Abstract

The phenomenon of colonialism must be understood from visual sources as well as written discourse. Examination of iconographic and cartographic evidence of late-eighteenth-century Amazonia reveals that the Portuguese often adopted/adapted indigenous knowledge into the construction of material culture, even while overtly speaking to a "project" of Europeanizing the local population. This example strongly suggests that reductionist global paradigms of imperial control may be strongly contradicted when the colonial process is analyzed in context. Keywords: visual record, "local knowledge," cultural landscape, contextual analysis, pragmatism.

Introduction

The Portuguese not only colonized Brazil in the broadest political and economic sense but, in the eighteenth century, they attempted to shape and mold a new Brazilian cultural landscape¹ in the Portuguese image. This necessarily involved changing the material culture of the region as well as the physical environment. Late-colonial administrators in Brazil understood that material culture served as a tangible metaphor for the colony's advancement; in the 1700s, the equation was widely presupposed that the more "modern" (read "European") the artifacts, lifestyles, and physical surroundings of Brazil's inhabitants were, the more "progressive" the colony had become.² This mindset determined the shape of eighteenth century colonialism in the Amazon region.

Yet, at the same time, as this discussion will show, colonially-generated solutions to material culture construction were not disparaged, even if this meant adopting or adapting local (i.e., indigenous) techniques. Using "local knowledge" did not immediately imply deviation from the official "project" of the metropolitan country; while solutions which incorporated local expertise might be considered compromises, they often represented the most expedient ( and creative) use of local talent, as well as materials. Local knowledge, after all, implies that it has been "acquired in concrete practice,"³ and the history of the Amazon region in this time frame provides ample evidence of Portuguese willingness to incorporate styles, techniques and materials native to the region.

Up to now, however, the notion that there might be some "give and take" between official Portuguese insistence on Europeanization, and the (presumed) inclination of the local population to retain its own way of doing things (as well as the contextually inherent advantage of local knowledge), have not shaped the debate on Brazilian history. Instead, the tendency has been to view cultural policy in the Brazilian colonial setting as a one-way flow of ideas and orders, a monolithic, "top-down," praxial phenomenon in [end p. 117] which "discourse," representing the unilateral, official position of the imperial power, assumes an almost reified presence. In this respect, Brazilian historiography is not unique but is firmly rooted in currently popular historical paradigms of how colonial "agency" operated globally.⁴ In the corollary paradigms,⁵ researchers have assumed that resistance, either armed or passive, was the only method via which local peoples could counter monolithic colonialism; this assumption, however, does little more than confirm the very existence of hegemonic domination by ontological (if not explicit) implication and, again, is a position well represented in Brazilian colonial historiography.⁶

By contrast, this paper addresses the discrepancy between a postulated direction of culture flow on the one hand, and the reality in which it was created and evolved on the other, by focusing on the specific context, or cultural landscape, of the late-colonial Amazon. I have focused on this region specifically because it was there, in the late-eighteenth century, that the Portuguese expended enormous energies in attempting to reconfigure the landscape according to metropolitan-generated precepts. Using "nontraditional" sources (i.e., iconographic and cartographic), instead of relying on written discourse to elucidate the cultural landscape, has resulted in an intermediate interpretation of the history of Amazonian colonialism, one which emphasizes the processes of cultural borrowing and selective assimilation, rather than reducing options to the twin heuristic categories of metropolitan/colonial dominance and subaltern resistance. Although this third interpretive paradigm has not characterized historiography of colonialism in general (including that of Brazil), it is well represented in the anthropological literature on syncretism and in cultural geography studies which consider the process of "transculturation" in the "contact zone."⁷

In this regard, historians can profit from the valuable insights of their sister disciplines; an examination of late-eighteenth century visual sources has made it clear that only the concept of "transculturation" can adequately explain how the cultural landscape of the late-colonial Amazon evolved. Such visual sources demonstrate processes of selective assimilation on the part of the colonized, as well as cultural borrowing on the part of the colonizers, ultimately resulting in the creation of unique, syncretized material cultures distinct from imperial as well as indigenous forebears. While perhaps born out of expediency, these hybridized syntheses contained their own inherent cultural logic: i.e., to the extent that both colonizer and colonized contributed to the creation of such "compromises" in the cultural landscape, they were rendered more acceptable, offering the prospect of wider application.

