
of what is considered clean against what is deemed polluted, those categories are not
fixed spawning a multiplicity of local ecological strategies.
But if for most people, the mangrove is inseparable from the concepts
attached to the vast array of objects and matter that constitute it, environmentallydriven actors persevere to discriminate between what should and what should not
constitute the mangrove. Almost all forms of perceived pollution mentioned in this
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chapter have, directly or indirectly, been the object of public policies, and/or
regulations, even if probably the most serious polluter of all in the Guanabara Bay,
Petrobrás, still owes millions in indemnity to fishermen. It is also clear from the
accounts that waste management is entangled with political and institutional agendas,
and personal pursuits. The passage from nature to environment also marked a shift
from the mangrove seen as constitutive of the moral economy of the fishing families
that lived around it, which was moral insofar as it was informed by embodied
dispositions, to a both moral and ethical mangrove resulting from ‘reflective and
reflexive’ (Zigon 2008:165) behaviours towards the environment. It seems plausible
to suggest that recycling is an example of such a reflexive behaviour insofar as it
involves an engagement with the creative and conscious self.
There is a general understanding on the part of environmental governance that
it is difficult to arouse people’s sensibilities towards a mangrove when it is associated
with everything deemed impure, and amongst the things and concepts assembled in
this mangrove network, concepts related to ‘hygiene’ are powerful tools of discourse.
But under the environmental paradigm, waste has intersected with a wide array of
domains, including the corporate, the artistic and the religious. It is a health and a
political issue, but most importantly, it has now acquired a high price in the market.
Thus, in the environmentalist endeavour to purify nature, the mangrove is enacted as
a polluted environment. After the mangrove enters the environmentalist assemblage,
this purification is performed through policies that in turn produce ethical subjects
whose jobs are to separate classified substances in and around the mangrove. In sum,
residents working for the City Council have learned that environmentally ethical
sensibilities entail a particular cleaning, and do not necessarily coincide with
ecologically ethical ones. They do nevertheless carry on performing the important
task of cleaning the mangrove shores of man-made unwanted items. Those agents
mirror in an uncannily way the work of the mangrove biome at the natural level, and
of Exu in the supernatural realm.
The concept of dump opens and closes this chapter. In the broader picture, the
main dumping grounds are the final destination for the transformed nature that travels
223
through the city, from factories to retails shops, to households at Z-10. The stigma
associated with those who earn a living picking rubbish still applies, and connections
with Marx’s lumpenproletariat may echo for those familiarised with the concept.
Dumps, and dumping grounds like a lot of mangroves are historically, are the place
for displaced nature, displaced individuals, and displaced communities managed by
departments elsewhere in town. I shall now move to one of those units, the
Department of Environment at the municipal level, part of the City Council and
current ‘guardian’ of Z-10.
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Part III – Environmentalisms
Chapter 6 – The 12th Floor
One day I was on my boat going up the mangrove when I saw a shack on
preserved area. This is illegal, and I didn’t know what to do. I went home and
thought for a while. If I contacted the city council, they would have to get in
touch with the urban control department, which would then have to contact
the social services, because it involved people. The housing department
would then have to find a place to resettle the people. The matter would go
back to the urban control department, then back to the city council again. It
could take well over a month, by which time more houses could have been
built making the resettling more complicated. I decided to phone my mate at
the Navy base. The next day, the shack was pulled down.- a resident at Z-10.
The above passage indicates the tension between two forms of control over
the colony, the current one by the City Council, more decentralised and bureaucratic,
and the former governance exercised by the Navy where personal relations prevail. It
also illustrates the complexity of qualifying what is ethical, and what is not, and the
hurdles involved in drawing the line of how far one can and should go in his/her
commitment towards the nonhuman world and away from humanist mind frames.
Following Jarret Zigon’s suggestion that ethics, as opposed to morality, refers to ‘the
rare occasion in everyday life when one actually has to stop and consider how to act
or be morally appropriate’ (Zigon 2008:164), the action described above could be
read as an instance of ethical behaviour. The third part of this thesis focuses on
changes in the ethical behaviour towards a mangrove under the environmental
paradigm. The promise of a renewed cultivation of nature underlies the green
225
movement (Nairn 1997), provides a moral high ground for the environmental
movement as a whole (Grove-White 1993; Descola & Pálsson 1996; Little 1999;
Tsing 2005), and paradoxically announces the death of nature and the rise of
environment with related beacons such as ‘sustainable development’ (Escobar
1996:48).
This ‘concern to protect the environment through human responsibility and
effort’ (Leach & Fairhead 2002:221), places environmentalism in the realm of
political ecology1 given that the way people understand the paradigm is socially,
politically and economically situated. However, as pointed out by Mario Blaser,
given the ‘multiplicity of worlds animated in different ways’ (2012:1) and the
heterogeneous assemblages composed by natural, supernatural and social natural
beings, political theory is undoubtedly moving on shifting ground (Holbraad 2008;
Blaser 2014). The mangrove, as from 1993, has rights, but what about everything else
that constitutes it?
This chapter explores a particular unfolding in the environmental turn, the
institutionalisation of natural landscapes, with special attention given to the
production of ethical sensibilities perceived through the way people converse with
current legislations and political agendas, at times being informed by them, at others
judging or undermining them. The dynamics of those relations reveal the concrete
effects of seeing nature and culture as sometimes purified categories and at other
times hybridised, along with the ethical implications of this conceptual pair for ideas
such as humanism, democracy, rights, and the relationship between humans and the
non-human. To trace the links in the environmentalist assemblage the anthropologist
has to explore terrains where knowledge about the environment gets legitimised
across space and institutions, relations and objects.
1
Escobar sees political ecology as the study of conflicts over access to and control of natural
resources, while noting that ‘the political field is traversed by three domains: the ecological, the
economic and the cultural’(Escobar 2008:13).
226
I shall start by focusing on the repercussions of the mangrove becoming a
legal entity, to explore the ‘environmental ethics’2 at play in the interactions between
governmental institutions, people, and the legislation in the light of literature on
ethics and moral agency (Laidlaw 2002; Asad 2000; Foucault 1997; Lambek 2010;
Heintz 2009; Hawkins 2006). I shall then demonstrate how most of the instruments
available to grant environmental protection are based on the nature/society divide,
including contemporary democratic models, such as the 1988 Brazilian Constitution,
which places the environment as a right. Next, I will focus on the discrepancy
between discourse and practice by analysing the episode concerning the dispute
around the construction of an Olympic Village, and how different actors, from inside
the colony and outside it, played their parts.
I will then move on to describe people’s perceptions of two practices that help
assemble the network: an environmental policy and work undertaken at the Centre for
Environmental Education, unveiling a detachment from what is happening at the local
level by political actors with a supposed interest in the environment. I will also weigh
up the advantages of the theoretical nature/culture pair for environmental education
policies, while making a case arguing that cultural phenomenon where the nonseparation is present should inform not only environmental policies but also the body
of knowledge on environment. Finally, I will explore the potential of an ontological
shift as an alternative route towards an ecological assemblage.
2
Defined as ‘the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to,
and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents’ (Brennan &
Lo 2011).
227
Ethics and the institutionalization of the environment
The mangrove that once provided fishermen and their aggregates with a living
became, over the years, a political and legal entity insofar as politicians make
decisions about it, and is recognised by the National Forest Code and the Constitution
as a bio-system. The landmark for the construction of the institutional sphere of the
environment is broadly recognised as the UN Conference on the Human Environment
held in Stockholm in 1972. Brazil had been going through its process of
industrialization since the 1940s, and, at the time of the conference, still during the
military rule, the country expressed concerns over environmental restrictions which
could affect its developmental plans. Nevertheless, and fearing possible curbing of
international financial help, it created in 1973 its first department of environment
(Lopes 2006). The process of the institutionalization of the environment apparently
lags behind the process of its legislation, thus in 1993, in the same year the mangrove
was turned into an APARU, the first Municipal Department of the Environment was
created in Rio de Janeiro.
The historical process of environmentalism implies transformations in
governmental structures and in people’s behaviour, which includes the acquisition of
new embodied practices by the natural person (in the juridical sense), also understood
as the ‘micropolitics of the self’ (Hawkins 2006:15), and of ethical standards by legal
entities, such as the Agenda 21 now part of the social responsibility plans of a large
number of corporations in the country. Thus, it is possible to see the ethical at work in
a number of layers which affect one another and may produce interesting ethical
sensibilities: the public or political represented by the former and current forms of
governmentality; the private or natural person realm, including also the legal person
in the form of corporations and NGOs under personal progress; and the normative,
which stands for the regulatory framework which should in theory provide the
guidelines for the moral agent to act upon. This field of competing ethics around the
mangrove may look more or less like this:
228
Mangrove
Private
Public
Normative
Representations
Everyday practices
Spiritual reasoning
Personal development
Navy
Laws
Department of Environment
Policies
Education
Diagram 2: The layers of competing ethics.
Michel Foucault posits that the Western world today, having rejected some
forms of interventions to normalise moral conduct, as Christianity did before the
Enlightenment, lacks the grounding to sustain a new ethics (Foucault 1983).
Universal environmental ethics would supposedly fill in the moral vacuum left by
capitalism (Harvey 1996:156), though the shift from the neo-liberal model towards
progressive socio-environmental policies reconciling economic growth and
environmental preservation appears to be a rhetorical one. In Greek times, ethics was
related to the aesthetics of existence, rather than to political, social and economic
structures (Foucault 1997), then with the Epicureans, it gradually became a tēkhne of
the self for its own sake. While it concerned the running of the city, it was mostly a
tēkhne of life, a notion that fits well together with current readings of ‘practices of
self-fashioning’ (Das 2012:4).
The account that opens this chapter could also be read as an ethical moment
(Zigon 2008) that grants the individual an opportunity to re-make his/her moral self.
And it is significant because it shows that the relationship between the broader
229
context and local practices is dynamic and that old ethics where hurdles can be
‘easily’ overcome clashes with today’s bureaucratic traps like Max Weber’s iron
cage.3 What we see here is a tension between one type of governance based on
discipline and authority which favours selected individuals, and a more democratic
one where social justice supposedly comes first. The illegality of the shack was
resolved unofficially and, much like Kant’s model of moral reasoning, actors
exercised a certain measure of freedom and rationality, and solved the problem by
inhumane means. This is an example of the conundrum of multiple ethical layers: the
shack was illegally constructed, so destroying it can be seen as ethical by some, but is
it ethical to destroy it by unconventional means? Is removing the roof of a homeless
person ethical? Should the protection of the mangrove come first?
Rights, laws and human exceptionalism
We saw in the historical account in chapter 1 how the environmental
legislation for the mangrove evolved from a need to protect the interests of
individuals and the crown, allowing deforestation for commercial reasons, to the
granting of collective rights which protected the environment but only insofar as
human livelihood depended on it. In other words, the legislation to protect natural
landscapes emerges as a factor of ‘human exceptionalism’ (Haraway 2008), grounded
on the conviction that humans are at the top of the hierarchy of beings. Over the years,
a regulatory framework was created resulting in many accomplishments for the
environmental cause, but the reform of the Brazilian Forest Code in 2012 is seen by
environmentalists as a setback for mangrove areas, while also unveiling the problem
of democratic participation in the 21st century. The highly controversial reform
which generated a huge amount of bad press just as Brazil was getting ready to host
3
An employee at the Department of Environment explained that the difficulty of dealing with
illegal constructions on areas of environmental preservation is mainly due to the issue of human
rights. He gave an account of an operation in a favela which needed the simultaneous undertaking
by five different departments in the city council.
230
the Rio Summit in 2012, grants amnesty to illegal occupation of areas such as
mangroves, seen by many as one of the main negative points of the project. It also
unveils the archaic roots of land ownership in Brazil which favours those with the
biggest extensions of land.4 The dilemma between development and environmental
preservation is further enhanced by arguments in favour of the former, grounded on
the need for developing countries to achieve economic growth and improve social
conditions. Such a view persists in the century-old logic of placing human needs
above those of non-humans, and sustains the division between society and nature.
Thus, we are faced with a double dilemma raising ethical issues: we need to look
after the environment because of future generations, but we need development to
achieve more equality, both locally between different social classes, and globally,
between countries. This predicament explains why ‘sustainable development’ is
regarded as an oxymoron in some circles.
The environment officially entered the Brazilian Constitution in 1988, along
with the driving precept of environmental justice, with people seen as constitutive of
the environment. Chapter VI ‘On the Environment’, part of the section ‘On the Social
Order’, Article 225, states: ‘Everyone has the right to an ecologically balanced
environment. As an asset for common use and essential for a healthy quality of life,
the public power and the population have the duty to defend and preserve it for future
generations’ (1988 Brazilian Federal Constitution, my translation).5Considered one of
the best environmental legislations in the world (Lopes 2006) since it includes rights
and obligations regarding natural landscapes, the 1988 Constitution turns
environmental protection into a constitutional right for the citizen, and does so for the
future of humankind.
4
The Official Diary (Diário Oficial) issued on 18th October 2012, announces that the law 12.651,
of 25th may 2012, an amendment to the Brazilian Forest Code, is now in force According to Mário
Mantovani, one of the main voices of a pro-mangrove campaign Mangue faz a Diferença,
Mangroves Make the Difference, this amendment exposes mangroves in Brazil to legislative
breaches by affecting the status of environmentally preserved areas.
5
See Planalto 1988.
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Inversely, the contents of Law 9.985 (2000) establishing the guidelines for the
implementation of the National System for Conservation Units in Brazil, the umbrella
category that encompasses APAs (Areas of Environmental Protection) have human
beings as the foreign element which has to be either controlled or eliminated from the
selected territory. However distinct, both documents renew the artificial division
between human and non-human beings and expose different approaches to natural
landscapes and the paradox of having humanism as a moral imperative in an
environmental legislation. Maurice Strong, the Secretary-General of the Rio Summit
in 92 talked about humanity going through a ‘civilizational change’, and the world
moving away ‘from its self-consumptive course to one of renewal and sustenance’
(Argyrou 2005:74). While the environmental turn is often associated with
postmodernity whereby nature is no longer perceived as a resource to be exploited
indefinitely (Jameson 1991:ix), others see it as the continuation of a modernist project
which relies on a universal logic and on a particular cultural investment of ‘the Same’
(Argyrou 2005). The legislative texts above seem to support the latter view seeing
that they are grounded on a strict division between the science of things and human
matters thereby guaranteeing the ‘modern constitution’ (Latour 1993), despite the
underlying intention to acknowledge the needs of non-humans.
