UC Irvine

FlashPoints

Title
Traces of the Unseen: Photography, Violence, and Modernization in
Early Twentieth-Century Latin America

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978-0-8101-4541-2

Author
Sá Carvalho, Carolina

Publication Date
2023-02-16

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Traces of the Unseen
The FlashPoints series is devoted to books that consider literature beyond strictly
national and disciplinary frameworks and that are distinguished both by their
historical grounding and by their theoretical and conceptual strength. Our books
engage theory without losing touch with history and work historically without
falling into uncritical positivism. FlashPoints aims for a broad audience within the
humanities and the social sciences concerned with moments of cultural emergence
and transformation. In a Benjaminian mode, FlashPoints is interested in how liter-
ature contributes to forming new constellations of culture and history and in how
such formations function critically and politically in the present. Series titles are
available online at http://escholarship.org/uc/flashpoints.
series editors: Ali Behdad (Comparative Literature and English, UCLA), Edi-
tor Emeritus; Judith Butler (Rhetoric and Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley),
Editor Emerita; Michelle Clayton (Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature,
Brown University); Edward Dimendberg (Film and Media Studies, Visual Studies,
and European Languages and Studies, UC Irvine), Founding Editor; Catherine
Gallagher (English, UC Berkeley), Editor Emerita; Nouri Gana (Comparative Lit-
erature and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, UCLA); Susan Gillman (Lit-
erature, UC Santa Cruz), Coordinator; Jody Greene (Literature, UC Santa Cruz);
Richard Terdiman (Literature, UC Santa Cruz), Founding Editor
A complete list of titles begins on page 309.
Traces of the Unseen
Photography, Violence, and Modernization
in Early Twentieth-Century Latin America

Carolina Sá Carvalho

northwestern university press | evanston, illinois

Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

Copyright © 2023 by Northwestern University. Published 2023 by Northwestern

University Press. All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sá–Carvalho, Carolina, author.
Title: Traces of the unseen : photography, violence, and modernization in early
twentieth–century Latin America / Carolina Sá Carvalho.
Other titles: FlashPoints (Evanston, Ill.)
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2023. | Series:
Flashpoints | Includes bibliographical references and index
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040330 | ISBN 9780810145412 (paperback) | ISBN
9780810145429 (cloth) | ISBN 9780810145436 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Documentary photography—Brazil—History. | Documentary
photography—Social aspects—Brazil. | Brazilian literature—20th century—History
and criticism. | Literature and photography. | Civilization, Modern. | Brazil—
Civilization. | BISAC: LITERARY CRITICISM / American / Hispanic &
Latino | PHOTOGRAPHY / History
Classification: LCC TR820.5 .S235 2023 | DDC 770.981—dc23/eng/20220824
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040330
To Mauricio and Lua
Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 3
Chapter 1. Corpse: The Nation in a Decomposing Portrait 27
Chapter 2. Scars: Humanitarianism and the Colonial
Point of View 83
Chapter 3. Debris: The Indigenous Past in an
Ethnographer’s Dream 125
Chapter 4. Shadows: The Amazonian Worker and
the Modernist Traveler 189
Epilogue: Fire 233

Notes 241
Bibliography 283
Index 301
Acknowledgments

This book would not be possible without institutional support and a

generous network of people.
I thank the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton Univer-
sity, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, and
the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University for
funding early research trips to France, Ireland, England, and Brazil. An
Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) Fellowship and the RJ Reyn-
olds Junior Faculty Research Award at the University of North Caro-
lina at Chapel Hill provided me with crucial resources and time for the
development of this project. Thanks are also due to the librarians and
archivists who supported my research at the National Library of Ire-
land, the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthro-
pology, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Museu da República,
the Museu do Índio, the Museu de Astronomia e Ciências Afins, and
the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the University of São Paulo, the
US National Archives, and the New York Public Library. Special thanks
go to Matthieu Lévi-Strauss, who agreed to meet and talk about his
father’s photographs, besides authorizing me to reproduce some copies
of them. I am thankful for the support I received in the last stages of
this manuscript from the exceptionally knowledgeable and supportive
librarians at the University of Toronto, Fabiano Rocha and Miguel Tor-
rens; as well as from my research assistant and friend Taylor Barrett and
my competent copy editors Melanie Bush, Isis Sadek, and Erna von der