Context

To develop this theme of cultural borrowing in the historical context of the late colonial Amazon, I use the broad definition of "material culture," suggested some years ago by James Deetz, as encompassing not only "artifacts" in the traditional sense but "that sector of our physical environment that we modify through culturally determined behavior."⁸ Such "material culture" should not be viewed as a static inventory of artifacts but rather descriptive of an ongoing process. Thus, "the study of material culture is the study of creativity in context... [an analysis] of the dialectic of wills and conditions,...the reciprocal connections among individual desires, social orders, and environmental possibilities."⁹

It is this acculturative process, with its recombinant cultural mixtures of local and imported traditions and techniques and, perhaps, differential rates of acceptance, which should be viewed in the context of the contact zone. The remainder of this paper will, therefore, consider several instances of cultural fusion in the Amazon region which illustrate that "European" models of cultural construction were shaped by indigenous knowledge, resulting in highly original, adaptable solutions. The use of these maps and drawings as "data" allows for a measure of independence in interpreting historical evidence distinct from discourse; nonetheless, such objects "speak" to us as surely as a written record. And while it is true, as visual anthropologists remind us, that [end p. 118] renderings of these objects were "to some extent socially and/or culturally constructed,"¹⁰ and must therefore be understood as representing the viewpoint of the Europeans or Brazilians of European background who drew them, they remain the few images that we have of material production within colonial contact zones. Most of the drawings presented here are reproduced from the well-known account of the Brazilian-born naturalist, Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, whose Viagem Filosófica is the outstanding iconographic source on the Amazon for this period.¹¹ The town and house plans represent the work of military engineers. There is, unfortunately, little known evidence of indigenous renderings of these contexts.

My concern here, therefore, is to move beyond the largely politically-driven discourse in determining whether the parameters of an emerging colonial material culture are necessarily predetermined by a normative ideology (in this case Portuguese), or are responsive to the inherent logic of cultural borrowing, grounded in the prospect of acceptance. It is in this regard that the modified "artifacts" and "spaces" of this late colonial period may be read as something other than just "things"; they may be seen instead as the phenomenological evidence of Portuguese influence and control or, alternatively, of willingness to incorporate local knowledge into newly created landscapes. We can be certain, given the paucity of written data on the subject, that attempts to measure the indigenous reaction to such cultural reconfigurations would not be very productive and would implausibly suggest that it is not only possible to reconstruct subaltern history in the Amazon, but that there was broad understanding of the colonial "project" by the colonized in the first place. If, however, instead of relying exclusively on written discourse (or drawing conclusions based on the lack of such writings), we substitute visual evidence of the adoption or adaptation of local knowledge into the Amazonian cultural landscape, it becomes obvious that a process of cultural borrowing was, in fact, the modus operandi in the region. Ultimately, such sources force us to rethink the phenomenon of colonialism and to tell a "different story."

Cultural Landscapes

The origin of the thrust to modify the Amazonian cultural landscape can be traced to the 1690s' discovery of gold in the region of Minas Gerais, a windfall which necessitated a new, and explicit, Crown policy for controlling the development of the backlands. In response, the Portuguese projected sweeping plans for the eighteenth century which aimed to replace the uncontrolled or spontaneous landscapes of the previous two centuries with one that was visibly regulated and European in appearance.¹² Beginning first in the backlands and extending later to the older, coastal cities, the Portuguese consciously attempted to change the proxemics or spatial arrangements of the way people lived within the colony, by mandating the construction of new communities.¹³ At first concerned just with the maintenance of a uniform physical presence in these newly constructed hamlets, the government would eventually mandate rules for "appropriate" lifestyles which, it was thought, the inhabitants of these new communities must eventually embrace. Indeed, while inhabitants of such backlands communities (including those of the Amazon) were derided as vagabonds, the Portuguese assumed that by decreeing that such folk live within structured, aligned communities, their collective behavior would ultimately manifest a more civil character.

