Another “education by stone”: An archaeological case study in Brazil's environmental law

Abstract

AbstractBrazilian law protects environments understood to be the remnants of historical ecologies. This article uses oral histories, silicate plant fossils, and stable isotopes to excavate one such protected fragment of Brazil's Atlantic Forest. Located on a former plantation in the Paraíba Valley of Rio de Janeiro, a region central to state and market formation, and to Atlantic slavery in the nineteenth century, this “forest” contains ecological histories different from those encoded in environmental law. Rather than a legislative failure, this incongruence constitutes an important structural feature of the juridical authority that marginalizes embodied ways of learning about the environment. This fundamental tension, related to who can know this place and by what means, has important implications for understanding the social meanings of environmental politics in the Atlantic world, which emerged in the context of the abolition of slavery. Environmental laws provided means of claiming knowledge and control over spaces of social reproduction created by freedpersons post abolition, underwriting enduring forms of land and labor management. [environmental legislation, land conflict, plantations, race, Brazil]