ix
x ❘ Acknowledgments

Walde. The Northwestern University Press editors Trevor Perri, Patrick

Samuel, and Faith Wilson Stein, and the FlashPoints Series editor Susan
Gillman were also extremely supportive throughout this process.
A few paragraphs of chapter 1 appeared in “Spectacle and Rebellion
in Fin-de-Siècle Brazil: The Commodified Rebel in Machado de Assis’s
Chronicles,” Journal of Lusophone Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2018); and an
abbreviated version of chapter 2 was published in the article “How to
See a Scar: Humanitarianism and Colonial Iconography in the Putu-
mayo Rubber Boom,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 27,
no. 3 (2018). I thank the publishers for granting permission to repro-
duce these materials.
I owe great debts of gratitude to mentors, colleagues, and friends who
read and commented on the current version and previous ones of this
manuscript. I am indebted to Gabriela Nouzeilles, Eduardo Cadava,
Bruno Carvalho, Rachel Price, Beatriz Jaguaribe, Mauricio Lissovsky (in
memoriam), Nathaniel Wolfson, Melissa Teixeira, Ana Sabau, Michelle
Leigh Farrell, Herica Valladares, Gustavo Furtado, Victoria Saramago,
Rodrigo Lopes, Ashley Bashford, Carolyn Fornoff, Amanda Smith, Mar-
tina Broner, Luciana Villas Bôas, Kevin Coleman, and Adriana Campos
Johnson, who helped this project take the shape that it has. This work
has also received a great deal of encouragement from Mike Sullivan,
Paulo Vaz, Silviano Santiago, Lilia Schwarcz, and Pedro Meira Monteiro.
I also benefited from the feedback I received from audiences at Duke
University, the University of Chicago, Northern Michigan University,
the Institute for the Study of the Americas at UNC, the Federal Univer-
sity of Rio de Janeiro (Núcleo de Pesquisa em Sociologia da Cultura,
Programa de Pós-graduação em Ciência da Literatura, and Programa
de Pós-graduação em Artes Visuais), and the conferences of the Latin
American Studies Association and the Brazilian Studies Association.
Conversations with a great number of colleagues during these events,
only some of whom I will be able to mention here, have been extremely
helpful. I thank Esther Gabara, John French, Lupe Arenillas, Javier
Uriarte, Mariana Bolfarine, Larissa Brewer-García, Dain Borges, Luca
Bacchini, Odile Cisneros, André Keiji Kunigami, Tadeu Capistrano, and
Marco Antonio Gonçalves for sharing their insights with me. My bright
colleagues at the IAH fellows’ meetings also gave invaluable contribu-
tions to this manuscript. Friends in Brazil, scholars, teachers, producers,
organizers, and filmmakers not only have stood up and helped me when
I needed references, contact with archival sources, and advice, but have
been a source of ongoing inspiration.
 Acknowledgments ❘ xi

Part of this book was written at the University of North Carolina

at Chapel Hill. I thank my colleagues and friends at UNC for the sup-
portive environment there, especially Maggie Fritz-Moritz and Herica
Valladares, with whom I spent many hot and humid afternoons writing,
plotting, and laughing. Thanks are also due to my gifted and curious
students at UNC for allowing the classroom to be a space of learning
and dialogue and for helping me think through this project.
I am deeply thankful to my brilliant and friendly colleagues at the
University of Toronto, who made me feel welcome and offered support
with this project. The stimulating and nourishing environment at the
Department of Spanish and Portuguese there allowed me to finish this
book as a new mother.
I am grateful for my family in Brazil, for their love and ongoing
support. They are my bedrock and my inspiration. I am thankful for
my loving in-laws Mary and Rich Sonnenschein for taking care of their
granddaughter while I revised parts of this manuscript and for helping
me decipher some early twentieth-century handwritings.
Jason has crossed borders with me. Many of them. Even in times
of hopelessness and cynicism, Jason cares fiercely about the world and
those around him. His courage and support make my days fuller and
brighter. This book is dedicated to Lua and to the memory of Mauricio
Lissovsky; they did not have the chance to meet each other. Mauricio,
whom I met as an undergraduate student, became a brilliant mentor
and a generous friend. He left an indelible trace on my intellectual tra-
jectory and on this book. Lua was born at the final stages of this journey
and showed me another version of myself.
Traces of the Unseen
Figure 0.1. “Chapéu-de-chile no porto de Porto Velho”; “Na verdade estou
sentado nesses trilhos de Porto Velho por causa das borboletas que estão me
rodeando, amarelinhas e a objectiva esqueceu de registrar. Era pra fotar as bor-
boletas.” (“Straw hat at the port of Porto Velho”; “Actually, I am sitting on these
tracks in Porto Velho because of the butterflies that surround me, all yellow, and
the lens forgot to register them. It should have photographed the butterflies.”)
Photograph by Mário de Andrade. July 11, 1927. Reproduced by permission of
Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de Andrade, código de referência: MA-F-0431.
Introduction

Let us begin at the end, with the image discussed in the last chapter of
this book. It is a portrait of the Brazilian avant-garde writer Mário de
Andrade, sitting on some train tracks in the Amazonian city of Porto
Velho on July 11, 1927 (figure 0.1). Located on the banks of the Madeira
River, Porto Velho served as the base of operations for the construc-
tion of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway between 1907 and 1912. That
monumental engineering project, intended to connect Bolivia’s rubber
industry to the Amazon basin, was completed just when the Amazonian
rubber economy was entering its decline. Though touted as the arrival
of the most advanced technological and commercial enterprise in the
hinterlands of Latin America, the railway was born obsolete. In the pho-
tograph, Mário de Andrade, self-proclaimed tourist apprentice, poses
among the railway rubble wearing his new chapéu-de-chile, an artisanal
straw hat, and a tidy outfit. It is not clear why he sits there, among the
rubble.1 The portrait’s background is not a tropical tree, a picturesque
house, or a modern train; it is not even ruins, but leftover crossties and
wretched trees. Andrade’s photograph talks about the incorporation of
the Amazon into global market relations, about environmental destruc-
tion in the aftermath of infrastructural development, and about the cir-
culation of tourists and commodities. But the photograph is also about
something else, something that might not be visible at first sight.
In his diary, Andrade noted that he felt as if he were being watched
by the workers who had died during the construction of the Madeira-