While some urban planning had been evident in Brazil from the founding of Salvador da Bahía, in 1549, the first real evidence of a planning mindset appeared in 1716, when legislation was drafted for the creation of townships in the northern region of Piauí.¹⁴ This new construction "code" mandated the creation of designated sites for a church, jail, and other public buildings; lots were to be distributed to future inhabitants on streets which had been delineated by surveying (a linha recta). Lastly, every effort was to be made to assure uniform façades for the houses, so that the entire project would be, in the [end p. 119] famous Italian phrase of the day, un bel composto (a beautiful composition). As the century unfolded, such regulations became even more explicit in regard to house style, color, and content, and they were often accompanied by precisely rendered towns plans. Significantly, the plans drafted for such new communities were to be implemented in context regardless of the ethnic background of the future inhabitants. Thus, residents of European and mixed background, newly arrived caçais (families from the Atlantic Islands and other overcrowded parts of the realm), African-born and local slaves, as well as indigenous peoples were now required to live in regulated settlements in the Amazon, often side by side. Elsewhere, I have referred to this scheme as the first step toward creating a Brazilian peasantry.¹⁵ Creating such planned minifundia, instead of permitting the mostly uncontrolled pattern of large landed estates which had characterized earlier settlement on the coast, was seen as a method of assuring greater Crown authority.¹⁶

This town-building program reached a feverish pitch after 1750 when the Marques de Pombal, as the Prime Minister, persuaded King José I of the need for broad-reaching reform in all areas of the colony. While Pombal's projections for Brazil are well-researched and need not be redeveloped here, it is critical to this discussion that one of his primary concerns was the expulsion of the Jesuits, a feat accomplished in the late 1750s. For the Indians now "liberated" from missionary control, Pombal formulated policy which sought to integrate them into the mainstream Brazilian/Portuguese milieu. The success of this experimental vision (known as the Directorate) hinged on modifying the material culture; i.e., "allowing" the Indians to live in a recognizably "Portuguese manner" and to marry Europeans, which Pombal reckoned would result in "Lusified" behavior.¹⁷ Indeed, one enthusiastic administrator predicted that Indians would rapidly flock to these newly created Portuguese settlements, where they would be treated as "men like anyone else" and where they would be allowed the liberty of owning goods, unlike the Jesuits who would not let them "possess a single thing."¹⁸

To implement this clearly defined cultural agenda, the Portuguese created a cadre of specially trained individuals. I am referring here to the military engineers who not only came from the realm but who were also educated locally in Brazil.¹⁹ The graduates of these academies formed a corps of loyal technocrats who had the training and the intelligence to implement a mandated cultural policy, supported by modern technology. Yet, as will be seen below, such individuals were not averse to modifying metropolitan prerequisites and incorporating local knowledge when warranted by a specific context.

Many of these engineers saw duty in the Amazon region. Unlike the previous century, when the Portuguese had confined their Amazonian activity to Belém do Pará and sent sporadic expeditions up the river system, in the eighteenth century metropolitan officials attempted to populate and control the entire region, efforts that were often under the direct control of military engineers. Through the course of the century, the contact zone between the indigenous population and Europeans widened, as the Portuguese pushed further inland to Mato Grosso and developed a trade route which linked the Guaporé, Madeira and Amazon Rivers to the port city of Belém.²⁰

In this newly opened region, the Portuguese preferred to locate and construct new towns on the várzea, or floodplain of the rivers; often these settlements were associated with a nearby fortification. Nor was this necessarily a deviation from the setting of Pre-Portuguese indigenous settlements; recent archaeological evidence suggests that early occupation occurred on the várzea as well as on terra firme (high ground or forest), with occasional settlements spreading over both geomorphic land forms.²¹ By contrast, it was during the missionary era that this pattern was substantially modified, as the religious orders preferred to located their missions on the bluffs overlooking rivers,²² rather than on the floodplain.