The root of this paradox is that although the environmental turn is
characteristic of postmodern times, it is predicated on a globalised logic. If on the one
hand postmodernity refers to a fragmented world which lacks a meta-narrative and
common values to give coherence to it all, globalization on the other, promises a
‘monolithic system of measurement’ (Graeber 2001:xi), and along with this universal
market, comes universal values such as those put forward by some forms of
environmentalism. However, environmentalism is anything but monolithic. The idea
that all forms of life have right to existence is seen as a ‘biocentric’ and radical view
by mainstream environmentalists. In this scenario, diverse ontologies do surface, and
some strands of the environmental movement offer potentially new ontological
perspectives of the world. Charlene Spretnak suggests that green politics should
ideally foster a society that is ‘post-humanist, post-modern and post-patriarchal’
232
(1984: 236), while Latour claims that political ecology has to let go of nature (2004)
in order to do away with the hierarchy of beings.
But those legislative texts pertain to the semiotic terrain; in practice, things are
never that clearly cut. And even if the concept of environment is a result of scientific
and sociological constructions in the symbolic domain, it nevertheless spawns power
relations with concrete outcomes and associated ethical sensibilities. This
ethnography has so far provided telling examples of how the current environmental
governance at Z-10 does not adequately acknowledge local ethical sensibilities where
the boundaries between nature and society are rather blurred. The heterogeneous
assemblage around the mangrove which encompasses humans, wildlife, rubbish, shit,
institutions, and a humanist framework, is one rife with tensions. In other words,
ethics and rights are entangled in practice, and as the social and the natural are
assembled in the collective, the rights conceded to the mangrove by decree get
muddled up with the constitutional rights of the citizen, as seen in the opening
passage of this chapter. Given there are two different processes at play, one of
legislating over the environment, and the other of protecting it through
institutionalisation in dialogue with the legislation, how do practices reflect and
conform to legislation over the mangrove at the local level?
The mangrove and the Olympic Village
When I arrived at Z-10 in 2011 to start my fieldwork, Zé Luiz was visibly
thinner and more bitter. Four years before he had welcomed me to his house to show
his archive of the colony’s history, which encompassed old photographs, poems,
hundreds of newspaper articles about his environmental activism, documents such as
the minutes of meetings between the Navy and the fishermen, and the deeds from
1938 through which the Navy donated the land to the fishermen. He was also excited
about a manuscript of a book he wrote on the fauna and flora of the mangrove, a 145page-long report containing tables of chemical analysis of its biological composition
233
and of its contamination by heavy metals resulting from the polluting industries in the
surrounding area. It also includes a compilation of the different types of molluscs,
crustaceans and all the fish found in the surrounding bay along with photographs of
almost every species mentioned, including local birds and vegetation. Not a small
achievement for a self-taught environmentalist. Zé Luiz soon revealed the reason for
his disappointment: after more than thirty years of struggle to save the Jequiá, the city
council was re-developing part of the area that had been reforested in order to build
an Olympic Village:
We will go there tomorrow, I think you will even cry, there are trees on the
floor about this thick [he shows me the diameter with his hands]. They even
burnt some of the vegetation and nobody does anything. Why? The city
mayor tells the department, which then tells the technicians to stop
complaining and get their job done. That’s how it works.
Zé Luiz was against the Olympic Village to start with, but was later told by
some acquaintances not to get involved in the fight against it. I also met an
environmental activist who took part in one of the demonstrations against the
Olympic Village who allegedly received threats over the phone after the protest. He
also showed me pictures of the car of a fellow activist which had been hit by seven
bullet shots as a warning. Another activist expressed his frustration:
On the day of the meeting with major stake holders to decide the outcome
concerning the Olympic Village, they [supporters of the Olympic Village]
brought lots of young athletes from social projects to back the project. The
vice-mayor of Ilha affirmed the plans for deforestation had decreased by 40%
in relation to the original project, though the funds were maintained: 19
million reais for that. Zé Luiz decided not to stand up the fight.
234
In 1975, the government imposed a new requirement for industrial activities,
construction work and services whereby they would have to obtain ‘environmental
licences’ for activities that might cause an impact on the environment. However,
governmental initiatives rely on corporate funding, and any redevelopment project,
such as the Olympic Village, involves a tendering process through which the
corporate sector bids for public contracts. This is usually the moment when the
population loses representation, ethical commitments give way to possible gaps in the
environmental legislation, and individual and national interests override the common
use of an ecologically balanced environment as prescribed in the 1988 Constitution.
The day the construction was finally authorised by the city council, in
December 2011, and without the necessary environmental licence, there were photos
in the local newspapers showing the city mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Paes,
together with the president of the samba school União da Ilha, Ney Filardi, and José
Moraes, a business man and
politician known as Ilha’s
godfather, all celebrating the
start of the construction. A
few months later, with the
2012 United Nations
Conference on Environment
and Development, aka Rio +
20, approaching, there were a
few protests around the city.
In the Figure 34 we see the
current Secretary of the
Environment for the state of
Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Minc
being hanged by a
Figure 36 – Demonstration outside INEA, the State
Institute of Environment in Rio de Janeiro.
demonstrator wearing a T235
shirt with the words Rio minus 20, an acerbic comment on the environmental decay
of the last twenty years, while the secretary carries signs announcing “Environmental
licences – FAST FOOD”. Back at Z-10, Zé Luiz confides to me:
People say I’m crazy. I’m not an environmentalist, I’m stubborn. My mother
suffers a lot because I’m a dreamer, but when I die they will build a statue for
me. Politics in this country is disgusting. Some people may not recognise the
work I do, but my family, friends, and the mangrove recognise it.
The suggestion of impotence in Zé Luiz’s response is a feature of the way
people perceive the possibility of being political subjects in the contemporary world.
What can we take from this general feeling of impotence and distrust that
governmental bodies and politicians will protect the environment? As suggested by
the anthropologist Karina Kuchnir analysing the Brazilian context, politics is a means
to have access to public resources in which the politician acts as the mediator
between local communities and different levels of power (Kuchnir 2007:164).
Political corruption notwithstanding, the legislation, in the above case, was
undermined on ethical grounds; it is thus relevant to investigate under what
circumstances human rights conflict with nonhuman ones, and continuities between
nature and society are legitimized, accepted or downplayed. The construction of the
Olympic Village, for example, will serve as a sports infra-structure for the less
privileged population in nearby communities, and the mangrove will pay some of the
costs. Zé Luiz states that ‘Now it’s too late. Here it’s all about politics’, while
Marconi, a local composer, commented playfully about the state of the mangrove:
The State took over; the state of abandonment.
236
Being in limbo
I went to the Environmental Secretary of the City of Rio de Janeiro, on the
12th floor of a newly built complex that houses all different city council departments
to talk to Nestor, the forestry engineer, about the plans for the Olympic Village. He
had been in charge of reforestation at Z-10 for many years:
An enormous area of mangrove and of reforestation is lost with the
construction of the Olympic Village. We were not consulted about the work
we do there. The only thing that can now be done is to make sure that the
conditions [condicionantes]6established are followed through, that is, if and
when interested people get hold of what was officially agreed.
Map 9: Kindly conceded by the Department of Environment/Rio de Janeiro.
He showed on the map (above) the reforested area that would be deforested
for the construction which was finally decided through a political agreement alone
6
The term ‘condicionantes’ is commonly used in environmental policies discussions. It refers to
conditions associated with construction work near or in environmentally-preserved areas.
237
and without any of the necessary environmental assessment of the preserved area.
The area in blue is the work of reforestation that has been done since the creation of
the APARU, the striped blue area is what has already been deforested for the
Olympic Village (a total of 6 hectares), and the area in red is the whole area to be
deforested.
While trying to find out what the official ways of environmental decisionmaking were and how civil society could get involved and have more control over
such decisions I was advised to go to another office on the 12th floor, namely the
Environmental Education Office, since they were more acquainted with the mangrove
through CEA’s work. There I was told that the reasons there was no public
consultation about the deforestation, was because there is no ‘comitê gestor’
(managing committee) at Z-10, a civil society group that can be part of the decisionmaking process. By law every APA, Area of Environmental Protection, should have a
managing committee made up of a number of actors in civil society with a voice over
any decisions made on the preserved area the group is associated with. Because Z-10
is an APARU rather than an APA, it does not require a managing committee by law.
One was actually created informally when the APARU was first established but it
only lasted for two meetings.
The benchmark against which the APARU of Jequiá is compared is the APA
of the Parque Municipal Ecológico de Marapendi. On the other side of town, a fiftyminute drive from Z-10, the APA at Marapendi is a place where families go and
schools take children on day visits. It has ‘attractive’ species such as alligators and
lizards, lush tropical vegetation, not to mention good infra-structure that includes a
visitors’ centre, toilets and car-park. A state employee in the department of
Environmental Education explained to me:
It’s easy to get funding for Marapendi, there are always big corporations
wanting to invest. The problem is that the APARU of Jequiá was never
turned into law. Besides, who is going to want to fund a preserved area that
is in a favela?
238
I suggested that Jequiá was in a legislative limbo. She agreed: because the
APARU was one of only five decrees in the country which established Areas of
Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration (APARUs)it does not have access
to resources that APAs do, nor is it subjected to the same laws. The APARUs do not
fall under the protective umbrella of the National System for Conservation Units in
Brazil (SNUC), which regulates and monitors subcategories such as APAs, because it
was established before the SNUC and by decree rather than by law. In some ways,
she added, ‘the APARU doesn’t exist’ because it was not properly regulated.
The map in figure 25 indicates that once the grounds are laid the Olympic
Village will probably benefit from the green area of mangrove nearby, and in a few
years it may stand as a pleasant example of natureculture with children practising
sports next to a preserved landscape, a telling example of how development and
deforestation come to be perceived as morally sound. The fact that the forestry
engineer working for the council employs the term ‘obra’, which means ‘construction
work’ for reforestation, further signals the hybrid aspect of developmental work, and
the difficulty in determining the ethical boundaries of human’s transformation of the
environment.
From nature to environment: public policies and environmental
education
The Olympic Village episode was not the first time Zé Luiz felt cheated by the
authorities. Some years ago, the multinational Shell funded a project led by him to
raise saplings of native mangrove species to be replanted in the mangrove area.7 The
project went really well until, due to alleged political disputes, Zé Luiz was banned
7
The multinational Shell, with offices in nearby Ribeira, built a greenhouse for the cultivation of
saplings, as well as financially sponsoring the project that also included reforestation in nearby
areas and environmental education activities. Ze Luiz’s NGO ran many activities using the 50
thousand square meters where the greenhouse was built, in a civil/corporate partnership.
239
from continuing the activities on grounds that he lacked the necessary academic
qualifications, and was summoned to go to court after a lawsuit was filed against him.
While the UN Rio Summit in 1992 paved the way for initiatives related to policy
making to support local participation, fostering multisectorial, and private-public
partnerships, the issue of stewardship, and of who should exercise it, has remained a
major debate within environmentalism (Herzfeld 2001) and is still incipient. It has
been often noted that one of the reasons development projects fail is because of the
way local participation is absent from them (Ferguson and Gupta 2002), and judging
from the accounts above, Jequiá is no exception. Nevertheless, the fact is that in its
capacity as preserved area, the mangrove has been granted environmental capital and
managed to attract some public policies to Z-10 with a little help from local residents.
Maria, the wife of Geraldão, a fisherman at Z-10, was doing an IT course in
Ilha in 2003 which was part of a governmental program called Fundo Carioca
offering training to low income populations. Those who participated would get 1,000
Brazilian reais, the equivalent of 270 pounds upon completion. Geraldão went up to
one of the organizers and asked if his wife could buy a fishing-net with the money.
The demand was taken to a higher level and a public policy was formulated for Z-10
called Pesca Rio. The Municipal Department for Work and Income, the SMTb
(Secretaria Municipal do Trabalho e Renda) announced on its website the call for
potential institutions to carry out a project with the following aims: ‘the creation of a
trading cooperative to strengthen the colony’s fishing activities, improve income and
generate new jobs’ and help fishermen undertake their professional activities in a
safer and more organized manner, without harming the environment and the fishing
stock in Guanabara Bay’(my translation, Lang 2007). The project lasted six months,
two of which would be for the implementation of a cooperative which never actually
took place. It consisted of a two-day a week course, with 80 people enrolled and a
certificate at the end. The following modules were taught: new techniques for
‘responsible’ fishing, environmental issues, and management skills, though people
told me that they did more teaching than learning.
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This was a distributive type of policy, whereby funds are passed to a lowincome fraction of the population, as with the policy Baía Limpa mentioned in the
last chapter. Every participant received 1,000 Brazilian reais at the end to purchase
fishing-related equipment, contributing in return with 64 hours of voluntary social
work, making this one of the most popular projects ever brought to Z-10. Even if the
plans for the cooperative were scrapped, participants enjoyed long-term benefits with
the resources obtained. Margarida, for one, bought a big freezer which was invaluable
for her cooking activities and waste management (see chapter 5). In terms of
environmental education, people still mention things they learned in those workshops
such as the names of crabs and plants in the mangrove, or the importance of using
sustainable fishing practices. When asked about the outcomes of Pesca Rio,
interviewees indicate that ethical sensibilities about ‘responsible’ fishing were
acquired:
The biggest problem in Ilha Seca [a deserted island very close to Z-10 where
people go fishing] is that people go there with metal spades and take all the
mussels when they are too small. We learned that we have to use wooden
spades, and avoid removing the seeds. We also learned that the river should
be dredged, but only in its central part, so that the eco-system is not
affected. – Zaine.
The use of modal verbs, such as ‘have to’, ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ is
noticeable in people’s comments about Pesca Rio implying that learning brings about
obligations. Also noteworthy is the use of technical terms such as ‘eco-system’, and
‘dredging’. The Rio 92 Conference also spawned the first pilot projects for CEAs, as
well as the first National Program for Environmental Education(PRONEA) in 1994
(Diegues 2002), culminating in the National Policy for Environmental Education
(PNEA 9795/99). In 1999 the city council opened the CEA in Z-10 aiming at making
the APARU of Jequiá a vehicle of education, and a place where the population would
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learn about the mangrove biome. Thus, the CEA is the concrete outcome of the
Municipal Decree 12250/93 that placed ‘the child’ in the hands of a governmental
institution.