3
4 ❘ Introduction

Mamoré line, popularly known as the “devil’s railway,” and he recounted

an anecdote circulated at the time of its construction saying that each
crosstie corresponded to one dead worker.2 The “tourist” smiles at the
camera as he sits on these tracks, which now appear to us as epitaphs
for dead workers. We now see in this image the traces of the exploita-
tion of labor and natural resources. We see Andrade sitting on, or sitting
with, the traces of destruction, and appearing both happy, as a tourist
should be, and uncomfortable. In this unstable, ambiguous position,
he maintains his own participation—and consequently our participa-
tion, as consumers of images—in the transformation of the Amazonian
environment.
In the photograph’s humorous caption, Andrade asks us to bear wit-
ness to yet another absence: the yellow butterflies that the lens forgot to
register. On closer examination, we are able to see the shadowy marks
left by the butterflies upon the film. Amazonian nature, often portrayed
in literature and photography as sublime, appears here only in its most
subtle form, as a survivor in the aftermath of destruction. In teaching
us how to see the entanglement of almost invisible traces of living but-
terflies and dead workers, artisanal hats and industrial tracks, and the
footprints left by tourists and commodities, Andrade’s combination of
photography and text reminds us of the temporality of multiple media-
tions, as well as of the multilayered time of Amazonian modernity.
In this book, I examine how traces of violence were mobilized as
visual evidence of the destructive processes of modernization in early
twentieth-century Latin American regions at the edges of an expanding
capitalist world. While examining the rapid transformations unleashed
by the development of railways, telegraph lines, and photography, I
challenge the temporal understanding of technological modernity as
necessarily bringing about an acceleration of time by addressing the
multiple ways of registering the heterogenous temporalities of moder-
nity through visual technologies. The main subject of this book is the
production of different pedagogies of the gaze that articulated photo-
graphs and texts in order to teach increasingly connected urban publics
what to see in these traces of destruction and how to interpret these
traces within the larger context of capitalist expansion. What concepts
of history and ideas about modernization did these pedagogies convey?
How did they conceive of the role of the state and the agency of the
public in the construction of these projects? What practices and politics
of seeing do they imply? While dialoguing with the history of photog-
raphy and discussions about the ontological status of the photographic,
 Introduction ❘ 5

I investigate how functions of the medium were embedded in disputed

concepts of modernity and in historically specific practices of seeing
within the (geo)political peripheries of capitalism.
This landscape of heterogeneous practices includes works that have
not typically been considered jointly, as they have been separated by na-
tional and disciplinary boundaries: the Brazilian journalist and engineer
Euclides da Cunha’s 1902 book Os sertões, decrying the state-led mas-
sacre of the rebellious peasant community of Belo Monte (or Canudos);
letters, reports, and photographs circulated by the Irish humanitarian
Roger Casement in order to build a consensus to stop the violence of a
rubber extraction company in the Amazonian region of the Putumayo;
the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s critique of the expan-
sion of “mechanized civilization” in his accounts of his 1930s encoun-
ters with Indigenous communities in central Brazil; and the Brazilian
writer Mário de Andrade’s 1927 travel diaries, in which he reflects on
being a spectator of human and environmental exploitation in the Bra-
zilian and Peruvian Amazon.

Photog r a ph i c T r ac e s

By the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century,

Latin America’s “hinterlands,” or regions that had previously enjoyed
relative autonomy or neglect due to their remoteness from urban cen-
ters, were being violently incorporated into the political governance of
expanding nation-states and the channels of global circuits of exchange.
Transnational corporations extracted raw materials, such as Amazo-
nian rubber, to feed the most lucrative industries at the time; spectac-
ular infrastructural works financed by local governments and foreign
capital, such as railways and telegraph lines, promised to connect “re-
mote” regions—swampy forests or desert plains—to urban and coastal
cities, and hence to international markets; and rural areas previously
regulated according to traditional labor relations and patriarchal modes
of authority were (albeit partially) assimilated into the governance of
modern nation-states.
The concurrent processes of the consolidation of Latin American
nation-states and of the integration of the interiors of the region into a
global supply chain were therefore deeply connected,3 although encom-
passing discrete practices and symbolic patterns of territorialization.
While foreign investments were crucial to the expansion of state power,
6 ❘ Introduction

in the public realm local political elites often portrayed their nations’
ability to take part in a rising global economy as a sign of their prog-
ress towards modernity. Debates on what this process of moderniza-
tion should look like encompassed issues such as the transformation of
vast plains, deserts, or forests into productive extractive zones and the
challenges of integrating their populations into the national and global
economies as laborers.4
In an ironic commentary about the intertwined processes of state and
capitalist expansion in Brazil, the Brazilian writer Joaquim Maria Ma-
chado de Assis suggested in an 1897 crônica (a short essay) for the Rio
de Janeiro newspaper A Gazeta de Notícias that news about the ongo-
ing clashes between the Brazilian military and a rebellious peasant com-
munity in the Brazilian Northeast had reached New York and London,
where “the name Antônio Conselheiro”—the community’s religious
leader—“caused our stock prices to decline.”5 That same year, this com-
munity, known as Canudos and portrayed in the newspapers as fanatical
and regressive, was entirely wiped out by the Brazilian army in the name
of modernization. It is as if history—understood as the global/historical
fulfillment of the European subject’s domination over its others6—were
trying to catch up with a delay on the peripheries of global capitalism.
Simultaneously, early twentieth-century developments in the democ-
ratization of photographic technology such as the appearance of light-
weight cameras, the reduction of film exposure times, and the availability
of cheaper printing processes such as the halftone process seemed to
consolidate the affinity of the photographic medium with the forward
sweep of modernity and its promise to shrink distances and acceler-
ate time. Machado de Assis, again in response to media attention to
the rebellious peasant community in the backlands of Brazil, suggested
that a photographer should “bring back” the traits of the mysterious
prophet Antônio Conselheiro and hence “reveal the truth about the
sect.”7 Machado’s comment articulates how photography was used to
generate empirical knowledge about “remote” regions and racialized
subjects in the process of engulfment of these other worlds and peoples
into the historical progress of capitalist modernity. If, in the words of
anthropologist Anna Tsing, “when the spectacle passes on, what is left
is rubble and mud, the residues of success and failure,”8 what I will ex-
amine in this book is what was made of the photographic traces of the
rubble and corpses, such as those of Canudos, in the aftermath of spec-
tacular destruction. The photographs of traces of destruction in regions
portrayed as frontiers of capitalist modernity, I argue, engendered new
 Introduction ❘ 7