Portuguese town-building activity in the region (which intensified after the 1759 expulsion of the Jesuits allowed the Portuguese greater [end p. 120] direct contact with indigenous peoples) visibly reversed the tendency of the missionary period and physically relocated the local and recently arrived settlers into newly constructed communities at water's edge. These new communities were provided with casas de canoas to stow craft, rudimentary docking areas, and occasionally shipyards. Even former missions, which were now taken over by civil authorities, experienced substantial modification.

Nonetheless, it is difficult to speak of the emergence of just one new cultural landscape; such riverine communities differed widely from one another, a fact which reflected accommodation to local knowledge and conditions. Swampy areas necessitated the building of houses on stilts, while lack of what was considered "appropriate" construction materials resulted in houses built of thatched palm leaves (Figure 1) instead of the preferred taipa (mud bricks) or stone. Thus, notwithstanding the prevalence of uniformity internally in these towns, no one pattern of town layout nor house prototype can be said to represent a global model; each was devised in context. Even within single sites experimentation took place, so that the development of the cultural landscape must be viewed as an ongoing process, while lip-service was being paid to prefabricated "Lusification" directives from the mother country. Analysis of the construction of the town of Sâo José de Macapá de Amapá (on the northern banks of the mouth of the Amazon River) provides an excellent example of how the process worked at one site.

Sâo José de Macapá

Construction of a fortress and settlement at Sâo José de Macapá was ordered in response to threats of foreign invasion; the Portuguese Crown hoped to protect the entrance to the Amazon river and its tributaries by creating human "bulwarks" (i.e., townships) composed of a mixed peasantry of Atlantic Islands caçais, their slaves, and "congregated" indigenous peoples. Toward this end, Thomaz Rodrigues da Costa, a Portuguese engineering graduate of the Royal Academy at Lisbon, was dispatched in the late 1750s to delineate a settlement in the shadow of the fortress?²³

He laid out the new town of Sâo José de Macapá²⁴ adjacent to the fortress and parallel with the water's edge (Figure 2). Each nuclear family was assigned a house, the floor plans of which are depicted on a contemporaneous plan of the settlement. Significantly, two house styles are represented, allowing us to interpret how the process of cultural modification evolved on site. The second house type (referred to as the "new house" in the plan's legend) seems to have prevailed, becoming the predominant house form (Figure 3). This was probably due to the fact that the plan of this bungalow provided for greater cross-ventilation, in this extremely hot climate, than is evident in the floor plan of the first house type (Figure 4).The interior space of the predominant house type was divided into three small rooms, with a narrow entrance corridor/foyer; each unit had three simple windows and a pair of doors aligned opposite each other to maximize ventilation. Significantly, the purpose of these rooms is not delineated on the [end p. 121]

We can observe, additionally, that the high pitch ofthe illustrated roof line, as well as the lack of indication of an attic floor, suggests that partitions (probably woven), rather than solid walls, divided the interior space. This was a building style common to indigenous dwellings. Iconographic evidence from Rodrigues Ferreira's A Viagem Filosófica confirms the use of partitions in dwellings inhabited by Indians in the "Europeanized" town of Monte Alegre, as well as in contemporaneous indigenous malocas (roundhouses; see Figures 5 and 6). It is probable that the Portuguese selectively incorporated this climate-adaptive vernacular device after trial and error.

This begs the question of the cultural origin of these new town housing prototypes. Can we consider this second house type to be purely European in derivation? If written discourse is accepted at face value, we would expect to find evidence of direct continuity of building styles from Portugal to the colony. Indeed, vernacular houses from rural Portugal today show similarity in plan and scale to the colonial Amapá exemplars. If we speculate that there is also a continuity of form of eighteenth-century rural Portuguese vernacular houses with those of the present then, by extending that continuity to Brazil, we can suggest that what appears to be replication of European forms in colonial Amapa was probably not coincidental. Superficially, we might be tempted to conclude that in Amapa cultural borrowing in toto from Portugal was the order of the day.