Velho do Rio is a resident in Boogy Woogie, a neighbouring favela. He is a
regular presence at public events at CEA since his artistic work is in tune with CEA’s
rhetorical mission of recycling and
sustainability. Velho do Rio makes
sculptures out of scrap telephone
wire, and affirms that all the
material was found inside waste
containers near his house. He
describes the mangrove as a
source of life, and the APARU as
‘the group of things that contains
the mangrove’. Some conflate the
concept of APARU with that of
environment, thus as the president
of the Residents Association was
giving a speech for the anniversary
of the APARU, he stated that
‘people can’t imagine what this
Figure 37: Velho do Rio and his model of a socó.
was like without “the
environment”’.
Generally speaking residents refer to CEA as the APARU and do not know
that the letters CEA stand for Centre for Environmental Education. Those who do
complain about it being run by people from outside the colony when they could be
employing a local who knows the mangrove like Zé Luiz, though some recall that in
the early days of the APARU he was an assistant to city council forestry engineers,
but in the end he abandoned everything because he disagreed with how CEA was
being managed. Besides being often inactive, when it runs workshops it fails to
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engage the community, with few people, mostly retired women, attending the
courses. In interviews the view that CEA is ‘detached’ from the community was
almost unanimous. The former vice-president of the Residents’ Association gave me
his view on the subject:
The APARU was a political initiative, not a community one. There’s nothing
happening here for the community. No one is going to do anything now,
because elections are only next year, and by then, people will have forgotten
who did what. They want to be able to wave their hands when work is
concluded so people will vote for them.
Kelly is a city council employee who divides her time between the APARU of
Jequiá and the one in Serra da Misericórdia located in the largest complex of favelas
in the city of Rio.8 She took me there to show how problems differ from Z-10.
Although the path leading to the main area of protection is full of rubbish, the
APARU itself looks green, clean, and pleasant. The pond is covered in algae, but
there is no sewage there because it is high up on the hill and away from houses. Kelly
tells me that before the ‘pacification’, the preserved area was mostly used by drug
users and dealers, whilst nowadays families go there for picnics on weekends. Having
started to be implemented in 2008, the Police Pacification Units (UPP) is an initiative
by the State Government of Rio de Janeiro to combat drug traffic in favelas. Its main
objective is to reclaim control of areas that have been ruled in the last few decades by
leaders of gang factions by replacing them with the permanent presence of military
police. This community has much more visibility than Z-10, probably due to its size,
but also because it was recently ‘pacified’, attracting researchers, and hosting, at the
time of my visit, 64 NGOs. Such numbers point to a higher level of connectedness
than at Z-10.Guilherme, who works for the Department of Environment at state level
and has been involved with the environmental movement for Jequiá since the 1980s
8
Complexo do Alemão comprises 14 communities.
243
says it is difficult to bring environmental projects to Ilha at the moment since all
political eyes are on the UPPs.
Workshops at CEA resumed in February 2012, not long before political
campaigning started for local elections to take place in September 2012, after many
months when it hardly opened at all. The workshops where people make juice and
pies using discarded food, such as pineapple or pumpkin skin, or objects to give as
presents proved very popular. However, the one on ‘raising awareness’ about the
environment was so unpopular that the community managed to scrap it. The women
did not want to go to workshops to learn things they already knew:
I didn’t like those workshops because this story of conscience is silly. I don’t
throw rubbish in the mangrove, and the people who do, don’t go to the
workshops, so there’s no point having them. Nobody managed to change the
behaviour of those people; they are not going to do it now. –Margarida
For me there’s no point in going. I’m not the one who dumps bags full of
rubbish in the mangrove, so I don’t need to listen to the reasons why we
shouldn’t do it. – Dona Carmen
The workshops happened at CEA over the course of 4 weeks, but were
actually devised and administered by the Guanabara Bay Institute, IBG, an NGO that
was contracted by the City Council to run environmental education workshops in
under-privileged communities. Similarly to Pesca Rio, projects are normally
advertised by public calls when funds, either public or private, are made available
according to priority themes such as ‘environmental education’. Those calls are
highly competitive, with many NGOs, and other philanthropic institutions including
sectors within universities, applying for them.
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I approached Flavio, who works for FIRJAN,9 the Federation of Industries of
Rio de Janeiro, one of the bodies involved with the environmental education project,
to ask him why they keep doing ‘environmental awareness’ classes when people
clearly dislike them:
If those classes don’t work well here, they may elsewhere. We normally do
what we call a diagnosis to find out what the demands of a given community
are. In Majé for example, there was a demand for courses on tourism. Here,
there was a demand for courses of caring after the elderly. Some people
convert what they learn into income. We are told where to set the
workshops, and because the funds we had came from Petrobrás, the
communities had to be the ones around Guanabara Bay. Petrobrás
recognises the need to have a better dialogue with those communities
because of the affinity between them.
The ‘affinity’ that Flavio describes is due to the fact that Petrobrás is liable
with regards to the oil spills of 2000 and 2004, to mention only the latest
environmental disasters that affected the fishing communities surrounding Guanabara
Bay. Ernesto works for IBG, and agreed that the ‘environmental education
workshops’ were not well received, and noted that generally speaking theoretical
classes do not motivate as much as the more practical ones:
We have to acknowledge local specificities. In some places an offer does not
match the demand; some workshops can generate income, others only
knowledge. Those that can generate income are always better received. But
knowledge should be disseminated and reproduced amongst participants.
9
In its website, FIRJAN describes itself as ‘an important partner of corporations in Rio de Janeiro
in the pursuit of development’ (Accessed 23/6/2014).
245
This is something that we have to pursue as educators. Most people don’t
realize that they can transmit knowledge.
In Ernesto’s view, residents measure the success of policies by the material
benefits they get out of them, thus teaching consciousness about something that has
no practical relation to one’s life is likely to fail. Zaine for example, learned about a
more environmentally friendly way of getting mussels out because she works as a
fisherwoman; likewise, the retired women absorbed strategies on recycling because
they saw a practical outcome of it in the form of carnival costumes or Christmas
presents. As an environmental educator, Guilherme promotes preservation using ‘the
3 Rs’: reuse, recycle, and reduce, and claims the latter is the hardest one to teach
since it would mean altering the consumption logic. Every now and then, a key actor
like Audary may appreciate the rich sources of local ecological knowledge that could
ecologies the environmental assemblage and which make Pombo Velho and others
said they ‘did more teaching than learning’. Zé Luiz has his own reading on why the
‘environmental awareness’ workshops run by CEA do not engage participants:
I went to a seminar in Bahia, and after it we went to sit by the edge of
a mangrove where some indigenous children were playing. I saw one of them
come out of the water and go behind the tree. I asked him, why he didn’t
pee in the water. He said he shouldn’t. There is no centre for environmental
education there, but there is culture. When they are little they are told by
the shamans, or by their mothers, that water is sacred. It’s not enough to
raise mangrove saplings and re-plant them in the mangrove. What needs to
be done is to give continuity to environmental education at public schools in
Ilha, with guided visits to the mangrove. How can people love something they
don’t know?. – Zé Luiz
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Though it is difficult to tell if the behaviour described above is reinforcing or
undermining the nature/culture division, Zé Luiz’s intention is to illustrate how the
mangrove in Bahia was perceived by the indigenous children as a sentient being, not
as an abstract element in a theoretical class which constantly redraws the artificial
distinction between the natural and the cultural realms. While that separation is also
attempted in practical classes, the ‘hands on’ aspect of learning blurs the distinction,
permitting a less mediated and translated experience. Everyone I talked to welcomes
practical classes at CEA, but keeping nature and society separated demands constant
effort (Latour 1993), and perhaps theoretical classes is an effort people cannot be
bothered with. In conclusion, although the concrete outcomes from the move from
nature to environment have fostered ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove and its
broader bio-system, people do have a say regarding which acquired dispositions will
become part of the network, thus loosening even further this environmental
assemblage.
Uncharted waters: ontological shifts and a new collective ethics
This study has so far suggested that environment-related problems indicate a
miscommunication between different worldviews, translated by some authors as
ontological differences which are often at the root of the friction between local and
institutional models regarding nature (Blaser 2014). However, while ontological
theories have tended towards criticizing the hegemony of the Eurocentric ontology
grounded on a supposed objectivity of the natural sciences, and on the subsequent
nature/culture separation, this ethnography indicates that in some circumstances, such
as with environmental education, nature as an instrumentally separate realm can play
a part in the preservation of natural landscapes. Thus, when the city council employee
who cleans the mangrove shores says that he now knows how important the
mangrove is, he is implying that the acquired learning sensibilities towards the
247
mangrove are grounded on the separation between what is deemed waste and what is
not.
Reflecting upon the reasons the APARU is abandoned and underfunded, one
of them being the level of hybridization of its ‘natural’ elements, I saw in the
proposal by Latour of a collective made up of humans and nonhumans the possibility
of a new ethics whereby a polluted mangrove full of crabs would not be inferior to a
lagoon with alligators by the beach in a more privileged area of Rio. His proposed
focus on the association between parts rather than on society or nature, is
accompanied by a reconfiguration of the three components that make up political
ecology, polis, logos and phusis, or, politics, science and nature, with a focus on a
practical ecology with ‘imbroglios involving sciences, moralities, law, and politics’
(Latour 2004:231). In order to do that, he adds, one may have to let go of deeply
ingrained representations to welcome other possible aesthetics, ethics, and even
metaphysics (ibid 2004:232).
This is all very well, but my concern echoes that by Michael Herzfeld who
thought it ‘irresponsible to act as though there were no environment to be protected,
or by Eduardo Kohn (2009) who posed the question to Descola of ‘how
environmentalism can survive without a nature to be protected’. Descola replied that
ethics must include non-humans, adding that naturalism and scientific thought are
more counterintuitive than commonly admitted (Kohn 2009: 147). And indeed,
anthropology is rife with ethnographic accounts that show that we live in a world of
hybrid ontologies. When discussing ‘things as social agents’, Alfred Gell observed
how a car can be like a prosthesis to the car owner and be granted personhood,
something the author equates to a ‘vehicular animism’ (Gell 1998).
Those imbroglios are evident in the following account by Didil, who besides
being a fisherman is also an ogan, or drummer, at Toninho’s terreiro. He started to
both fish and play atabaques at the age of 12. While rowing his boat one day, he
explained that traditionally ogans not only play the drums, but also perform animal
sacrifice used for spiritual work, and for that reason, instead of having their heads
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‘done’, a rite that must be performed by Umbanda novices, ogans have to have their
hands ‘done’:
But we stopped killing animals some years ago because the orixá told my
brother to stop the killing.
Seu Toquinho, the spiritual guide that descends on Toninho one day
commanded that the practice should be stopped. This happened at a time when animal
sacrifice and its proposed prohibition was a polemic issue in the media and the
community was in regular dialogue with environmentalists, ecologists and biologists
with the movement to protect the mangrove. In 2012, the representative for the
National Institute for the Support of Afro Brazilian Traditions (Instituto Nacional de
Defesa das Tradições de Matriz Afro Brasileira) claimed that ‘the State has no
competence to legislate over such matters’,10 while other advocates of animal
sacrifice draw on the wording of the Constitution, which grants citizens the right to
exercise their religious faith. In the case of Z-10, the supernatural entities decided
against animal sacrifice, adopting new ethical sensibilities that were in tune with
discussions in the legislative realm. In other words, the environmental rhetoric at play
in the broader context had seeped into practice dictated by a supernatural entity.
Talal Asad observes that whether the actor is ‘an instrument of the text’ as in
the Elizabethan theatre, or ‘constructs his own text’ (2008: 35) as the modern
Stanislavskian actor, he or she is never dissociated from the plot. Thus, changes in
ritual practices, norms of cleanliness, and ethical sensibilities can sometimes be
motivated by the broader context of new regulations informed by the environmental
paradigm. But while this case is an instance when environmental ethics won, it must
be remarked that in the case of animal sacrifice and the ‘correct’ disposal of spiritual
work seen in chapter 5, the voice of the entity is a creative way of assimilating a
conduct which could otherwise be seen as a top-down imposition.
10
See O Globo (2011).
249
While this newly acquired practice adopted purifying mechanisms that
separate nature from culture by establishing environmental guidelines of respect for
animal life, it can also be seen as an adaptive strategy to keep core social natural
entanglements, such as the transgressive Exu who constantly crosses the barriers
between the two. In a recent interview11 Bruno Latour suggests the use of the verb ‘to
ecologise’, arguing that since nature and society are ever more entangled in practice,
we might as well construe politics in a way that acknowledges and embraces such
entanglement, rather than having an underground history of entanglements, and an
official ‘pure’ one. I would suggest that there are plenty of actors in this ecologising
mode in Z-10.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I tried to examine the production of the ethical subject in the
interface between practices, policies and legislations under the environmental
paradigm. While the legislation on the environment is still, for its most part,
predicated on a division between human beings and nature, the mangrove, a
preserved area since 1993 by means of a decree that was never turned into law,
displays in its biological make-up of river water, sea and sewage, the ambiguities of a
nature and culture hybrid, and of a legislative limbo.
Some stake-holders in the broader scenario have an optimistic vision of the
dialectical encounter between capitalism and limited natural resources and call that
vision green economy, some claim that social welfare should come first, while others
see no possible compromise between sustainability and capitalism. In between these
three stances lies an immense range of opinions and a diversity of configurations with
regards to nature and culture concepts, and despite all the legislation and
institutionalization of the environment, policies are short lived, and participation is
still minimal.
11
See O Globo (2013).
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The convergence over the last 40 years of all the social actors mentioned in
this chapter, civil society, government institutions, and corporations, reflects the
incorporation and naturalization of a new public concern (Lopes 2006: 34), and as a
fractal of the overarching environmental picture, the accounts above suggest that
some environmentally informed ethical sensibilities seeped into everyday practices.
In other words, gains result from people’s adjustment and intake of new forms of
knowledge, even if locals claim that they ‘teach more than learn’ in certain
workshops. Moreover, local decision-making is often stifled by political forces in the
assemblage.
As already observed in other chapters the nature/culture opposition at the local
level looks more like a continuum, with nature at one end, and culture at the other,
with humans displaying a range of ethical stances along that line. In the case of
Umbanda for example, the spectrum goes from natural landscapes at one end, to
urban territories at the other; the mangrove is seen as a biological organism and as an
ethical agent; and waste can refer to a fish called savelha or to plastic. But the
discourse of environmental bodies endorses a purified idea of nature, such as in the
workshops ran by the Centre for Environmental Education, failing to acknowledge
local knowledge which is far more open-ended. It is noteworthy that the CEA resists
admitting Zé Luiz into the network that constitutes the environmental governance,
even if informally he is recognised as the most reliable source of knowledge on the
local environment. The fact that he wanders daily through the mangrove barefoot may
explain a thing or two, both with regards to prejudices, and bewilderment towards his
person.