practices of looking, new forms of articulation between spectatorship

and politics, in early twentieth-century metropolitan areas.
Seminal works on early twentieth-century photography in Latin
America have explored the relationship between the medium itself and
the means of observing, ordering, storing, and exhibiting the human
and natural resources which were instrumental for the enhancement of
state power and capitalism. As Jens Andermann has argued, photogra-
phy was not only a tool of state and capitalist territorialization in Latin
America, but played a central role in the organization of fields of visibil-
ity that allowed the state to be configured as an independent agent “set
apart from social practices—as a way of seeing that yielded an imper-
sonal, ‘objective’ type of knowledge.”9 In her important book on early
twentieth-century photography and film in Brazil, Luciana Martins
suggested ways in which the photographic medium itself incorporated
the temporality of progress.10 Focusing on nineteenth-century Brazil,
Natalia Brizuela challenges the oft-discussed association between pho-
tography and positivism during that period, and explores the role of
landscape photography in the production of a desired, even enchanted,
geography of a tropical empire.11 Other authors, such as the historian
Kevin Coleman, have examined the archives of imperialist corporations,
such as the United Fruit Company, not only to identify the use of new
techniques of observation to discipline labor, but also to discover how
the subjects of photographs participated in shaping their own images.12
Finally, Latin American photographers who used the visual languages
of imperialism in order to subvert them have also garnered attention. In
this sense, Esther Gabara has argued that Mário de Andrade parodied
the genres of travel photography—akin to colonizers and explorers,
who produced landscapes to transform the spaces they traveled as lands
destined for acquisition, as well as to “members of the international
avant-garde who visited Brazil, such as Blaise Cendrars and Filippo
Marinetti”—in order to foreground rather than erase the power rela-
tions implicit in them.13
This book also engages with the history of the affinities between
photography and the expansionist impulse of nation-states and global
capitalist networks, but it does so in order to unearth multiple, con-
tested temporalities of technological modernity. I recount, for exam-
ple, how the American photographer Dana Merrill was hired by the
transnational Brazil Railway Company to document and publicize the
monumental advance of the railway into the Amazonian territory. In
dozens of Merrill’s photographs of the railway, the organization of the
8 ❘ Introduction

frame follows the rules of perspective, performing/enacting the heroic

forward movement of the railway into the rainforest. Identifying this
linear mode of spatial-temporal organization helps us understand, for
example, Mário de Andrade’s effort to make visible the unseen traces
of labor and resilient butterflies, among the leftovers from the earlier
infrastructure development. My focus is not only on how Andrade or
other photographers enact, subvert, or resist the expansionist gaze of
the explorer, but also on the formal strategies they use, including the
way they caption their images in order to register modernity as multi-
layered strata of the transformations, migrations, and “friction,” to use
Tsing’s term, of commodities, work, tourists, meanings, and nature. In
placing his own (privileged) body among railway debris, commodities,
resilient butterflies, and invisibilized workers, Andrade recognizes the
ongoing and unequal production and distribution of destruction on the
world stage.
Whereas the Brazilian writer traveled along a railway built with global
capital and labor, photographing a multilayered, globally positioned,
Amazonian modernity, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss
traveled along the Brazilian state-commissioned Rondon telegraph lines
in central Brazil a decade later, in 1935–36 and 1938, trying to register
the traces of destruction as signs of an irreversible path towards the
end of difference itself.14 In his account of a series of encounters with
Indigenous communities that started with his “disappointing” visit to
the spoiled Kaingang (Tristes tropiques, 153) and with the Kadiwéu,
who, according to Lévi-Strauss, lived like “ragged peasants” (177), the
anthropologist denounces Western civilization’s global project of as-
similation and homogenization. In Lévi-Strauss’s account of destruc-
tion, the photographer’s challenge is twofold: to make the Indigenous
communities he encountered visible as the leftover debris of what these
“primitive” cultures once were, and to make clear that technology, in-
cluding both the telegraph lines and photographic technology, had par-
ticipated in their destruction. Although they both partook in a similar
modernist critique of photographic realism and its exoticizing tenden-
cies, Andrade and Lévi-Strauss offer contrasting pedagogies of the gaze:
while Andrade proposes a phenomenology of looking, Lévi-Strauss
eschews the phenomenological aspect of the photographic encounter;
while Andrade’s use of images and texts destabilizes the temporal co-
ordinates of the photographic referent, Lévi-Strauss combines captions,
drawings, and photographs in order to focus on symbolic data—such
as the Kadiwéu body painting—as what remains to be seen of lost
 Introduction ❘ 9