But closer examination of the visual evidence suggests otherwise. For example, the divisions between rooms depicted in modern-day [end p. 123] house plans of Alentejo and Ribatejo do not show woven partitions, but thick, structural walls.²⁵ Moreover, the rural Portuguese analogs lack the apertures necessary for cross-ventilation and, in this regard, resemble the unsuccessful first house type of Sâo José, rather than the more predominant (and airier) second house type of da Costa's town. Moreover, the roof area of the rural Portuguese houses is invariably floored, functioning as a usable storage area, or attic, rather than remaining open for ventilation as in the Amazonian colonial examples.

Colonial Amapá houses, therefore, represent only a partial adaptation or acceptance of the Portuguese house form. In other words, this was a selective application of European norms. Analytically then, this example from Sâo José may be read as follows: the Portuguese engineer (da Costa) developed a prototype Amazonian bungalow that, initially based on a normative metropolitan vernacular cultural form, proved to be unsuccessful (uninhabitable?). He then modified the basic form, incorporating local climatic knowledge in a process of cultural borrowing, (likely following the suggestions of the indigenous workers who formed the construction crews²⁶ to produce a house type more suitable for this zone. From the outside these houses would meet administrative demands requiring locals to live in orderly (read "European-like") residences. But inside the houses there was room for local adaptations, such as partitions, cross-ventilation and open space under the roof.

Was this a "superficial" take of the European culture, or a highly pragmatic synthesis born of experimentation and adaptability? I believe that the visual evidence suggests the latter interpretation, which is why the second house form prevailed. Parenthetically, one wonders what indigenous inhabitants made of the spatial arrangement of these new houses to which they were now assigned. We have no evidence of their reaction and there is nothing to contradict the notion that they may have assigned their own culturally-derived interpretations to the new communities and dwellings.²⁷

Textiles

Paralleling the case of the houses discussed above, analysis of the Amazonian textile industry²⁸ shows that the introduction of European technology (e.g., in the loom pictured in Figure 7) did

Transport

In yet another facet of material culture in the Amazon, marine transportation, similar melding of local knowledge with European form occurred and suggests symmetries of purpose. Although master Portuguese shipbuilders were sent to the Amazon (and elsewhere in Brazil) in the mid-1700s expressly for the purpose of bringing their skills to the shipbuilding industry,³¹ and engineers often saw duty as naval designers, the bulk of the labor force in the Amazonian shipyards continued to be indigenous. These workers were undoubtedly more familiar with the construction of canoes, upon which riverine communities did (and still do) depend for their supplies. Thus, while Amazonian shipyards successfully produced brigs, brigantines, smacks, and other vessels of clearly European derivation, it was the everyday transport vessel, based on the simple, yet efficacious dugout form, that dominated construction. These canoes were transformed into sleek transportation vessels with the addition of rigging (both lateen and square sails), partial keels, stem rudders and "tumblehomes," resulting in highly sophisticated fusioncraft like the igarite (Figure 11), which was used for inland commerce; notwithstanding its exterior sophistication it remained a one-piece-hull canoe, albeit a "Europeanized" one, and it traversed the entire Amazonian riverine landscape.

We can understand why the Portuguese would modify an indigenous cultural form of transport rather than insisting upon more European models if we reflect on the prevalence of cultural borrowing we have already seen in the Amazonian contact zone. Here again, it was the advantage of local knowledge that determined the shape of the cultural form; for the task of navigating the often treacherous waters of the Amazon river and its tributaries, the canoe was the ideal vessel in terms of stability and draft, as well as cargo transport.³² Moreover, the fact that for [end p. 126] riverine traffic the Portuguese were largely dependent on native mariners, to whom the canoe was comfortably familiar, undoubtedly played a determining role in the decision to adapt this quintessential local vessel, rather than insisting upon a more European form.