It seems apparent that the move from nature to environment fostered the
production of ethical agents, as seen in the opening account, and that those ethical
agents can be humans, and non-humans, as in the case of the orixás and of the
mangrove. The accounts also elucidate how people make themselves a certain kind of
person, a moral subject, through their ethics-oriented actions, sometimes with
creativity or autonomy even when restricted by relations of power or legislations.
However, the moral agent may override normative restrictions imposed by the
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bureaucratic apparatus, and exercise a certain amount of freedom. The ethical subject
may also emerge in the way people express judgment with regards to the
environmental status of the colony, and to the mangrove itself. It is clear from the
case of the Olympic Village, and from the accounts about the CEA that people feel
their environmental efforts and sensibilities are often undermined in decision making
processes. Order works as a sort of temperature gauge to judge how well public
managers are administering the APARU. In that context, judgments are made on the
running of the CEA, which is often described as bagunça, ‘a mess’.
It was clear from the previous chapter that, while the mangrove holds multiple
local meanings for the institution that manages the APARU the mangrove is an
environment, a singular entity as opposed to a mangrove with many meanings.
Furthermore, the mangrove has to be regulated by law in order to be better managed.
Without regulation, as stated by a public employee ‘this APARU doesn’t exist’.
While a lot of people, sometimes unknowingly, take part in the environmental
assemblage, major players, such as the Department of Environment at the City
Council level are perceived as alienating. They do not learn from the community and
expect the community to learn a type of knowledge most people do not connect with,
and the information landscape that permeates the assemblage is patchy and inhibits
dialogue. For Zé Luiz nature should be an intrinsic part of culture, implying the need
for an ecological education, rather than environmental one.
But while legislations and institutions help shape the environment, there are
many other actors that have a say on how to sculpt it, such as metaphysical entities
which may become ethical agents of sound environmental practices. The accounts
also prompt us to think about the model of political representation currently used in
our democratic model: people vote for representatives, politicians who supposedly
have the skills to make decisions on behalf of the local population, but who rarely
know the local problems in depth. The alternative for those who do not feel properly
represented is to get mobilised into some sort of social movement. It is to that
political subject that I shall turn next.
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Chapter 7 – Iguaá-Mbara1
Figure 38 - An emulation of a Guanabara Bay postcard image made with scrap materials: installation
by the artist Vik Muniz with public participation at Rio + 20 2
O pintor Paul Gauguin amou a luz da Baía
de Guanabara
The artist Paul Gauguin loved the light of
Guanabara Bay
O compositor Cole Porter adorou as luzes
na noite dela
The composer Cole Porter adored the
lights in her night
A Baía de Guanabara
The Guanabara Bay
O antropólogo Claude Lévy-Strauss
detestou a Baía de Guanabara:
The anthropologist Claude Lévy-Strauss
hated Guanabara Bay:
Pareceu-lhe uma boca banguela…
It seemed to him a gap-toothed mouth…
Mas era ao mesmo tempo bela e banguela,
Yet, it was both beautiful and gappy,
A Guanabara
The Guanabara
O Estrangeiro, The Foreigner - Caetano Veloso (a Brazilian composer)
1
Iguaá-Mbara is the Tupi name given to Guanabara Bay by the indigenous people who inhabited
the area.
2
The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro in June
2012.
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Brazil is very good at photoshop
Sérgio Abranches (a Brazilian sociologist)3
The Guanabara Bay is a prime example of the dominion that human beings
exercise over the myriad sea and earth creatures as epitomized in the extract from
Genesis reproduced in the first chapter of this study. At the time the Portuguese
arrived in Guanabara Bay, whales were a common feature and were depicted in
paintings4 and narratives (Amador 2013; Léry 1578); now the bay is deemed a lost
environmental cause. While the fresh water source for the mangrove is located in a
place called Guarabu, today a favela in Ilha, the bay is the necessary passage way for
the waters that feed the mangrove with every high tide. In its 2.2 kilometres of
extension, the Jequiá river opens into the Guanabara Bay right by the bridge where
the colony is situated, making the mangrove a fine example of a liminal existence of
fresh and sea water, an encounter between river and sea with its indefinite beginning
and end. It is this strategic position of the mangrove in relation to Guanabara Bay that
made that area the backdrop of historical events, and a political stake.
This study has so far identified distinct processes that shaped the mangrove
both as a thing and as a concept: its heritageisation, memorisation, hybridization,
culturalization, commoditisation and institutionalisation. In this final section, I shall
be looking at the politicization of the mangrove and at the political effects of the
environmental network assembled around it, against the backdrop of the broader
environmental assemblage of which it is part, while also delving into the ethical
sensibilities found therein. This contextualisation will shed light on the range of
different ethical sensibilities found in the environmental movement at the local and
trans-local levels, and on the overlap of otherwise conflicting ethical framings in the
assemblage. As the chapter unfolds, it will become clear that there are distinct
political stances being enacted and that some key actors in Z-10 are not recognised as
3
Sérgio Abranches being interviewed on Globo News on 15/6/12.
4
Leandro Joaquim is the author of one of those paintings, dated from 1780 (see Amador 2013:53).
254
political. The task here is to follow those actors, and describe their insertion in the
assemblage to pursue ‘a symmetrisation of knowledge positions’ (Farías 2011:372),
and shed light on how the political emerges through different configurations.
The ethnography has pointed to a polysemic mangrove made up of many
elements and attached to many meanings; sometimes enacted as nature, sometimes as
environment, and at other times as just ‘mangue’, the mangrove. The fact is that the
municipal decree changed the role the mangrove performs in people’s lives,
illustrated by the pattern whereby the mangrove gradually became distant from
communal life, and was eventually locked up to prevent public access.5This pattern
disclosed one of the most intriguing aspects of my fieldwork, prompting an inquiry
into why the environmental movement lost momentum. Considering that many
people had been previously mobilised, I wanted to understand the drying up of the
social engagement that had turned the mangrove into a political entity. An employee
from the Department of the Environment explained that ‘the problem there is a
political one’; the vice-president of the Residents’ Association claimed that Z-10 was
not a worthy stake for politicians because votes there were divided; and I was advised
by colleagues in the academic sphere not to do my study in that community because
‘people there were not politically engaged’. Those seemingly contradictory views
signalled that, at worst, this was an interesting political scenario to explore.
This chapter will trace the political trajectory of the mangrove, attending to
the conflicts brought about by contending ethical sensibilities aroused by the
mangrove to test if claims of environmentalism as a global ethical project apply at the
local level. Central to this chapter is not only how the mangrove becomes political as
it enters the environmental assemblage, but also how people fit into that assemblage,
and in what capacity. I shall start by laying out the analytical framework concerning
networks and framings that I will be using to tease out the political in the assemblage
5
This trajectory is reflected in the media coverage of the mangrove, which shows a peak of related
articles in the local Ilha newspaper between 1991, two years before the creation of the APARU,
and 2002, two years after another big oil spill in Guanabara Bay.
255
around the mangrove. To better grasp the common understandings as well as the
fundamental gaps between the local and wider context, I will give an account of the
Rio+20 Conference as a locus of environmental discourses. The comparison with
other environmental assemblages is relevant to unveil how people make sense of
those conglomerates, how distinct ethical framings aggregate social capital, and how
local and translocal forms of environmentalism use terms such as nature and
environment.
I will move on to the topic of political participation to shed light on what
activists conceive as political. Following the trope of ‘order’ present throughout this
thesis, I will explore the ethnographic category of the scab, pelego, used by people
from outside the colony to explain the absence of social movement at Z-10. Next, the
story of the passage from nature to environment will be told by a key-actor in the
environmental assemblage who does not reside at Z-10, to show how the mangrove
became a matter of concern mirroring changes in attitudes that were happening
elsewhere. I shall use the concept of ‘framing’ (Benford & Snow 2000) to explore
which configurations are deemed useful or detrimental by stakeholders, and the
ethical sensibilities and interests that make this assemblage bigger than the sum of its
parts. Finally, I will reassess what people in Z-10 see as political against the
background of local political elections. I shall conclude that being political translates
into affecting the material relations that constitute the assemblage.
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Fishing nets and networks
Figure 39: Born in 1924, Baixinho is considered the oldest fisherman in the colony, and is also one of
the last people who masters the craft of weaving a fishing net in the area.
The image of Baixinho repairing nets almost every day is like a simulacrum of
the fishing colony this community once was. Fishing nets are not only a primary
working tool for the fishermen, but are also the object of major policies aimed at
regulating fishing activities. Thus, a registered fisherman has to be fully aware of the
periods he/she is allowed to fish particular species and the size of the holes in the
fishing net he/she is using, so not to catch ‘underage’ fish. In the stories narrated in
chapter 2, weaving fishing nets was a common activity when there were plenty of fish
in the sea and hand-made fishing nets were the norm. Nowadays, people see no point
making them to sell since manufactured ones can be purchased at prices that cannot
be matched by human labour. Nevertheless, Baixinho offers a competitive price when
it comes to repairing nets, while his tarrafas, or sweep nets, which he puts together
with manufactured net material, fetch 150 reais each, the equivalent of approximately
40 pounds. Baixinho may be the last fishing net craftsman in the colony, and one
can’t help but wonder how different Z-10 will look without this 90-year-old
fisherman who plays a vital, if subtle, part in this intricate network of relations that
constitutes the APARU.
As well as having a powerful appeal as a metaphor, nets appear in this thesis
in more ways than Baixinho’s material artefacts. When it comes to social movements,
the Portuguese term ‘rede’, which stands for ‘network’ is often used to describe
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material relations between people, which can sometimes be confused with ‘network’
as synonymous with ‘assemblage’, used as an analytical tool in this thesis. In other
words, the concept of network is today so widespread, and used in so many contexts
to imply the connections themselves and the fluidity between them that there is an
inevitable danger of its conceptual use slipping into a descriptive one. Strathern
observes that ‘the theorist's interpretations are as much networks as any other
combination of elements’ (Strathern 1996:521), thus as an anthropologist, I am bound
to add dimensions to the assemblage I have envisaged by unravelling even more
meanings attached to it, and exposing links that may be hidden to others. Strathern
states that her own deployment of the term mixes ‘the old networks of network
analysis and kinship theory, and the new ones of actor network theory’ (ibid.:531).
The sociological use of the term, for example, has a pervasive appeal in some strands
of environmentalism to refer to the connectedness between humans and their
surroundings. The thinker behind the Deep Ecology movement, Arne Naess, sees
humans as ‘relational junctions’, ‘a point formed by innumerable vectors of
influences and relations converging at the same junction’ (in Harvey 1996:167).
The growing profusion in the use of the term, be it with regards to social and
virtual networks, alternative ways of making politics,6 the running of corporations, or
social science analyses, points to a desire to privilege connections rather than rigid
configurations. This explains variations on the model such as the concept of
‘rhizomes’7 as deployed by Deleuze and Guattari who, to counterbalance the
predominance of the tree model in studies of genealogy, equate the rhizome to antigenealogy and to a map since it ‘fosters connections’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987), or
6
In February 2013, Marina Silva, who was the minister for the environment for 5 years during the
government of President Lula attempted to form a new political party called Rede
Sustentabilidade (Sustainability Network).
7
Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze use the concept of rhizome, which in biology depicts a mass
of roots, to refer to connections between heterogeneous elements, as in the case of a wasp and an
orchid which territorialize each other in their exchange of pollen, or in the case of humans and
their viruses. Because the rhizome is in a constant state of becoming, it does not have a beginning
or end.
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Escobar’s extended classifications of dominant and subaltern networks (Escobar
2008:268). In a definition by Escobar, a network is ‘a multi-layered entanglement
with a host of actors, organizations, the natural environment, political and
institutional terrains, and cultural-discursive fields that may be properly seen as a
result of assemblage processes’ (Escobar 2008:273). His use of the term overlaps
with Latour’s actor-network theory, the purpose of which is ‘to rebuild social theory
out of networks’ (Latour 1997:I).
For Strathern, networks not only foster the proliferation of hybrids but
actually stand for ‘socially expanded hybrids’ (1996: 523), thus in her understanding
of Latour’s network, the chain of elements that constitute it could produce artefacts,
and I would suggest the hybrid mangrove in this study is such an example. The
complex entanglements between the human and non-human worlds in my field were
partly informed by the tracing of relations as conceived by Latour, as well as by
Ingold’s approach that sees those networks as ecologically contingent (Harvey,
2013). In the case of fishing nets, relations are contingent since those nets were
woven because of the abundance of fish, and because industries now mass-produce
them, people no longer engage with their making. On the other hand, contingencies
create new connections and foster new practices, as in the case of Daniel, one of the
Umbandistas at the terreiro and resident in the colony, who makes a three-hour
journey to Cabo Frio three times a week to buy shrimps that will be sold at the fish
stall at Z-10, since there are no shrimps left in Guanabara Bay. While those are
examples of descriptive networks, analytically speaking, people like Daniel and
Baixinho and related practices and artefacts are important links in the network that
need to be traced.
However, for networks to have durability they need to be ‘sustained’
(Strathern 1996:523). It is this sustaining of the network, or lack of, in the
politicization of the mangrove that interests us here since the movement that gave rise
to the APARU is generally perceived as having lost momentum with direct
consequences for the mangrove. The political theorists Robert Benford and David
Snow have analysed social movements using the concept of ‘framing’, which relate to
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shared cultural understandings, or ‘shared frames of meaning’ (Escobar 2008:271),
such as ‘environmental justice’, ‘morality’ or ‘order’, to understand how ideas and
meanings get mobilized or counter-mobilized. They base their theory on the concept
of ‘schemata of interpretation’ by Goffman (1974) ‘that enable individuals to locate,
perceive, identify, and label occurrences within their life space and the world at large’
(Benford & Snow 2000:21). The theory indicates that the decision to join a
movement involves ‘intuitive, emotional, and rational considerations’ (Escobar
2008:261), and is commonly associated with a sense of social injustice which enters
the collective sphere and triggers mobilization.