“primitive” civilizations. Through an examination of such instances in

which technological modernity addressed its own debris, I investigate
how the photographic medium becomes embedded in disputed visions
of history.
While dialoguing with works that discuss the formation of modes of
seeing that allowed Indigenous lands to be imagined as frontiers of cap-
italist modernization, I shift the focus to a parallel—and overlooked—
history15 of photography and modernization in Latin America: the
piling up of traces of history’s destructive force. This reference to Wal-
ter Benjamin’s “angel of history” is intentional: the figure of the angel
who stares with wide-open eyes at the debris of history piled up at his
feet while the storm of progress propels him toward the future, against
which he turns his back, is familiar to readers of photographic theory.
Photography scholars have argued that Benjamin, particularly in his
essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” uses photography as a
metaphor for a relationship between past and present that is dialectical
instead of progressive.16 In a photograph, past, present, and future are
not experienced as continuous and linear, but rather as spatial, an im-
agistic space that Benjamin calls a “monad.”17 For those concerned with
Benjamin’s reading of photography or with a photographic reading of
Benjamin, the photographic image is historical not when we see in it an
accurate image of the past, but when it breaks with the continuum of
history.
My use of the term “traces” is marked by these efforts to release
the understanding of photography from linear, chronological time,
and to instead read in photographic images the claims of the dead, the
wounded, and the exploited. The notion of the trace, which Benjamin
took from Sigmund Freud’s memory traces, alludes to the similarities
between memory and photography as material vestiges, marks of some-
thing that has passed, even if it was never consciously seen, or of some-
thing that is on the verge of disappearing but does not do so completely.
It refers to the heterogeneous temporality of the present, or the absent
part of a visual presence. The concept of the “trace,” which can be ap-
plied to the figures examined in each of this book’s chapters—corpse,
scar, debris, and shadow—allows me to think about photography be-
yond the emphasis on the representation of the past.
But my work also takes a different path, in that I find the traces of
destruction as they were made visible to a certain public, and were cap-
tured in artifacts and language that tried to impose a meaning on the
event recorded in the photograph, and to stabilize the determination of
10 ❘ Introduction

its context. When I find photographs of destruction as they circulated at

the beginning of the twentieth century, I already find them captured in
montages of images and texts, framed, captioned, cropped, inserted into
reports, books, or newspapers that developed singular pedagogies of the
gaze in order to teach urban publics what to see in these traces—what
Indigenous or rural communities once were, the horror of their destruc-
tion, and what future nationally and internationally integrated terri-
tories should look like. I examine how photographic indexical realism
was mobilized to provide what I call “ethical knowledge”—knowledge
not only of what “is,” but of what “should be”—in order to demand
specific commitments from the public. That these attempts were un-
successful is also part of my argument. Even though these traces are
temporalized and narrativized in certain ways, they also threaten to dis-
integrate narratives that attempt to place them at the service of national
teleologies, reformist agendas, catastrophic narratives, or international
humanitarian campaigns. Ultimately, while examining how these traces
of destruction were put into the service of various projects of modernity,
I suggest that they can never be entirely subsumed by the narratives of
progress or catastrophe in which they are often inscribed; rather, these
photographs inevitably create a tension within the text-image artifacts
in which they are embedded.
Walter Benjamin has also been an enduring reference in works about
the ruins left behind by the destructive processes of imperial history. In
questioning capitalism’s stress on the positivity of historical and mate-
rial reality—the historical account that justifies the present as it is and
the value of things as they are—Benjamin left a lasting mark on efforts
to understand the political meaning of ruins as what was negated and
destroyed in order for the present to acquire its positive form. Recent
works in the field of anthropology have productively shifted debate
about Benjamin’s optics of ruins to what Ann Stoler has called “pro-
cesses of ruination,” along with their tangible effects and the uneven
temporal sedimentation that imperialist formations leave behind. Works
such as those of Stoler and Gastón Gordillo respond to the reification
of ruins, and their readily recognizable forms, by paying attention to
formless and sometimes invisible debris, rubble, or remains that are less
available to scrutiny.18 In opposition to modernist readings of ruins,
both scholars have insisted that we should not contribute to further
petrifying these debris, but examine their “vital refiguration” in specific,
localized contexts (Stoler, Imperial Debris, 10). Stoler proposes paying
attention to ruination as an active “ongoing process that allocates im-
 Introduction ❘ 11

perial debris differentially,” as well as attending to the political lives of

ruins (7–8). At stake is not so much a particular ruin in itself, but the
perceptions and practices through which people entangled with such
formations deal with them. Similar to Stoler, Gordillo’s work on “rub-
ble” in the Argentine Chaco region takes into account the multiplicity
of places and forms taken by the debris of new and old waves of de-
struction. In another inspiring work, Anna Tsing develops the concept
of “friction” in order to account for the very material “grip of worldly
encounters,” offering a way of understanding both environmental de-
struction and environmental activism as messy entanglements in the
context of global interactions (Friction, 1). As much as these works are
influenced by Benjamin’s emphasis on seeing ruins as traces that mark
the fragility of power, they also examine remains as what people are left
with, and detail people’s engagements with these traces. In other words,
they ask what people do with them. Although inspired by these anthro-
pological works’ focus on the revitalization of traces of violence in the
political present, I diverge from their focus in that I examine not people
who live amid the ruins, but how traces of violence are made visible by
photographers, humanitarian activists, anthropologists, and journalists
in order to demand specific modes of engagement from those who do
not live among them.
While I consider specific historical processes of ruination that pro-
duce corpses, scars, and debris, the traces I mainly refer to in this book
are photographs. More specifically, they are photographs that fold the
indexical materiality of debris, scars, and corpses—photographs whose
appeal comes from the fact that they are indexical traces of indexical
traces. I examine, for example, how humanitarians obsessively photo-
graphed scars—marks of the lash—on the bodies of Indigenous people
as proof, or “analogical verification,” to use Elaine Scarry’s term, of
violence.19 But as I argue throughout this study, photography’s double
indexicality was always both powerful and unstable as a form of evi-
dence; it had to be combined with other texts and images in order to
teach the viewer how to interpret them temporally, how to attribute
past causes and future responsibilities. In the case of photographs of the
corpses of those killed for resisting the territorialization of the state’s
power, as was the case in the Canudos Campaign, this instability of the
trace is potentially dangerous. The pasts and futures contained in the
traces of Canudos are a reminder that the nation-state has never been
inevitable as a historical outcome. In order to fix the meaning of the
historical process that produced these corpses, these photographs were
12 ❘ Introduction