Conclusion

These modified canoes, as well as the house forms, textiles, and ceramics, demonstrate that the fusion of European material culture with local knowledge was not an aberrancy. While written discourse confirms that the Portuguese believed that cultural/structural reforms could reconfigure the cultural landscape, and perhaps really believed that their colonial subjects who adopted European culture would be better off, the visual data presented here suggest that this is too simplistic an interpretation for what is a complex process. Implementation of imperial policy obviously did not automatically mean eschewing local ways of creating material culture, as we have seen. The apparent enthusiasm which the Portuguese demonstrated toward experimentation, acculturation and even outright adaptation of local forms in Brazil might, in fact, be said to imply just the opposite; i.e., notwithstanding the prerequisites and die-cut solutions associated with the official "colonial project," it was possible for a colonial power to improvise and tailor material culture to meet the imperatives (physical and, perhaps, metaphysical) of the contact zone.

Nor, apparently, was this process unique to the Amazon, nor to Portuguese possessions in America. Writing about material culture in Portuguese Goa, Urs Bitterli describes such objects as blankets, carpets, weavings and embroideries which "combine motif and ornament, form and technique, with no stylistic incongruity, in a successful syncretism of Eastern and Western traditions."³³

If we accept the willingness of the Portuguese to adapt or outright adopt local cultural traditions, does this automatically imply that there was no local resistance to cultural change in Brazil? The answer is negative, as several recent studies have confirmed³⁴. However, it is equally clear that the Portuguese were eager to avoid such confrontations. Wise counsel on this matter was voiced by the late-eighteenth century Viceroy of Brazil, the Marques de Lavradio. Writing about indigenous communities in the south of the colony, he suggested that "rather than by brandishing the sword... the Portuguese should win over the Indians by examples of piety and kindness."³⁵ In the Amazon, as well, the same conciliatory mindset is evident: to entice inhabitants back to villages in the Rio Branco region following a devastating revolt in 1781-2, the Crown offered amnesty to the rebels, a policy that apparently was successful, according to onsite observers.³⁶

The Amazonian visual data examined here strongly suggest that the process of reconfiguring the cultural landscape included the input of the indigenous population (subalterns) . Not only was "give and take" feasible, it may well have been perceived as desirable by avoiding confrontation. In demonstrating that compromise was possible, notwithstanding the hegemonic parameters of official policy, these examples of cultural borrowing speak eloquently to a virtually unexamined arena of the Brazilian colonial historical experience. Clearly, we can no longer claim that cultural production in the late-colonial Amazon was uni-directional. While we may never be able to say with certainty that the Portuguese recognized that they were giving tacit approval to a hybridized material culture, or even that they acknowledged the possibility of a dialogue between colonized and colonizer, the visual record of the late-colonial Amazon would seemingly support both possibilities by confirming the existence of frequent (and obviously acceptable) material culture syncretisms. In the final analysis, we are obliged to look beyond imperial domination and resistance to syncretism, if we are truly to understand the evolution of colonial cultural landscapes.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on "Material Culture, Life Styles and Consumption in the Iberian World, 16th-19th centuries," University of Delaware, April 1996. The author thanks David Keeling and two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions in revising this paper and her husband, Eric Delson, of the American Museum of Natural History, for editorial assistance.

Notes

1. The importance of cultural landscape studies as a central concern of geographers has been discussed recently in Richard Muir, "Geography and the History of Landscapes: Half a Century of Development as Recorded in The Geographical Journal." The Geographical Journal (1998) Vol. 164 (2):148-154.

2. I first developed this interpretation in Roberta Marx Delson (1979), New Towns for Colonial Brazil: Spatial and Social Planning of the Eighteenth Century. Syracuse: Dellplain Monographs in Latin American Studies 2, Syracuse University.

3. Susan Kus and Victor Raharijoana, "House to Palace, Village to State: Scaling up Architecture and Ideology," American Anthropologist (2000) Vol. 102 (1):101.