In the case of Z-10, the collective sense of injustice was triggered by the big
fire that consumed the mangrove leaving it, in the words of Margarida, ‘as bald as an
egg’, and the movement was sustained by the overlapping of distinct framings around
the mangrove. At that moment of the passage from nature to environment,
entanglements encompassed the local and the global, and sensibilities served as links
that occasionally articulated with the broader environmental assemblage. It must be
recalled that the APARU was created one year after the first United Nations
Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio, but twenty years later, as the time for
the Rio + 20 conference was approaching, the global could hardly be heard at Z-10,
even if those informed by a more collective framing such as Elmo were engaging
with all sorts of local/global crossovers. That said, some ripple effects were apparent
in the way CEA decided to host a walk along the mangrove with some foreign
students, call a meeting to discuss environmental initiatives in Ilha with the vice-city
mayor, and announce funding for an exhibition of Zé Luiz’s photographs all within a
week before the event started.
Rio + 20: the official event and the People’s Summit
In 1992, at the time of the first United Nations Conference on Sustainable
Development in Rio, considered by Arturo Escobar to be ‘the first rite of passage to
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the “transnational state”’ (Escobar 2008:277), a seminar was held to discuss the many
voices in the environmental movement, described as a Tower of Babel (Mafra 1995).
Then, some defined the movement as an attempt by society ‘to find answers to
environmental problems, producing new paradigms as a result of the need to re-think
economic, social, environmental, political and cultural models of our times’ (Urban,
2001:18), while others proposed that environmentalism was about ‘the protection of
life in all its dimensions’ (ibid.). It was also noted that the movement was
characterized by its ability to foster mobilization, even if its insertion in society was
weak. In other words, while disputes related to natural landscapes can trigger social
movements, they often fail to change practices.
In 2012, twenty years after the conference that paved the way for a number of
initiatives such as the APARU to protect the mangrove, Rio hosted its follow-up.
Mobilization was springing up in Rio weeks before the opening of the official event,
gathering social actors from the most varied backgrounds with a common interest in
the environment. Those gatherings followed niches of interest such as ‘greener cities’,
‘environmental justice’, or ‘green economy’, reflecting the multi-faceted framing of
the event. The official event, which included delegations from the 191 member-states
of the UN, is estimated to have cost public funds approximately 430 million Brazilian
reais. In tune with the general excitement over the event, Itau, one of the biggest
banks in Brazil, sent emails to its clients announcing a new investment: the iShares
Índice Carbono Eficiente (ICO2), advertised as shares for those desiring to invest
their money while ‘helping save the planet’. This carbon efficient index is a fund
constituted by the shares of Brazilian companies willing to make their emissions of
CO2 public, in yet another attempt to reconcile environmental concerns with
capitalist endeavours.
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The official report8 about the conference issued by the Brazilian Government
in partnership with the UN, maintains that the making of a new agenda for
sustainable development is
based on consensus and that
changes in the models of
production and consumption
are crucial in the pursuit of
sustainable development. The
official event launched a space
Figure 40 – Banner for Rio + 20 Conference.
called Dialogues for Sustainable Development for civil society to propose
environmental measures to heads of state. It followed a very well-defined agenda to
discuss ten key issues: decent jobs, sustainable development to combat economic
crises, sustainable development to combat poverty, sustainable models of production
and consumption, forests, food security, sustainable energy, water, sustainable cities,
and oceans.9
Designed as an emulation of a social network, Dialogues included a digital
platform for discussions and consultancy by experts. I applied online to participate
and managed to secure a place, along with another 1,300 representatives of civil
society who proposed recommendations for the specified issues. Those with the
highest number of entries were analysed during the three days of the official event,
and then all participants voted for the recommendations they perceived as priorities.
In fact, anyone in the world could participate via an open platform, which by the end
of the conference had accumulated 1.4 million votes.
Dialogues had the participation of 100 speakers who pitched their views on
the 10 selected themes and demanded a great deal of logistical and technological
effort, with apparently fruitless results. The official event was a blatant example of
the contradiction of an enormous amount of resource spending on behalf of
‘sustainable development’: the environment as matter transformed by the human
8
See Itamaraty (2012).
9
See Dialogues (2012).
262
subject was present in the expensive leaflets sponsored by big stakeholders of the
prophesised Green Economy. The common-sense view of the conference as a whole
disseminated in the alternative virtual media and social networks is that it was a
fiasco and a complete waste of public funds, not to mention natural resources.
Another parallel event, a state of the art exhibition named Humanities, seen as
the must-go place by the elites of Rio, focused on the concept of environment,
deploying statistics on the historical process of environmental and social degradation,
including the demise of indigenous populations. The framing here was more artisticintellectual, appealing to those who rely on technology as an optimist alternative for
the future, and both ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ featured in accompanying texts.
Meanwhile, grassroots groups were getting organized all over the city to somehow
break through the unspoken boundaries that separate different forms of knowledge
and prevent policy-makers from being informed by what happens at ground level.
The recognition of the gap between the local and the global was often present in
discourses by social movement activists, along with a critique of more locally
grounded class struggles:
Rio + 20 is selling the image that Rio is sustainable: they erased the favelas
from the hillsides using photoshop for the advertising material. – a participant
at a parallel event against Green Economy.
Rio +20 followed in the steps of the 1992 event by offering a space to bridge
the local and the global: the Cúpula dos Povos, or People’s Summit. While the
official event offered a performative stage for politicians, the repertoire of which was
boosted by the geographically defined spaces allocated to participant nation-states,
the atmosphere of the People’s Summit was a great deal more inclusive. The forty
kilometres that separated the official event from the People’s Summit, the two main
spaces for discussion in the conference, reflected the distance between the respective
agendas, even if the advertising material for the official event borrowed images and
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messages from the latter. The UN report mentioned above, for instances, had an
image of a mãe de santo in the section titled ‘Partnerships for Sustainable
Development’.
The area where the Summit was held was set up like a festival with tents for
the seminars, stalls selling books, organic products and handicrafts, and with an
overall consensual theme that ‘ecological awareness’ is about militating for nature
and quality of life, in opposition to the criteria currently used to measure countries’
GDP. A massive area comprising five big marquees for films, performances and
debates, came under the umbrella Religiões de Matriz da Natureza, Religions of the
Nature Matrix, a concept that encompasses indigenous and Afro-Brazilian
cosmologies, as well as all the offshoots from both, such as Umbanda, São Daime,
Jurema, Pajelança, and others. Those practices are believed to exist within the ‘nature
matrix’ because their rituals make use of plants and their cosmogonies are peopled
with nature-related entities. In other words, they all denote a form of spirituality
rooted in nature:
Our desire is to build another society, one with more respect for nature.
And to create public policies that will secure those rights. Conservation is
about protecting what is left out there. Some people blame religious
practices for polluting the forest, but that’s religious intolerance directed
towards the very people who pay tribute to nature. – a speaker at the Tent
for Religions of the Nature Matrix pictured below.
There ought to be more public policies that ensure our rights to do
rituals in natural spaces. Nature is a sacred space for people whose religions
are of the nature matrix. – a pai de santo
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Figure 41: In one of the marquees, a group of people created a great Mandala out of fruits and
grains, while in another a circle of people held hands around the food they were going to eat as they
prayed to mother earth.
While the range of topics being addressed at the People’s Summit was varied,
encompassing major issues contemplated by social movements such as the landless,
the indigenous people’s struggle for land, women’s pleas, religious intolerance, and
the new culprit representing the power of capital, the green economy, the most visible
framing deployed was probably that of a nature-oriented form of spirituality. The
term mostly used at the People’s Summit was ‘nature’ and ‘forests’, rather than
‘environment’, perceived by some as a more technical term, though the adjective
‘ecological’, considered a more political jargon, was also present.
These forms of ‘environmental spiritualism’ so to speak, or recognized forms
of spirituality grounded on discreet entities of nature, were by no means the only
examples of the overlap between environment and spirituality. Scattered in different
areas of the Summit there were examples of a spiritual framing I here refer to as
‘spiritual environmentalism’, meaning an attitude towards the environment
sometimes dubbed as ‘new age’, ‘hippie’ or even ‘pagan’. Those two broad groups
used the event as a spiritual arena sometimes grounded in the concept of
environment, at others in more concrete forms of nature, such as plants, seeds, or
grains. At one point, a crowd gathered around a car arriving in this otherwise car-free
zone: the public figure attracting such attention was Leonardo Boff, arguably the
most well-known liberation theologian,10 who now defines himself as an eco-
10
Liberation Theology is a political movement sired by members of the Catholic Church in Latin
America in the 1950s, known for its involvement in issues of social justice particularly in the
context of rural struggles for land. Criticised by the Vatican for promoting communist principles,
265
theologian. Boff is an iconic representation of the ethical framing at work in the
Summit space of Rio + 20, an intersection between environmentalism, spirituality and
social justice.
The People’s Summit offered a moment of anti-structure, in Victor Turner’s
sense, when compared to the formality of the official Rio + 20.A lot of the debates
centred on what could be gained by ‘taking nature into account’, the ‘tyranny of the
capital’, and the ‘need to change the logic of accumulation’, as if something more
drastic than locally-informed public policies should be tried. The march that took
place on the day before the conference ended expressed the discontentment with what
is sometimes seen as the appropriation of a movement by the perceived perpetrators,
such as the green economy. The banners read: ‘Rural Congressman, Red Card for
you’; ‘Forest Code, the game is not over’; ‘Green Economy. Impossible Future’;
‘Mining destroys our mother earth’; ‘The Franciscan Order against the
mercantilization of nature and for the commons’; ‘Deforestation Zero’; and ‘For a
just and green world’.
A few weeks later the State Department of the Environment organized a
march on Copacabana beach against religious intolerance, conflating the three
framings exposed above: spirituality, environmentalism and social justice. One of the
banners carried by a representative of the Department of Environment read: ‘To
respect religious diversity is to respect nature’; members of MUDA, Movimento
Umbanda Do Amanhã (Movement for Tomorrow’s Umbanda) distributed seeds to
the onlookers; and posters of the city-mayor candidate for the Green party obstructed
the pavements. This glimpse of the different forms of environmentalisms happening
around the city and within a bus journey from Z-10 illustrate what I see as an
oscillation between framings, sometimes resulting in them overlapping, at others in a
framing disjuncture. Sometimes the overlapping of framings is conjunctural: as we
saw in chapter 5, both Umbandistas and the department of environment are interested
in keeping the forest clean from clutter, and the former is suffering with religious
Leonardo Boff left the Franciscan religious order when Rome tried to prevent him from
participating in the 92 Earth Summit.
266
intolerance while social justice is also on the agenda of the state government. This
shared interpretation of a contemporary scenario which urges people to articulate
potential changes is what Snow and Benford describe as ‘collective action
frames’(2001), meaning a coincidence of interests that nurtures collective action.
Likewise, the Marxist university students who fight market-economy as a matter of
ideology certainly sympathise with an eco-theologian like Leonardo Boff and the
Franciscans who are fighting for the commons and mother earth, spawning one
collective framing of a just preservation of the wildlife. The reason a collective
framing becomes powerful enough to mobilise a big number of actors, as seen at the
People’s Summit, is because those originally distinct framings are articulating with
each other, or performing some sort of ‘frame bridging’ (Snow & Benford 2001),
something that is apparently missing from the current assemblage around the
mangrove, and which by all accounts was there when the APARU was first created.
So what happened to that collective framing that made the passage from nature to
environment possible?
From nature to environment: the politicization of the mangrove
Whilst throughout this thesis Zé Luiz appears as the main person behind the
struggle to save the mangrove, a few respondents from outside the colony claim that,
despite his obviously deserved merit, ‘to say that the APARU was down to the
singlehanded work of one person would be to erase history’, as one interviewee put it.
Amongst the social actors who are at times recalled, there is Admiral José Luiz Belart,
a Navy officer who played an important role in the Brazilian environmental
movement in the 1960s and was deeply engaged with the mangrove’s protection after
an accident that left him paraplegic.11 He was a resident of Ilha and is said to have
11
José Luiz Belart is also mentioned in the 2001 book Missão (quase) Impossível, (‘Almost
Impossible Mission’ [my translation]), which gives an overview of the environmental movement
in Brazil. The author remarks that Belart’s public activities, alongside those of another Navy
admiral, Ibsen de Gusmão Câmara, point to the active involvement of Navy officers in issues
concerning the environment. They both supported the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation
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influenced a lot of people in the Navy to think ‘environmentally’. He also played an
important role in the struggle against the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam
in the country, a project by the military rulers, which went ahead despite his efforts
and personal connections in the Armed Forces. He wanted to turn the mangrove into a
park, and to call it Heron Park, due to the huge population of that bird species around
the mangrove. However, seeing that parks are public and the area belonged to the
Navy, the project was abandoned. Ribamar, the main Navy representative for Z-10,
also mentioned Commander Julio Brandão Costa:
He was very interested in medicinal herbs, and helped found a medicinal
pharmacy in the hospital at Cacuia. In those days, people were starting to
talk about the environment, and the Navy here had a research department
where some people started to study the mangrove. He used to teach here at
the Navy and the community would come to listen to him. That’s when
Amigos do Manguesal [Zé Luiz’s NGO] started.
Another key figure is Elmo who has a history of political activism going back
to his grandfather, a unionist in the north of Brazil, and father, a leader of re-settled
rural workers. Sérgio joined the environmental assemblage around the mangrove back
in 87 when Zé Luiz was already involved in the struggle for its protection. Their
stories of the creation of the APARU differ in a number of ways, and their
relationship is very conflictive. Sérgio describes the precedents to that struggle as ‘a
beautiful story’. According to him, during the military dictatorship in the 70s, there
was a communist group in Ilha led by Aunt Helena, a woman who started a
movement to protect the mangrove against the widening of the Jequiá road, a fight
that was followed up by Zé Luiz:
of Nature (FBCN), a group formed by scientists, politicians and journalists in 1958. During Jânio
Quadros’s term in office, some of the members of that institution were involved with the
elaboration of political measures which paved the way for the creation of the Forest Code in 1965,
only one year after the military coup. Many of those actors were, according to the author, inspired
by London-based activists (Urban,2001).
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The widening of the Jequiá road haunts us like a ghost. The plans were
around in the 70s, in the late 80s, and again in 2007 with the proposals of a
wholesale fish market which we managed to stop. The story goes that Zé
Luiz repeatedly demolished the foundations for the road with some of his
mates. They would go there in the middle of the night and, hiding from the
Navy, would smash down the foundations with hammers. It was a clever
move to destroy the road being built over a land filled section of the
mangrove. They managed to stop the construction.