inserted into narratives that directed the public to see the violence that
produced these corpses as part of a (mis)step in the (otherwise unavoid-
able) history of nation-state building. Thus, I focus on the aesthetic and
political projects involved in the inscription of these traces in photo-text
artifacts that allowed them to circulate beyond the specific place where
they accumulated and to make claims on the future.
The concept of the trace also relates to the material dimension of
photography. In order to study the politics of looking at the destructive
facets of early twentieth-century modernizing projects, it is crucial to
take into consideration the concrete ways in which these photographic
traces of violence reached certain publics, and circulated in national,
regional, and transatlantic channels. It is important to examine how
these images began to interact with other images and commodities that
were part of an increasing flow of goods and people from extractive
zones to metropolitan areas, forming what the Latin Americanist an-
thropologist Deborah Poole calls “visual economies.”20 By choosing the
term “visual economy,” instead of “visual culture,” Poole emphasizes
image circulation as embedded in “political and class structure as well
as the production and exchange of material goods or commodities that
form the life blood of modernity” (Vision, Race and Modernity, 8).
The increasing use of photographs to denounce crimes committed in
the name of modernization both activated existing circuits of image
exchange and created new networks and communities of feeling and
action. One example is the British consul Roger Casement’s campaign
in the 1910s to raise awareness about the atrocities committed by the
multinational rubber industry against Indigenous communities in the
Upper Putumayo region in the Peruvian Amazon. Casement circulated
images of Bora and Huitoto peoples not only among those involved
in the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, but also
among philanthropists and politicians in Britain and the United States,
and among Irish nationalists, thus connecting global humanitarian cir-
cuits to the Irish nationalist cause.
In sum, the concept of the trace sits at the node of three important
axes of this work: first, the question of the revitalization of remnants
of processes of modernization and ruination in early twentieth-century
Latin America; second, the indexical dimension of photography and
its relationship to disputed concepts of history; and third, the mate-
rial dimension of these traces that requires us to pay attention to his-
torically specific practices of seeing and to channels of circulation and
exhibition—including books, newspapers, lantern slides, reports, and
 Introduction ❘ 13

letters—in order to interpret the various modes of engagement they

fostered.

Mon tag e, Crop p i ng, C a p t i o ni ng, an d E kp h ras i s

My focus on the circulation of photographs also allows me to explore

temporal processes related to the materiality of photographic archives:
according to what ethical and aesthetic criteria are some images pub-
lished and others kept in the dark? How are images concealed or di-
vulged through the processes of cropping, reframing, captioning, or
ekphrasis? It is crucial to note that these photographs rarely appear
alone. On the contrary, they emerge as multimedia artifacts, combined
with texts, paintings, graphics, and drawings. A photographic image of
an emaciated Huitoto body might be combined with a graph that shows
the decrease in the Huitoto population at different historical moments,
thus contextualizing the destruction caused by the rubber industry in
the 1910s within a broader history of imperialist extractivism. A typ-
ical caption for this photograph would further generalize its subject,
suggesting that the photographed subject is one example of many men
and women starved and killed by the rubber industry. The same photo-
graph, however, might be presented alongside an ethnographic text that
talks about the rich cultural organization of the Huitoto, or alongside
a painting of a Huitoto in full ritual attire, thus teaching the viewer
to see the cultural value and humanity in the photographed body on
which the trace of violence is inscribed. The same photograph may, in-
stead, have been inserted into a narrative that focuses on a collective,
diffuse responsibility for this violence, in order to reinforce the idea that
the Huitoto community has already been decimated, sentenced to his-
tory, and that the public should focus their efforts on the construction
of a unified national culture. These examples are not all historically
accurate, although they are common strategies for the presentation of
photographs of atrocity that I explore. Even though the formal presen-
tations of photographic traces of destruction analyzed in this book are
multiple and distinct, the ways in which I approach them are similar.
Instead of considering the photographs as mere illustrations of ideas
and narratives, or as testimonial sources collected by travelers for nar-
rative reconstruction after the fact, I read these photographic materials
as fragments that have been carefully selected, cropped, captioned, and
rearranged in order to convey a desired political meaning.
14 ❘ Introduction

This reading allows for two simultaneous gestures: first, it enables

the examination of these images in their instability; that is, as having
meanings and trajectories that are not subsumed by the assemblages
in which they are inserted. I take as a point of departure that these
images have “social biographies” that go beyond the specific histori-
cal and political contexts I analyze.21 Second, this approach allows for
a rereading of the artifacts in which these images are inscribed. Some
of these artifacts are canonical books such as Euclides da Cunha’s Os
sertões or Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques. While the fact that
these books included photographs has been mostly ignored or viewed as
an unimportant detail, I argue that the ways they frame, caption, crop,
or overwrite photographs are crucial to an understanding of how they
constitute specific politics of seeing past and ongoing traces of destruc-
tion on the peripheries of capitalism.
An important reference in the development of my methodological
approach to these arrangements of images and texts is Roland Barthes’s
suggestion, in his essay “The Third Meaning,” that montage works not
only in favor of a narrative, but also against the “disruptive force” of
a film still.22 Although his essay focuses on film, specifically on Sergei
Eisenstein’s film stills, Barthes’s emphasis on the film still makes his ap-
proach to “montage” productive for articulating the difference between
photographs and narratives in a broader sense. In fact, it is fair to say
that his essay approaches film from the point of view of photography.
It is here that Barthes articulates for the first time an aspect of the pho-
tographic image that he will later call, in Camera Lucida, the “punc-
tum.”23 However, instead of the sharp point of the photographic image
that “pricks” or “wounds,” Barthes suggests in “The Third Meaning”
that every film still, even the most commonplace one, has an “obtuse
meaning” that opens up other possible meanings (56–65). The role of
the film editor is to control the excessive, potentially explosive force
of the still image. If, on the one hand, the film still can be read as part
of the diegetic dimension of the film, as a film’s fragment each still also
becomes an excess. In other words, the still can be read as both part of
the narrative and as its obstacle, to which the montage acts as its neces-
sary opposition. Similarly, by departing from the photographic image,
I reread assemblages of images and texts as efforts to control the tem-
poral unfolding of the photograph. If photographic traces always work
both in favor of the narrative in which they are inserted and against
it, this is because, as Elizabeth Edwards suggests, of the “multiplicity
of possibilities, histories, and counter histories lodged within photo-
 Introduction ❘ 15

