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Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon. By Candace Slater. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Pp. 332 + index, maps, photos, chronology of key dates, glossary, bibliography. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Candace Slater's Entangled Edens offers a detailed survey of two kinds of images of the Amazon region and its peoples. One is the kind found in the lore, literature, and visual media of "outsiders," which Slater traces from the time of the first European encounters of the Amazon to the present. Among the genres surveyed are narratives of war and conquest; legends of women warriors and golden kings; the literature of travel, botanical, ethnographic, and political/economic research; images purveyed in consumer marketing and advertising campaigns; and popular educational programs prompted by global ecological concerns. Slater juxtaposes these images with those of the "insiders," drawn from previous narrative collections, regional literary traditions, and stories collected within her own interviews with various contemporary peoples of the region (including gold-miners and descendants of runaway African slaves, among others). The sources tapped by Slater in surveying both of these kinds of images are enormous and varied. Influenced by Susan Stewart's On Longing, Slater finds a summarizing emblem for the outsiders' images of the Amazon in the "giant." This emblem calls attention to the outsiders' impulse—even in seemingly enlightened portrayals such as that of the fragile rainforest—to monolithize the region, neglecting its complex social history and the diversity of its cultures and peoples (for example, ignoring the many mixed bloods in favor of the image of "Stone Age Indians"). Slater finds a contrasting emblem for the local images in the mythological character of the shape-shifter—an image that conveys the multivocality, narrative mutability, and shifting social reality of the many forms of human adaptation that occur within the Amazon region. Slater's perspective is that of a historically-informed, literarily sensitive reader focusing on processes of image-construction, including major tropes, psychological and political motives, social-historical sources, and lines and processes of dissemination, as well as the many hybrid forms arising within all of these. The overarching strategy holding her book together is reminiscent of the structuralist's mediation of oppositions, or perhaps the classic thesis/antithesis/synthesis. More specifically, the book proceeds back and forth from outsider to insider images and narratives, with the closing chapter hinting that the hope for the region lies in some sort of synthesis of them. Although Slater frequently calls attention to complicated intertwinings between the two kinds of images, the thematic opposition she lays out is tidy and encompassing (giantizing vs. shape-shifting also correlates with other oppositions, most notably that of terrestrial vs. aquatic narrative focus, but also at moments with science vs. magic, engineering vs. art, and nature vs. society). Slater's basic finding—that of a monolithic outsider vision vis-à-vis a nimble, shifting, and richly diversified local vision—marks less of a radical departure than a rehearsal of a theme that is currently very much "in the air" in contemporary writing about culture. Slater insistently pursues the giantizing theme through a staggering array of times, disciplines, and genres. A question which arises, and which might be asked of many studies of our time, is whether in the interests of calling to attention the perils of giantizing, "totalizing," or "essentializing," we might also be begetting new versions of them. Gregory Schrempp |
