Survival International: Going Public on Amazonian Indians

Abstract

undermine it, e.g. the following, 'the inscrutable nature of the Thkano may in part be due to his addiction to cocaine...they often appear listless and resigned'! Rather than this, it would have been better to extend the brief chapters written by Elizabeth Carmichael and Stephen Hugh-Jones. Indeed, given the extremely high quality of many of the objects on display, a real catalogue and guide to the exhibition might have been provided. In the exhibition itself, the most serious and damaging gap lies in the treatment of history.The last section, treated as somewhat of an after-thought, is devoted to the past of Amazonia and the possible future of native people. Unfortunately the theme of change is treated in terms of Discovery, Exploration, Anthropologists and the clearing of the forest. The dominant image here is the Highway: there is a large and dramatic photograph of a native man astride a motor-bike. It is undeniable that the recent construction of highways into Amazonia and the destruction of large areas of forest have been topics of popular concern, but they do not represent the beginning of Amazonian history. The whole exhibition manages to avoid any mention of the centuries of river trading and urbanization in Central Amazonia, and there is not one single photograph of the river from which the area takes its name. The vast network of rivers that cover the Amazon Basin have been of more than symbolic importance to native people: they were and remain highways of contact, trading and change. The assumption of the exhibition is that those peoples who live furthest from the major rivers and show least superficial evidence of European contact are the most authentic expression of Native Amazonian culture. This ignores the real history of both these and the apparently less 'traditional' societies, and equally excludes the possibility that native people can and do both resist and accommodate themselves to their changing circumstances. But the truth will out: one object on display is a hammock with a featherwork representation of the flag of Brazil (this is shown without any explanation). It seems then that we have yet to move beyond the opinion of the great Brazilian writer Euclides Da Cunha that Amazonia, 'that eternal steambath', is the 'land without history'. Olivia Harris and Peter Gow