Zé Luiz actually denies this story, and claims it is a legend about him. From
an anthropologist’s perspective, the ‘legendary’ element adds another level of
legitimation to the struggle to protect the mangrove since it attests the myth-making
role of stories of resistance in the collective imaginary. In other words, the
assemblage is also constituted by legends. Sérgio continues his chronological account
of his career in the green movement, which started when he joined the Green Party at
the age of 19 and was consolidated when he helped found The Greens, Os Verdes, a
group involved in the struggle for the preservation of Jequiá. Although the role of that
group in the assemblage is rarely remarked upon by locals, Sérgio’s account below
gives a sense of its protagonism:
One day, I was reading the Ilha newspaper and saw an article about “The
Swamp of Jequiá”. There was a picture of José Richards12 advocating the land
fill of the mangrove, and one of Zé Luiz. So I went back to college the next
day and started a petition against the land fill. We made a huge intervention
in Cocotá. All the leftists hated José Richards, who was of the right. The first
time I went to the colony I met Zé Luiz, and he threw a wet blanket over us.
12
José Richards, along with Zé Morais and Jimmy Pereira, are the three most long-living political
figures of Ilha.
269
There is no chance of social mobilization with him. He used to work for the
Navy in those days and the military regime ideology was still very present. Zé
Luiz doesn’t have the mental disposition for social movement; he has an
individualistic frame of mind. I never heard Zé Luiz speak of mobilization. He
didn’t want us to, but we created the SOS Mangrove [a grassroots
organization].
In 89, Chico Alencar won the elections for governor of Rio, and we started
to fight for the colony to remain even if the mangrove was given the status of
protected area. After reading a book on environmental preservation areas in
the south of Brazil, I proposed that the mangrove could be a Wild Life
Sanctuary [Refúgio de Vidas Silvestres]. I went to talk to Zé Luiz with
photocopies of the law and to Chico Alencar proposing something similar for
Jequiá but keeping the people. The project started to be discussed in the
Chamber of Councillors. There was no Environmental Department in those
days. Their final decision was that the project was relevant but that we
would have to adapt it to the City Management Plan, which was then under
elaboration. That’s when the APARU was born, and why there are only
three in Brazil, all in the city of Rio. Zé Luiz never went to any of those
meetings, but we managed to influence a group in the colony. But then, there
was an implosion after the priest spread some rumours in the colony that we
were communists.
All that gossip about us being communists continued and ended up
demobilising the group; we were unable to engage further and the movement
emptied out. The management plan was approved and the APARU was
created, then we started to do some work inside the schools. In 91 UERJ
[State University of Rio de Janeiro] was hired by the city council to do a
diagnostic of the mangrove, and they concluded that the mangrove was no
longer a matter pertaining to the biological sciences, being instead a matter
related to sewage, which emphasized the need to protect it. After the
creation of the APARU, the council approved the start of some of the work
270
suggested by UERJ. Because the bridge had collapsed leaving people in a
situation of emergency, a new bridge was built, and in the opening day, Zé
Morais [head of one of the two political clans of Ilha] went there and was
photographed as though the bridge had been his achievement. Zé Luiz set
out fireworks and we felt betrayed, that’s when we finally broke with Zé
Luiz.
By the time the other improvements suggested in the report by UERJ
started, there was no longer a social movement there; there was only this
person of Zé Luiz all by himself, as the saviour of the mangrove. In those
days there were no NGOs, something that came as a strategy from the
International Monetary Fund, with neo-liberalism. During Marcelo Alencar’s
[city mayor of Rio de Janeiro between 1989 and 1993 and governor between
1995 and 1999] office, the government started a project for the
decontamination of Guanabara Bay. The decontamination program was
approved but was never implemented. For the past ten years we have been
trying to establish a management committee for the APARU. Throughout
this trajectory I helped found more than 30 NGOs, but for the last 15 years
I’ve just been a member in them, with no management role. Today, I see
myself as an environmental justice activist, and I make a living from writing
technical reports. For me Z-10 needs social organization; the only place
where we see this there is in the Carnival bloco.
The accounts above suggest a connection between the local and the global:
people’s involvement with the mangrove does not happen in a vacuum and are
oriented by distinct ethical sensibilities. The officers at the Navy started being
interested in the mangrove around the time when the Forest Code13was drafted by the
13
In spite of being associated with the evils of an authoritarian State, the reformulation of the
Forest Code was one of the most contentious issues in 2012 and split the opinions of left-wing
commentators who, facing the proposed reform which would benefit big land-owners, had to
admit the code had many merits.
271
military regime, and the concept of environment was beginning to circulate at a
global level. The motivation for the Heron Park that Admiral Belarte was keen to
promote was based on the aesthetic appeal of the wildlife, and would have translated,
had it gone through, into removing the population from the preserved area, a rationale
typical of the first wave of environmentalism in Brazil, while the groups that joined
the fight to preserve Jequiá are representative of the third phase of the movement (see
Viola 1992 and chapter 1 in this thesis), and appear in the period of redemocratization, around the time the 88 Constitution was launched.
At the beginning of the movement to save the mangrove, the group of which
Elmo was part represented a vital hinge in the articulation of the local and global,
inflating the assemblage. Other elements were assembled then, including political
networks of the Green Party, scientific information regarding the composition of the
mangrove, democratic ideals of social justice, and ethical sensibilities rooted in the
fishing colony’s history. As divergences emerged and some framings were rejected,
the assemblage changed shape. The process is of course ongoing and new elements
were assembled with CEA becoming a strong link, along with environment-related
policies which pulled in locals who had not been part of this shape-shifting network.
The older ethical framings underpinning the relationship between the Navy and the
community at Z-10 did not conflict with the environmental cause to start with. In fact,
it could be argued that Zé Luiz’s commitment towards the mangrove was a direct
consequence of his work with the research centre in the Navy, the IPQM, where, for
four years, he helped to make graphs of the local tides and winds. The Research
Centre at the Navy Radio Transmitter, was also undertaking studies in the realm of
biological sciences, informed by increasing concerns with the degradation of the
mangrove and by a framing akin to that used by young environmentalists of the time.
What the above narratives also make salient is that people’s involvement with
the struggle to preserve the mangrove can be jeopardised by ties which overrule the
more recent environmental discourse: the decades old ethical framing of reciprocal
exchanges between the fishermen and the Navy within the broader authoritarian
framework associated with the military regime, allegedly made the local population
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suspicious of supposed communists who the dictatorship was committed to eliminate.
In other words, the ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove that instigated the
social movement in the 80s, grounded on the sense of social injustice suffered by the
fishermen whose livelihoods were wrecked to benefit huge oil enterprises, were
overridden by older ethical framings that characterised the patron-client relationship
between the fishermen and the Navy. Those ties of bondage with the past, seen as
more reliable and associated with a view of the mangrove as nature as seen in the
accounts in chapter 2, ended up compromising people’s participation in the
movement.
Furthermore, the decree making the mangrove an APARU brought a
reasonable degree of de-territorialisation, as evident in the comment by a tour guide
of Ilha who said that ‘this mangrove is mine’. Despite not living in Z-10 he believes
he has a right to be part of the decision-making process of how to manage the
mangrove because it is an APARU. Another non-resident I met at one of the meetings
in CEA complained that some people at Z-10 ‘treat the mangrove as though it was
private property’. In fact, that is how many activists involved with the APARU feel
about the mangrove once it became environment: it became public, and if on the one
hand the population as a whole has obligations towards a preserved area, it also has
rights. In addition, there is an expectation that the local population should look after
the mangrove they believe is theirs, since it has become public through a decree. The
question we are urged to ask is what kind of frame bridging, if any, is happening now
at Z-10? And who establishes what political participation is, and by which criteria?
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Participation and accountability
The environmental movement doesn’t have mass militancy. To attract
fishermen to any mobilization we have to provide transportation and food, and
even then, we are lucky if we can get a couple of people from each colony.
Elmo
On June 22nd 2012, just a few days after the end of Rio + 20, two fishermen
were found dead on Guanabara Bay with visible signs of torture. There was broad
online mobilization with a variety of bodies summoning people to an act of
repudiation. The murdered fishermen were members of the AHOMAR,14 a group
involved in political activism against big oil enterprises. After the news reached the
social media there was a very emotional gathering with the presence of the rising
political leader Marcelo Freixo, a PSol15 candidate in the local elections for city
mayor in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 whose entourage includes Elmo. The overall
consensus is that people connected with some big enterprises were behind the killings,
and discussants talked about five other murders of AHOMAR members in the last
four years.
To my surprise, people I talked to in Z-10 on that day didn’t know about the
tragic event, and were not particularly interested in it either. Indeed, a few people
thought the murder was due to fishing net theft or personal vengeance. Equally
surprising was the absence of any display of solidarity about the murders of fellow
fishermen. When I confided that with Helena, the wife of the pai de santo, she
commented:
14
Associação de Homens e Mulheres do Mar (Association of Men and Women of the Sea).
15
A political party of the left.
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Ah, here in the colony people don’t get mobilized about anything, least of all
the fishermen. Toninho can’t even get them to clean up after themselves
when they bring the fish in!
Later that week when meetings were organised to protest against the murders
one activist, on noting that none of the fishermen from Z-10 were present, reacted:
‘The problem is that people there are scabs’. In his view, the colonies in Brazil attract
what is known as ‘fishing scabs’,pelegos da pesca. But why pelego?16 Popularized
during Getúlio Vargas’s period in office, the president who subjected the Union
statutes to the Work Department by means of the Union Law of 1931, the term
referred to the union leader who ensured deference, and whose relationship with the
government was based on mutual trust. The term regained popularity during the
military rule, and like the English term ‘scab’, it is still used today for the person who
breaks a strike. Fishermen from colonies are dubbed thus due to their historical
alliance with the Navy which, by all accounts, made those communities highly
institutionalized and ordered. Those values are looked down on by the majority of
left-leaning activists because of their association with the military rule.17
The importance of ‘order’ as a major ‘shared understanding’ or framing at Z10, is highlighted throughout this thesis: in chapter 1 as a guiding motto of the
national project; in chapter 2 in accounts by older residents who feel nostalgic about
an ordered past and criticize the city council which ‘is not looking after the child’; in
chapter 4, when the entity Exu is exalted for its skill of bringing order to the house;
and in chapter 5 with people exercising judgment over the disorder resulting from the
bad management of waste. Although order appears in connection with different
themes, its ubiquity as a value would suggest it is a major framing at Z-10, associated
16
The term translates into a sheepskin mat that goes on the top of the horse to make the ride more
comfortable for the horseman, thus pelego came to be applied to the individual who is subservient
to his/her boss, who is used as a foot mat by her/his superior.
17
I heard other militants using the term pelegoto refer to fishermen from different colonies to
implying that fishermen from colonies throughout the country are generally characterised as
‘scabs’ for not engaging with political mobilizations.
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with the military form of organization that foresaw the colony’s development. BendaBeckman and Pirie suggest that ‘the term may refer to the absence or containment of
violence, to the existence of a shared set of norms, but also to a sense of predictability
and feeling of security’ (2011:1). In the case of Z-10, order encompasses all those
meanings: the absence of drug-related crime is perceived as a particular feature of Z10; the shared set of norms is apparent in recurring comments such as ‘here we are all
family’, and ‘the fisherman has morals’; and the feeling of security is boasted by its
residents, with the mangrove playing a major role as a physical boundary along with
the Navy, as seen in chapter 2.
In the meeting to organize the mobilization against the murder of the
fishermen, half of the people there were fishermen or trade union representatives, and
the other half were researchers from universities or NGOs, or full time political
activists like Elmo. As maintained by those protesting, justice is one-eyed, and in the
words of Alexandre, a fisherman and member of AHOMAR, ‘the struggle must go
on’:
The environmental struggle is the other side of the social struggle, and the
Ministry of Fisheries has the obligation of addressing socio-environmental
problems. Governmental bodies need to be monitored. There ought to be a
committee to protect the rivers, and a social justice representative. The
fishermen were there long before the corporations, so they have rights.
Fishermen are afraid to speak.
Also on the agenda for the day of the audience with federal
representatives was the protection of traditional fishermen as voiced by a
participant:
The environmental bodies are not performing their role. It’s much easier
nowadays to get environmental licenses. There’s a process of asphyxia, and
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the Guanabara Bay is being privatized. The BNDES [National Bank for Social
Development] is a public bank that is financing big corporations.
At another meeting to demand compensation from Petrobrás to redress the
fishermen affected by the oil spill in 2000, organized by associations such as the
Forum for Fishermen and Friends of the Sea (Fórum dos Pescadores e Amigos do
Mar) and the Committee for the Guanabara Bay (Comitê da Baía da Guanabara),
most interventions were voiced by those leading the mobilization, namely activists
and university representatives:
We have to put Crivella on the spot. We have to work with the
environmentalist discourse, with the mystique of the fishing activity, the
fishermen being endangered. It’s emblematic.
If only fishermen from around Guanabara Bay come, we will be vulnerable.
We have to fill the place up with political actors.
There is a big split amongst fishermen. The federation hasn’t represented
anyone for over 20 years.
There are many political trends amongst the fishermen and we [nonfishermen] can’t get involved.
There ought to be a historical analysis of the 2000 oil spill. There is a
reindustrialization of the Guanabara Bay going on at the moment, and
Reduc[Refinary of Duque de Caxias]is the biggest polluter, and a potential
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bomb with its obsolete instruments. There is an urgent need for researchers
of environmental justice.
One of the major problems for fishing is the advancement of the capital, for
that reason, the protest should be in front of the BNDES.
Petrobrás has to compensate the fishermen for the biggest ecological
disaster in the country. Fishing is only still viable because the mangrove, a
breeding ground for aquatic life, is protected. Guanabara Bay is still alive.
The reactions above interweave environment, fishermen and political
mobilization to form a network within which environmental justice is the main
framing. Fishermen are important because they are ‘emblematic’, ‘endangered’, and
they do not have political capital because they are ‘split’. Social movements are
grounded on the interaction between people since subjective reasons and personal
interests can only articulate with something like a movement through the collective
realm.
Meanwhile, people at Z-10 are making sense of the conflicts between
traditional ways of living and outcomes of development by finding alternative ways
to adapt. Bearing in mind that the meaning of ‘evolved’, as it appears in the
ethnographic accounts, is a contentious one, sometimes standing for that which is
sustainable, as in most environmental discourses, at other times equated with
‘developed’ and distant from ‘natural’, as in the case of the entities in Umbanda , in
their efforts to adapt, people at Z-10 have managed to keep the community as a
fishing colony, which in turn guarantees them some rights over their houses and
keeps crime out, which in a city like Rio makes the place very desirable and increases
the value of properties there.
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Evolution or revolution? Adaptation as a political choice
Do you think people here are bothered with the mangrove? What they
want is bread and circus! Just give them some samba, do a huge barbecue, and
politicians will get their votes.