4. A good starting point for current views on colonial discourse and agency is Homi Bhabha (1986) "The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism," in Francis Barker et al. (eds.) Literature, Politics and Theory. London: Methuen. The integral and "primary role" of discourse in the colonization process is the theme of John Noyes (1992) Colonial Space: Spatiality in the Discourse of German South West Africa, 1884-1915. Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, p. 18 et passim. A typical statement of this point of view for Brazil can be found in Richard Graham (1968) Britain and the Onset of Modernization in Brazil, 1850-1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. He writes (p.9): "As a colony in a mercantilist era, Brazil was...a recipient of manufactured goods from the metropolis, a subject of its political control, and a recipient of its intellectual direction."

5. This position is elaborated in James C. Scott (1992) "Domination, Acting, and Fantasy," pp. 55-84 in Carolyn Nordstrom and JoAnn Martin (eds.) The Paths to Domination, Resistance and Terror. Berkeley: University of California Press.

6. See the recent discussion of resistance in B.J. Barickman, 'Tame Indians,' 'Wild Heathens,' and Settlers in Southern Bahia in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries," The Americas (1995) Vol. 51 (3):325-368.

7. See, for example, Nicholas Thomas (1994) Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Government. Princeton: Princeton University Press; and Mary Louise Pratt (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London: Routledge.

8. James Deetz (1977) In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life. Garden City, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, p.24.

9. Henry Glassie (1999) Material Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 67-68.

10. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy (eds.) (1997) Rethinking Visual Anthropology. New Haven: Yale University Press, p. 22.

11. The drawings analyzed here date from an expedition of 1783-1792 of Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira. Rodrigues Ferreira's illustrations were apparently never published during his lifetime, but his manuscript notes, encompassing the expedition of 1783-1792, were collated and published one hundred years later as "Diario da Viagem Philosophica pela Capitania de Sâo José do Rio Negro..." in Vols. 48, 49, 50 and 51 (1885-1888) of the Revista Trimestral do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. A facsimile edition, entitled Viagem Filosófica pelas Capitanias do Grâo Pará, Rio Negro, Mato Grosso e Cuiabá was published in 2 volumes by the Conselho Federal de Cultura, Sâo Paulo, 1971; all further citations refer to this facsimile edition and are hereafter cited as VF.

12. See Roberta M. Delson and John Dickenson, "Interpreting the Brazilian Landscape: Conflicts, Contradictions and Counterbalances," Journal of Latin American Studies (1984) Vol. 16, pp. 101-125.

13. This is essentially the argument presented in Chapter II of R.M. Delson (1979) New Towns...

14. Ibid.

15. cf. R M. Delson, "Military Engineering and the Colonial 'Project' for Brazil: Agency and Dominance," forthcoming, Revista Leituras, National Library, Lisbon, Portugal.

16. Nor should this ambitious scheme surprise us, since controlled colonization has always had a "vital role to play in the evolution of landscapes." R. Muir (1998), Geography..., p. 152.

17. For a discussion of the Directorate as it functioned within the Amazon region, see Colin M. Maclachlan (1973) "The Indian Labor Structure in the [end p. 128] Portuguese Amazon, 1700-1800," pp. 199-230 in Dauril Alden (ed.) Colonial Roots of Modern Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press. The major document source for this time frame is Marcos Carneiro de Mendonça (1963) A Amazónia na Era Pombalina: Correspondênica Inédita do Governador e Capitâo-General do Estado do Grâo Pará e Maranhâo Francisco Xavier de Mendonça Furtado, 1751-1759, 3 vols. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro.

18. Luis Antonio de Souza wrote this prophecy to the Conde De Oeiras, Sâo Paulo, 17 Sept., 1765 (Archivo Histórico Itamaraty, Lata 267, Maco 6, Pasta 12).

19. R.M. Delson, "The Beginnings of Professionalization in the Brazilian Military: The Eighteenth Century Corps of Engineers," The Americas (1995) Vol. 51 (4):555-574.