graphs” (Raw Histories, 12). Controlling these traces can therefore have
deep political implications.
While Barthes’s concept of montage is useful for understanding the
intentional organization of images and texts that I analyze in this book,
the formal procedures employed by these combinations are varied and
not all easily defined as montage. Some of them have been widely dis-
cussed in the history of photography, such as, for example, captioning
and cropping, which appear in almost all of the chapters of this book.
There are many possible reasons for a photograph to be cropped; for
example, to isolate the subject of the gaze from background “distur-
bances.” These disturbances can be reminders of things that contradict
the narrative in which the photograph is inserted. They could, for ex-
ample, be traces of the presence of Western artifacts in the image of a
supposedly isolated Indigenous group. Or they could be traces of the
ongoing cultural richness of a certain Indigenous group, contradicting
the catastrophic narrative of the elimination of otherness. In this sense,
cropping would also act to homogenize the heterogeneous temporalities
of modernity registered in the photograph.
The common practice of captioning photographs has frequently been
analyzed in relation to photography’s supposed lack of eloquence. In
Susan Sontag’s famous words, captions stand as photography’s “miss-
ing voice, and [they are] expected to speak for truth.”24 Captions, in
this sense, can serve to explain and contextualize what images can only
show, or to control photography’s visual excess, naming what should
be in focus in the image. Captions are, for Sontag, the work of mor-
alists who (naively) hope that “words will save the picture” (On Pho-
tography, 83), even though no caption can entirely control the multiple
meanings contained in a photograph. What is usually forgotten when
scholars cite Sontag’s remarks about captions is that in the same passage,
she suggests that what captions cannot do is prevent the “acquisitive
mentality” or the “aesthetic relation to their subject that all photography
proposes” (84). For Sontag, photography’s meanings, in contrast to text,
are unstable, while their acquisitive mode of engagement remains the
same. I argue, on the contrary, that captions can work not only to con-
trol the meaning of a photograph, but also to provoke specific kinds of
engagement with a photographic image and subject. They can demand
that we look at the image again, to extend our experience of looking in
order to see something we have not yet seen, or they might request that
we look away from the image towards what is out of the frame. The
layers of captions in Mário de Andrade’s photographs of the Amazon,
16 ❘ Introduction

for example, work to destabilize the photographed subject instead of

fixing it within one temporal coordinate. Ultimately, captions take part
in different pedagogies of seeing that teach not only what to see, but
how to look at traces of destruction in the transformed landscapes of
extractive capitalist modernity.
Other formal strategies that I consider have not been frequently
explored in the context of photographic theory and history. I ana-
lyze, for example, the aesthetic and political dimensions of the use of
ekphrasis—the verbal representation of a visual representation—in Eu-
clides da Cunha’s efforts to control the meaning of photographs of the
Canudos military campaign in his book Os sertões. I read his use of
ekphrasis in relation to the book’s narrative of the engulfment of oth-
erness in the text of the nation. In contrast, I also discuss the multipli-
cation of various media and genres of visual representation in Roger
Casement’s attempts to connect the marks of violence committed against
Amazonian Indigenous communities by rubber traders to an extended
history and geography of colonialism. Casement combined paintings
and photographs in different genres, such as the ethnographic and the
picturesque, and even a live presentation of Huitoto men meeting with
philanthropists and journalists, with texts in order to teach the public
how to see—aesthetically, scientifically, and historically—the value and
humanity of the Indigenous bodies on which scars are inscribed. In sev-
eral chapters, I examine how images and texts related to the same sub-
ject were circulated and exhibited, each influencing the readings of the
others even if they were not arranged in the same concrete artifact (such
as a book). For example, a journalistic interview with Huitoto men
about the Putumayo atrocities, conducted in England while the Huitoto
were posing for a painting which, in its turn, carries a resemblance to
an ethnographic-like photograph, demands an engagement with the ar-
ticulation of all of these media. The use of a montage of drawings and
photographs in a single artifact is also discussed, specifically in my anal-
ysis of Lévi-Strauss’s efforts to eschew the phenomenological dimension
of the ethnographic contact, emphasizing the symbolic elements that
survived what he called the “cataclysm” that had destroyed Indigenous
communities in central Brazil.
I argue that these formal arrangements of images and texts were
attempts not only to control the meaning of photographic traces of
violence, but also to trigger specific forms of engagement with the im-
ages. By examining how these arrangements fostered specific politics
and temporalities of looking and of not looking, as well as of sharing,
 Introduction ❘ 17

writing, speaking, and acting, I delve into how publics were not simply
addressed by these artifacts of image and text, but were also constituted
through the temporalized presentation of photographic images.