Zé Luiz
That is Zé Luiz’s opinion on the current stage of the environmental
assemblage at Z-10, and why he wants the whole place to sink. In his opinion, people
want to drink and be merry, as opposed to living in an ordered environment with a
clean mangrove. Politicians know this and lure voters by giving them beer and
barbecue instead of imposing environmental licences on construction companies. On
at least one point Zé Luiz and Elmo agree: people in the community only get fully
organised when it comes to carnival. Paulo Guimarães, the candidate for the Green
Party in Ilha, offered a barbecue with free beer to celebrate the start of his campaign
at Tubiacanga, a fishing colony that is also part of Z-10, located in another part of
Ilha. I asked Paulo why he joined the Green Party, to which he replied that when he
was a kid, he used to swim in the sea in Ilha, and nowadays his children can no longer
do that. As for his political agenda, he said he would focus on the issue of sewage,
and on Ilha’s emancipation as a separate municipality from Rio. There was no
mention of the APARU. While Paulo Guimarães entered the environmental
assemblage through his involvement with the Green Party, he does not play any
active role in the assemblage, being known through his financial support of the
carnival bloco from Z-10, his barbecues, and his samba compositions.
In August 2012, the last month of my fieldwork, the landscape of Ilha
changed with politicians’ banners attached to the walls of the houses and throwaway
leaflets resembling disposable carpets on the ground. Margarida, Zaine, and another
six friends got temporary jobs with Paulo Guimarães. They had to sit by the roadside
at strategic points with his political banner for a few hours a day in return for a
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minimum wage. They were glad of the extra cash, but the connection with the Green
Party was due to Paulo’s financial support of the colony’s Carnival bloco in February
2012. Most of them however were not going to vote for Paulo because they were
already tied to other candidates, in particular to a female nurse, the wife of a
fisherman, who had helped a number of people in the colony, while another informer
said she would vote for Jimmy Pereira (the head of one of Ilha’s political clans
mentioned above) because his ex-wife had placed her four grandchildren in the
crèche in the colony. Thus, voting intentions are based on reciprocal relations, rather
than ideological leanings.
With regards to people’s political participation, or lack of it, a tension seemed
to be apparent between adaptation and revolution-driven strategies, which in turn,
reflects an underlying tension of individual versus collective. Marcio Goldman
(2006) makes a similar point in his ethnography about the political involvement of a
black movement group in the town of Ilhéus in Brazil. The tension there is between
those who perceive the cultural group they are involved with as an almost
transcendental entity, standing above the individuals that constitute it, and those
whose personal pursuits are sometimes leveraged by their work in the group. The
same author noted how in the context he analysed, politics was both polluting and
polluted, a view also held by the almost all my interviewees. In Ilha, the same
political clans continue to have the final say over decisions such as the construction
of the Olympic Village, a power granted to them by their political connections. Some
suggest that the lingering presence of these contemporary versions of ‘colonels’ stops
people in Ilha from being engaged politically. Furthermore, as we saw in the previous
chapter, inclusions in a written constitution do not reflect the realities of people’s
everyday lives, for the Public Power rarely abides by their duty of preservation.
Analytically speaking, what we see in this conjuncture is an interesting threeway dispute where three conflicting framings are placed together in the
environmental assemblage: Zé Luiz stands for the orderly model, once found in a
tutelary version of the Big State represented by the Navy; the Department of
Environment and CEA stand for the neo-liberal model, which in this particular local
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context is in line with the political whim of democratically elected representatives;
and Elmo stands for the network model of political collectives, participatory action,
and constitutional rights and social justice. The framings used by those three
stakeholders do not coincide, hindering both dialogue and projects that could foster a
more fruitful co-existence between humans, fish, and the mangrove. At the two
extreme ends there is a seemingly unbreachable gap between adaptation and
revolution. I would suggest that people at Z-10 have opted for adaptation as opposed
to revolutionary change.
Raymond Williams sets evolution in contrast with revolution, the former
meaning the action of something being unrolled, the latter, a sudden change and
institution of a new order (Williams 1996:104) but concludes that the two terms are
actually not so different: ‘it is a distinction between a few slow changes controlled by
what already exists and more and faster changes intended to alter much of what
exists’; a matter of ‘political affiliation’ (Williams 1996:105). For David Graeber,
‘revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore confronts,
some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes social relations’
(Graeber 2001:45). He goes on to say, that actions can be revolutionary without
necessarily translating into the overthrow of a government.
Adaptation, on the other hand, is by definition a pragmatic strategy of
survival, and the fact that it may include adapting to dominant forces means that most
left-leaning environmental activists see it as an instance of 'false consciousness' in the
Marxist sense, political apathy, or submission to hierarchical power relations. When
Zé Luiz declares he is not an environmentalist, just stubborn (see chapter 6), he seems
to want to distance himself from the political positioning that environmentalists came
to occupy, often equated to that of politicians who are generally distrusted by the
population. He is also defying the higher moral ground taken by those who look
down on the fishermen because they enjoy the advantages, however few, of siding
with a paradigm of order. In sum, if being political is the exercise of choice and selfdetermination, or the capacity to negotiate a stance in a given hierarchy, adaptation is
a major political framing in the assemblage around the mangrove.
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One of the first meetings I attended prior to Rio + 20 was organised like a
laboratory where participants put forward an environmental problem to which
colleagues would suggest possible solutions. My ‘problem’, a polluted mangrove next
to Guanabara Bay, was immediately considered irredeemable. I faced similar
reactions in two other meetings I attended, where people voiced the argument that
Guanabara Bay ‘já era’, ‘it’s history’; in other words, places like the mangrove at Z10 or Guanabara Bay are not enacted as nature since they are seen as being ‘beyond
repair’ even if they are classed as environment. It is worth recalling that, as evident in
Sérgio’s accounts, people did not see the mangrove as belonging to the biological
realm due to the volume of sewage in it. What makes the mangrove ‘unnatural’ in
that perspective is the sewage produced naturally by human beings, leading us to
conclude that the nature being enacted is one that does not allow human beings to be
part of it.
The perspective that sees Guanabara Bay as doomed held by a significant
proportion of environmentalists and ‘nature lovers’ is one that James Lovelock
defines as utopian, grounded on an idealistic form of environmental preservation
which discourages the investment of resources on places that are environmentally
depleted and undermines adaptive forms of nature such as the mangrove of Jequiá. To
agree with such statements is to ignore the voices who throughout my fieldwork
attested to the rehabilitation of the mangrove, including so-called environmentalists
who remarked that Jequiá is evidence that Guanabara Bay can bounce back from its
state of degradation. Furthermore, it is easy to trace a parallel between the view that
dismisses Guanabara Bay because it is ‘beyond repair’ and the perspective that
consider people at Z-10 no longer ‘traditional’ because they chose to adapt, rather
than join protests.
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Conclusion
The above narrative points to a disjuncture between seemingly distinct
political models with a vast scope of ethical sensibilities in between. Here politics and
ethics are intertwined, since the question of government overlaps with that of
personal conduct and of governing oneself (Foucault [1987]1991:87). The military
heritage found in the colony’s history under the Navy’s tutelage could stand for what
De Landa (1997) describes as a hierarchical type of network, the model of the
activists’ movements would be closer to a ‘self-organizing meshwork’ (Escobar
2008:274), and somewhere in the middle, the City Council/Department of
Environment would stand for a more neo-liberal leanings of a decentralised State,
along with its ambiguous and heterogeneous ethics.
While this three-way tension unveils ethical mixes rooted in distinct political
models, such as private versus public, individual versus collective interests,
sensibilities towards the mangrove also forge the links that hold the collective around
it together. In other words, ethical and political framings produce a mesh of material,
conceptual and emotional relations around the mangrove, and as those relations
change, so does the mangrove. In the process, the adaptation strategy emerges as the
option favoured by most people at Z-10, which clashes with the revolutionary
alternative, supported by those who look down on the lack of the social organization
thought necessary to protect the mangrove.
The mangrove is politicised not only in the sense of being the object of
policies and politicians, but also in the sense of granting a potential leverage in the
political trajectories of individual social actors. But ethical sensibilities towards the
politicised mangrove go well beyond environmental ideologies to encompass a
variety of idiosyncratic interests and short-term objectives, such as political prestige,
votes, or a victory in the carnival samba context. Thus, while people in the
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community may not mobilise when other fishermen around the bay are murdered,
failing to see any connections between the mangrove and the bay, or between
environmental depletion and fishermen’s precarious livelihoods, activists who are not
fishermen do, since such an event falls within an area of major concern for them, that
of environmental justice.
But if on the one hand the local and the trans-local are not always articulated,
they do inform each other at times: the interest in the mangrove by the Navy’s officer
coincided with a time when the term ‘environment’ entered public discourses; the
activists’ involvement with the mangrove emerged at around the time the 1988
Constitution was being issued; and the APARU was established a year after Rio 92.
Such coincidence of shared understandings or framings fosters engagement giving it
impulse and encouragement, while framings that do not overlap can curb
mobilisation. As for the new framings that emerged with the environmental
assemblage, they are often associated with mostly short-lived policies which proved
fruitful insofar as they offered something in return, such as a wage, materials for
handicrafts, or the victory of a samba song in a competition, but which nurtured
ephemeral sensibilities. What seems to be missing from it is a form of locallyoriented governance that can foster connectedness and participation, and harness the
ecological assemblage that, as we have seen, is already there.
One cannot overlook Zé Luiz’s role in both the struggle to preserve the
mangrove, and in giving a sense of cohesion to the community, notwithstanding his
political leanings towards a benevolent form of dictatorship. It appears that in his
view, participation in social movements can have a disruptive effect and subvert
deeply-rooted traditions. People have after all learned, through historical accounts as
far back as the legendary Araribóia, that chances of survival are higher through
adaptation, rather than resistance. Many of the protagonists in this story are either
direct or indirectly enjoying the benefits of pensions from hard-working relatives who
had jobs in the Navy as cleaners, such as Margarida’s husband. Abstaining from
protest can be a way of ensuring some form of security that historical alliances with
the state have provided.
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In conclusion, the ethnographic accounts here appear to overthrow claims that
environmental ethics have a universal appeal, given that other allegiances may
override the environmental preservation undertaking. It is in the attentiveness to the
mangrove, a non-human other, that the creation of the ethical self becomes salient, at
times responding to trans-local framings, at times to traditional views of the virtuous
life of a fisherman, ‘a man with morals’, which may encompassinnovative relations
between material and immaterial beings. After entering the environmental
assemblage, the mangrove gained body, by becoming more lush, muddier, and home
for a variety of man-made artefacts, and status as an area of environmental protection.
In other words, the mangrove has become a different thing, with new colours, smells
and life forms, while conceptually reflecting the myriad perceptions people have of it.
It waits to be seen whether the environmental endeavour will enable others, besides
Zé Luiz, to walk barefoot through this awe-inspiring urban landscape.
Figure 42: Zé Luiz’s feet deep in mud.
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Conclusion
This research has as its starting point the big fire that in 1975 swept across a
mangrove surrounding a fishing colony in the periphery of an urban centre. With the
benefit of hindsight this environmental disaster can be interpreted as an ‘ethical
moment’ (Zigon 2008) since it motivated people to respond in reflexive ways, giving
rise to a movement to protect the mangrove from further deterioration due to
unbridled development in the area. The concrete outcome of the movement was the
creation of the APARU, Area of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration,
which meant that after more than seventy years under a system of tutelage by the
Navy, the colony and the mangrove were subjected to an environmental form of
governance administered by the City Council. The fashioning of new practices
around the mangrove meant that ethical sensibilities towards it changed, at times
reflecting environmentalist values, at others re-cladding existing values as a means
for people to adapt. It is this change of status of the mangrove, which implies a shift
in forms of governance, that I call ‘the passage from nature to environment’. This
formal model serves the purpose of shedding light on the specificities of the
environmental paradigm against the backdrop of a naturalist one, while
acknowledging the ubiquity and fruitfulness of multi-naturalist approaches in humandisturbed sites.
Over the years, besides oil spills which destroyed thirty five percent of the
original mangrove, a variety of social actors helped carve and sculpt the mangrove,
including politicians who pushed for construction work in waterlogged areas,
residents who land filled part of the mangrove to build homes, or environmentalists
who replanted natural species making the mangrove vegetation more abundant than
ever before. Representations, values, nature concepts, fishermen, Umbandistas,
politicians, activists, institutions, organic and non-organic matter, and ‘useless’
discarded utensils form an ecological network, which is open-ended since more
things and concepts are constantly being assembled. Yet this assemblage is not
horizontal (Latour 2005) since history, and the time it inscribes onto the landscape
(Bender 2010; Lefebvre 1996), is also a linkage that relates things and concepts.
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Thus, this is not a call to reiterate long-dead arguments about environments shaping
cultures (Steward 1955), but an attempt to focus on the relations between the parts
that form this assemblage under the impact of socio-economic factors. In other words,
this is a two-way process.
My argument is that the mangrove changed both as a thing and conceptually
when it became an APARU, and as a social nature it is in constant process of
becoming. But if the mangrove is like a conductor of meanings making those diverse
elements relate, ethical sensibilities work as connectors in this polyphonic mesh,
which is political insofar as people have a say in what should be included or excluded
from the network. This community was not only created literally on a mangrove, but
it was also symbolically and politically reproduced through the mangrove, and even
more so after it became a protected area. The dialectical outcomes of the relationships
between human beings and the mangrove, and between human beings as they
multiply, transform the landscape continuously, just as the mangrove in its perpetual
unfolding impresses itself upon human matters and sustains the social ordering of
things. It is this exchange between the non-human mangrove and the human beings
and things that makes this an ecological network, prior to being an environmental
one. Not unlike Ingold’s ‘sentient ecology’ (2000:10) this relationship is predicated
on people’s sensorial knowledge of that changing landscape, perceptible in their
stories, songs and beliefs.
This research explored two thematic threads over its seven chapters: the first
one looks into the overlaps and divergence between an ecological versus an
environmental assemblage around the mangrove, in other words, one which
encompasses social natures, and another less encompassing one informed by the
environmental paradigm. The second thematic thread investigates the supposed
universality of the values embedded in a widespread form of environmentalism
against the backdrop of local ethical sensibilities towards an urban mangrove, which
may or may not be environmentally-oriented. While both the ecological and the
environmental assemblage relate to nature, they are at odds with each other.