20. A complete overview of this route is contained in the dissertation of David Davidson (1970), Rivers and Empire: The Madeira Route and the Incorporation of the Brazilian Far West, 1737-1808. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI.

21. See Anna C. Roosevelt (1999) "The Development of Prehistoric Complex Societies: Amazonia, A Tropical Forest," pp. 13-33 in Elisabeth A. Bacus and Lisa J. Lucero (eds.) Complex Polities in the Ancient Tropical World, No. 9, Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association.

22. William M. Denevan, "A Bluff Model of Riverine Settlement in Prehistoric Amazonia," Annals of the Association of American Geographers (1996) Vol. 86 (4):672.

23. Construction of the fortification began in 1751; da Costa was sent out to oversee the completion of the town project in the late 1750s. Handpicked by the Amazonian governor Mendonça Furtado, he was chosen for being of "sufficient intelligence, honorable and Christian." Manuel Bernardo de Melo de Castro to Thome Joaquim da Costa, Pará, 30 Jan. 1760, Annaes da Biblioteca e Archivo Público do Pará, Vol. 8 (1913), p. 126.

24. Cf. Delson (1979), New Towns..., pp.102-107, for a description of the building process.

25. See, for example, Mario Moutinho (1979) A Arquitectura Popular Portuguesa, Lisbon: Editorial Estampa; and Paul Oliver (1997) Vernacular Architecture of the World. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

26. The use of indigenous workers is confirmed in the MA thesis of Nirvia Ravena (1988) As Grandes Obras na Amazonia Colonial: A Fortificaçao de Sâo José de Macapá, Universidade Federal do Pará.

27. The ethnographic literature of this region is filled with descriptions of anthropomorphic, or gender specific, designations of interior spaces of indigenous dwellings; one example is Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff (1971) Amazonian Cosmos: The Sexual and Religious Symbolism of the Tukano Indians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

28. The textile industry in the Amazon was highly developed. Cf. Colin Maclachlan (1973) "The Indian labour structure...", pp. 219-220, discusses a Rio Negro mill in the 1790s that had eighteen looms and sixteen men and women Indian workers.

29. For example, see Abel Soares Fernandes, Angela Freitas Alves and Julieta do Vale Fernandes (1994) 0 Traje na madeira: Subsidio para o Seu Estudo, Funchal: Secretaria Regional do Turismo e Cultura.

30. Since the Indians were now required to buy the cloth to meet clothing regulations. B.J. Barickman (1995) "Tame Indians..." makes this point on p. 343.

31. Cf. Harry Bernstein, "The City Artisans on the High Seas: The Nau and Nautica" in V Reuniâo Internacional de História da Nautica e da Hidrografia (1984), Rio de Janeiro.

32. For a discussion of these canoes and their advantages for riverine transportation see R. M. Delson, "Inland Navigation in Colonial Brazil: Using Canoes on the Amazon," International Journal of Maritime History (hereafter IJMH) (1995) Vol. VII (1):1-28; R. M. Delson and Steven W. Meng, "Cargo Canoes of the Eighteenth-Century Amazon: A preliminary stability analysis", IJMH (1995) Vol. 7 (2):173-185.

33. Urs Bitterli (1989) Cultures in Conflict: Encounters Between European and Non-European Cultures, 1492-1800. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, p. 67.

34. Cf. B.J. Barickman (1995) "Tame Indians..." For a perspective on resistance in the nineteenth century see the very interesting article by Joâo José Reis (1966) "'Death to the Cemetery': Funerary Reform and Rebellion in Salvador, Brazil, 1836," pp. 97-113 in Silvia M. Arrom and Servando Ortoll (eds.) Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765-1910. Wilmington, Delaware: Scholarly Resources, Inc.

35. Dauril Alden (1968) Royal Government in Colonial Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 466.

36. Cf. Nádia Farage (1991) As Muralhas dos Sertões: Os Povos Indigenas no Rio Branco e a Colonizaçáo. Sâo Paulo: Editora Paz e Terra, p. 135.

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Resumen