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The conclusion presented is that as the mangrove went from being a taken-forgranted thing to an environmentally-oriented concept, people found creative ways of
holding on to its thingness, and to ethical values that may at times conflict with the
broader environmental assemblage, hence the conclusion that an ecological
assemblage co-exists and sometimes conflicts with an environmental one. And
although environmentalism in its many variations nurtures ethical behaviour, those
ethics are far from being universal and can be undermined by more embedded values.
Instead, the environmental paradigm serves as one set of lenses, informed by
economic, political, and personal pursuits, while local ethics, in the sense of how one
ought to live one’s life (Foucault 1996), may intersect with environmental principles
but do not always coincide with them.
The order and progress trope that permeates this study is both undermined and
reinforced by the mangrove itself, which while signifying pollution and a failed
project, still filters what it needs to survive and generates a multitude of affects. The
State appears as a vector for both order and disorder, and is represented by two
different forms of governance coinciding with before and after the APARU. But order
is not just an ethical framing inherited from the colony’s partnership with the Navy, it
is also and foremost, a structure to cope with the chaos brought about by development
and change, of which the fire that swept over the mangrove was symptomatic. After
the big fire, ‘spaces of order’ (Benda-Beckman & Pirie 2011:2) were created for
example at the Umbanda centre, while the cleaning trope appears to counterbalance
and remedy the commonly perceived disorder. The entity Exu reaffirms the social
order by evoking the war and addressing ways of dealing with it (Turner 1987;
Benda-Beckman & Pirie 2011). The ‘heritage’ Zé Luiz struggles so hard to maintain
translates into the ordered and predictable world of the past, of which the image of
Baixinho weaving a fishing-net is emblematic.
By contrast, while the APARU represents the power of the State since it was
created by means of a decree, it does not run according to the old familiar order.
Politics is equated with pollution and lack of ethical values, and the State with a
parent that is not looking after its child succumbing to the whim of democratic
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elected politicians and allowing the emergence of disorder, which is also generated
structurally, as more people move into the community, and houses enter the real
estate market. The paradox here is that the rise of the environment means the rise of a
different State associated with absence of controlling mechanisms, and of bonds of
reciprocity, promoting instead the outsourcing of functions. Here environment is no
longer a construct, going beyond the wording of documents such as the Forest Code
or the 1988 Constitution, to become government departments and sociological
realities, as evident in the practices at the Departments for the Environment at state
and municipal levels.
Thus, amongst the connections that make up this shape-shifting assemblage
are representations about nature and the nation (chapter 1), memories (chapter 2), the
mangrove bio-system (chapter 3), its metaphysical counterpart (chapter 4),
unserviceable goods dumped onto it (chapter 5), city council departments (chapter 6),
and the politics around it (chapter 7). This research traces how the mangrove as a
thing circulates over time between different regimes of value (Appadurai 1986),
regimes which invite different approaches towards the mangrove object: the first
chapter explores the overlap between the mangrove and representations of nature.
Seen as a lesser natural landscape, the mangrove was often used as rubbish dump, or
for land filling to create new areas to be built upon. ‘They are not looking after the
child’ is the emblematic local insight in chapter 1 that reflects a common
understanding about the passage from nature to environment. Zé Luiz’s strategy is to
work on the symbolic value of the colony and of the fishermen, to forge a conception
of the mangrove as heritage. By means of enacting selected replays of the past, he
succeeds in nurturing idiosyncratic readings of history thus granting legitimacy to
what would otherwise be a simulacrum of a fishing colony.
Chapter 2 shows that the only place where the mangrove appears as a takenfor-granted unchanging ‘nature’ is in people’s memories. This ‘structural nostalgia’
(Herzfeld 1990) translates into a longing for a mangrove of an idyllic order which is
inseparable from the over-built and rubbish-laden landscape that characterises the
current colony. But if the passage from nature to environment brought about
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unpredictable outcomes with impact on economic, social and moral issues, the
mangrove, though transformed, appears as a moral agent insofar as it provides a
boundary around the colony and hinders crime. ‘There’s only one exit out of the
colony’ is the phrase that sums up people’s interpretation of the mangrove as a
protective agent.
Following the prompt for a symmetrical anthropology to critically analyse
modern hybrids (Latour 1993), chapters 3, 4, and 5, focus on social natures. The
passage from nature to environment meant that the mangrove was biologised as
actors struggled to grant it legitimate grounds for protection, while exotic species
found in the mangrove provided the much needed ‘evidence’ that it was a worthwhile
environmental stake. However, its hybrid constitution defies categorizations and
spawns analogies drawing on its physical characteristics such as mud, dirt and
marginal features. Thus being ‘deep in mud’ is not only a commonly used expression
to mean the state of being stuck in an undesirable position as seen in chapters 3 and 4,
it also exemplifies how a feature of the mangrove biome has been incorporated into
the vernacular hermeneutics.
Chapter 4 reveals how this social natural aspect of the mangrove is reflected
in the way Umbandistas relate to entities, with the domestication of nature appearing
as an imperative in the medium’s evolution. In an insight not unlike the perspectivist
logic of Viveiros de Castro (1998), the pai de santo sums up his understanding of
social natures when he says that ‘the waterfall is the culture of Oxum’. The shift from
nature to environment also had an effect on some Umbanda practices with the entities
performing the role of mediators for emerging environmental concerns. That said, the
pictorial language in the Umbanda spaces are far from resembling the ‘ecologically
noble savage’ (Hames 2007) who is a conservationist ‘by nature’. Instead,
Umbandistas’ representations of nature are more akin to John Locke’s (1690) moral
proposition of adding value to nature through human labouring it, hence the focus on
the Portuguese word ‘trabalho’, meaning work.
It appears that the more people try to reconstitute the boundaries of the
mangrove, be it by making it an APARU, by locking it away to prevent public access,
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by prohibiting waste disposal onto it, or by physically mounting a tire bank along its
shores, the more the mangrove insists on making its borders permeable by allowing
other practices and meanings to be associated with it. Hence the need for systematic
purifying practices to keep the stuff it is made of inside the category of environment.
Chapter 5 focuses on these efforts, on the effects of pollution on a preserved area, and
on the distinctions between visible and invisible forms of pollution. The passage from
nature to environment altered the way waste is perceived and managed in Z-10,
promoting the separation of the elements that constitute it. ‘That’s what fishermen do
now: they collect rubbish’ is the way one fisherman elucidates the passage.
Chapter 6 addresses the actual institutionalisation of the mangrove and the
impact of related policies, concrete outcomes of the passage from nature to
environment. Less tangible are the actual status of the APARU, which was left in a
legislative limbo, and the say the community has in decision making, reducing the
overlap between the ecological and the environmental assemblage. This chapter also
sheds light on how the conflict between the politics of environmentalism and
developmental plans is usually resolved through compromises, or ‘condicionantes’,
the term in Portuguese that refers to the conditions that developers have to abide by,
but hardly ever do. Nonetheless, the passage from nature to environment did affect
people’s sensibilities towards the mangrove, sometimes exposing the tension between
human rights and environmental protection. ‘The orixás told us to stop killing
animals for spiritual offerings’ is the local reading of how new ethical practices were
learned, even if in people’s own terms. Still, policy-makers fail to take local
knowledge into account producing top-down policies according to contingent and
short-lived offers of resources, and delivering them in a bureaucratic manner, and
without addressing local history and practices. Consequently, the success or failure of
a given project from the local perspective depends almost exclusively on the level of
material benefit from the transaction.
Chapter 7 shows the tension between adaptation, and revolution in the
politicization of the mangrove. Different versions of a single story told from different
points of view transform the assemblage, complexify it, or enlarge it. It becomes clear
291
that the production of a collective political agency which granted the conditions of
possibility for the APARU, are not a product of a collective identity, seeing that
locals were not politically engaged, and many political actors did not belong to Z-10.
An outsider’s view that ‘There are only scabs there [in fishing colonies]’, shows the
commonplace perception that there is a particular way of being political. The
argument presented here is that the ecological and the environmental assemblages
cannot overlap completely because of a conflict between three different framings, one
provided by the Navy, one by the City Council, and the third by social movement
militants.
As for the questions posed in the introduction to this thesis, the APARU
informed people’s ethical sensibilities insofar as caring for the mangrove entered the
agendas of policies and job training. The ethics that emerged after the mangrove
became ‘environment’ is multi-faceted; what we see is an ethical cacophony whereby
some actors appropriate practices and ideas from the environmental discourse, recladding them according to personal, political and economic interests. The protection
of the mangrove only appears as a collective moral imperative in the event of an
ethical moment such as the big fire, when people are prompted to act even before
they are made aware of values orientating such actions. Other moral imperatives are
found in environmental initiatives such as ‘environmental awareness’ classes which
fail to harness local sensibilities.
The mangrove is sometimes enacted as a resource, at others as protected
area/environment, or even as a rubbish dump. Environment in turn is enacted as this
abstract entity which ‘changed’ the future of the community, as when the president of
the Residents Association recalls ‘how things were before the environment’, or Velho
do Rio describes the APARU as ‘the group of things that contains the mangrove’.
Nature is enacted differently depending on the context. In the Rio Summit at Rio +
20, nature is enacted as something idyllic, grounded on representations of the noble
savage’s harmonious relationship with his/her surroundings, while in Umbanda,
nature is something that needs to be domesticated. The making of the ethical subject
may involve different enactments of nature, as in the practices and doctrines of
292
Umbandistas; of the environment, as in the discourse by political actors; and of the
mangrove, as in the memories of older folk.
The political emerges in the way those ethical sensibilities affect practices,
which may involve both acting against decisions concerning the mangrove made
elsewhere, and opting for non-engagement. That said, contingent aspects such as
political affiliations can ‘cut into the network’ (Strathern 1996). As for a desired
conversation between local knowledge and policies, major players, such as the
Department of Environment at the City Council level are perceived as alienating.
Arun Agrawal suggests that ‘there is always a gap between efforts by subjects to
fashion themselves anew and the technologies of power that institutional designs seek
to consolidate’ (2005: 166). This gap is apparent in the way City Council officials do
not tap into local knowledge, and expect the community to learn a type of knowledge
most people do not connect with; the concept of ‘environmental awareness’ is seen as
irrelevant by residents, and the information landscape that permeates the assemblage
is patchy and inhibits dialogue.
Ethical sensibilities towards the mangrove provide the links that make the
whole bigger than the sum of its parts, but unless people, concepts, things, and
institutions are assembled in a particular way, the environmental assemblage does not
overlap with the existing ecological assemblage, and the possibility of ‘environmental
subjects’ (Agrawal 2005) emerging is much diminished. The existence of local forms
of environmental ethics is apparent from the ethnographic accounts, and local
practices point to very efficient ways of dealing with everyday forms of perceived
pollution, but the question remains as to how to make those findings inform policymaking, and how to foster the dialogue between the information landscapes found
therein. This is a community defined by its particular geographical location, by
fishing-related practices, and by its historical and cultural heritage. If environmental
sensibilities, as well as the dialogue between local governance and values, are to be
nurtured, the historical-geographical trajectories of the place and of those who inhabit
it have to be taken into account, including cosmological aspects and polysemic
visions of the mangrove.
293
If we let the mangrove speak for itself what would it tell us? Though people
are seemingly more detached than engaged with it, anthropocenic traces constitute it
as never before. The vegetation is lush; the waters flow; it smells in places, and looks
beautiful from a distance; it is dodgy with an underwater surface of plastic, glass and
mud; it is resilient; and it will potentially be in the future an archaeological site of a
once-upon-a-time fishing colony. In other words, the mangrove is managing to
coexist with stuff many of us reject, such as sewage and rubbish, and in the process,
the mangrove is enacted as heritage, as nature, as a biome, as culture, as pollution, as
an institution, and as environment. If existing literature on hybridity points to a
‘tension between roots and routes’ (Wade 2005:602), the mangrove, hybrid although
it is, resolves potential unbalances in the way its bi-daily mutation guarantees the
eternal return of cleaner waters. Whilst finishing writing this thesis, I went back to
field for a visit. Being asked about the fishing situation Geraldão, a fisherman that is
part of this narrative, tells me that lately fish he had not seen for years started
appearing again. Locals claim that this is a consequence of a new sewage treatment
station nearby which is easing the volume of sewage in Guanabara Bay, which in turn
renovates the waters that run through Jequiá.
Thus, the mangrove could be seen as work in progress, an open-ended
process, defined by its dynamic potential (Graeber 2001:53), just as the actors around
it are defined by their actions. It is as though the mangrove is in an eternal liminal
stage, in Victor Turner’s understanding, insofar as it is an entity in-between worlds,
waiting for the time when it will be once more re-integrated. In this anti-structural
stage, the mangrove is both polluted and a protected area, both fertile and degraded,
both beautiful and disgusting.
And what can we take from the practices and conceptualizations by residents
in this urban fishing colony? If on the one hand this research refutes common
readings that associate ‘peripheral’ or rural communities with less harmful ways of
living (Martínez-Alier 2002), it also rejects assumptions that the poor have no
‘environmental awareness’. Rather than looking at this particular community from the
perspective of lack, ‘no social movement’, ‘not engaged’, ‘not sustainable’, ‘not
294
environmentally conscious’, one could strive to understand the mechanisms through
which it managed to reproduce itself through creative actions. For example, Zé Luiz
has an unpublished book on the fauna and flora of the mangrove about which few
people know. At the terreiro, rituals place people in direct experience with nature, and
the ritualistic use of plants could be capitalised as a form of environmental education.
The rich knowledge fishermen have on the relationship between tides and moon
cycles, types of fish, and traditional fishing craftsmanship of nets and other fish traps
could be incorporated into projects by the City Council/Department of Environment
as cultural heritage. There are informational resources at Z-10 that are not tapped
into, and a singular topology that could yield results in terms of environmental
preservation.
In conclusion, this ethnography has exposed some of the limitations and
shortcomings of contemporary forms of environmental governance, which are
epistemologically inappropriate when applied to particular local contexts because
they are mediated by, situated, and embedded in relations of power. There is an
ecological network around this hybrid biome that assembles the cultural, the natural
and the symbolic, unveiling ontologies that take social natures seriously and making
the whole much bigger than the sum of its parts. Thus, this research points to the need
for an ecological approach towards urban social natural landscapes, and one that
encompasses the biological and cultural aspects of the interaction between humans
and their surroundings. I hope this work will contribute towards a more participatory
form of politics by exposing the way people, things and knowledge are included and
excluded from the environmental assemblage even when they perform crucial and
political roles in neighbouring ecological assemblages. As for the mangrove, it seems
to occupy a liminal stage where it has not been re-integrated into the broader context
yet.
295
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