The Pu b lic s

In the beginning of the twentieth century, publics in the largest Latin

American urban centers typically had low literacy rates and were ob-
sessed with violent outbreaks. As Rielle Navitski has argued in her work
on sensational cinema in Mexico and Brazil, visual representations of
urban violence and armed conflicts contributed greatly to the creation
of mass cultures in these regions.25 The circulation of photographs in-
tended to denounce crimes committed in the name of modernization
worked both as part of this context and also sometimes against the lan-
guage of sensationalism. In his efforts to denounce the crimes in the Putu-
mayo, Casement, for example, expressed the need to counter the generic
language of horror and the dissemination of accounts of violence in the
Amazonian city of Iquitos because they prevented, rather than fostered,
political mobilization and attribution of responsibility. The varied pol-
itics of looking that I analyze here, however, are related to the creation
of a more exclusionary public realm formed by groups of spectators
who are addressed as political actors and critical agents, and deemed
to be responsible in one way or another for the destruction they were
witnessing. In this context, photography was exhibited as both credi-
ble proof that something had happened—i.e., that Indigenous subjects
were being flogged and forced to harvest rubber—and to show that
what had happened should not have happened. There was never any
consensus about how photography could provide ethical knowledge,
just as there was no agreement on what modernity should look like on
the peripheries of global capitalism. Divergent views on modernity and
modernization were related to equally contested ideas about the agency
of metropolitan publics to act politically to stop exploitation, as well as
the right of Latin American states to use their monopoly on violence at
their own discretion. Disputes around these issues are examined in this
book insofar as they helped to shape practices of seeing in the context
of the rapid processes of modernization in Latin America.
Some of the issues I articulate overlap with debates on the history
of humanitarian photography and what Susan Sontag called the rise
of the “quintessentially modern experience” of “being a spectator of
18 ❘ Introduction

calamities taking place in another country.”26 Although some authors

contend that the history of humanitarianism dates back to the emer-
gence of moral sentiments in philosophical reflections of the eighteenth
century connected to shifting notions of pain, from the unavoidable and
God-given to the unacceptable and eradicable,27 and to the development
of a politics based on seeing the suffering of distant others,28 as well as
the rise of sentimental literature and the spread of capitalist markets,29
it was in the second half of the nineteenth century, with antislavery and
missionary movements, that international humanitarian networks be-
came prominent among cosmopolitan publics in Western capitals.30 In
this sense, scholars have noted that the history of humanitarianism was
concomitant with the birth of photography.31 The term “humanitarian”
was used for the first time in 1844 in England, just five years after the
official announcement of the invention of the daguerreotype. By the end
of the nineteenth century, while photographs were being increasingly
used to mobilize the public in European and North American cities to
mitigate the suffering of distant others, heated debates emerged about
the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions of the photographic
representation of suffering. Writing on specific examples of the use of
photography in humanitarian campaigns, scholars such as Heather D.
Curtis, Kevin Grant, and Sharon Sliwinski have demonstrated that
many of the ethical debates about humanitarian imagery that we still
see today—such as whether it furthers identification with the victims or
results in feelings of indifference and disgust, or whether it triggers ac-
tion or disbelief—are more than a century old.32 If, as Thomas Laqueur
has suggested, humanitarian narratives “demanded new ways of seeing”
in order to keep distant others “within ethical range,”33 various strat-
egies for the display and circulation of images of suffering intended to
effectively trigger the viewer’s engagement with a given cause—lecture
slides, pamphlets, books, graphs—were all being developed, tested, and
criticized by the turn of the century.34
Another important body of work I discuss focuses not on “human-
itarian photography”—the mobilization of photography in the service
of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries—but on “reformist
photography,” or the use of photography to pass reformist ideas and
policies intended to create national communities of feeling and to in-
spire political action. Alan Trachtenberg’s classic Reading American
Photographs, for example, examines how photographs of urban and
rural poverty played an important role in shaping the public’s “atti-
tudes towards history” and political landscapes in the United States in
 Introduction ❘ 19

the early twentieth century.35 In his discussion of photographer Lewis

Hine’s images of child labor and poverty among Irish immigrants in
New York in the early twentieth century, Trachtenberg brings up some
important topics that I examine, such as the role of photography in
prompting citizens not only to pass ameliorative legislation, but also
in teaching “an art of social seeing” (Reading American Photographs,
192). Trachtenberg shows how Hine’s aesthetic choices—including his
use of diagrams and lecture slides—were tightly connected to the Amer-
ican philosopher and reformer John Dewey’s emphasis on the role of ed-
ucation in the process of social betterment. Dewey’s pedagogical creed,
in turn, was related to the development of new ideas about knowledge
and responsibility that, as historian James Kloppenberg has shown, cir-
culated as a transatlantic discourse in philosophy and political theory
between the United States and Europe between 1870 and 1920.36 In this
book, I explore further the work of Kloppenberg and Trachtenberg, in
particular in my discussion of Roger Casement, who was acquainted
with some of the intellectual figures and reformist ideas they mention.
Although the experience of being politically confronted by images of
violence was not exclusive to North American and European publics,
histories of the use of photographs of violence and injustice to form
communities of sentiment and action based on humanitarianism and
reformism center mostly on Europe and the United States.37 The prac-
tices of seeing that they analyze focus on the standpoint of a subject
who imagines itself responsible for the global-historical fulfillment of a
universal Western subject. In this book, I look beyond early twentieth-
century “humanitarianism”—an incipient network of people, practices,
and ideas that revolved around institutions such as the Anti-Slavery
and Aborigines’ Protection Society—and “reformism”—a movement
which encompassed a network of thinkers in Europe and the United
States—to include other networks of image circulation that aimed to
provide visible evidence of modernity’s destructiveness. Moving away
from a geography constituted by categories such as the regional or the
national, these networks were sometimes transient and often composed
of multiple centers and peripheries, multiple alliances, and negotia-
tions: a Brazilian elite that had yet to come to terms with the nation’s
racialized difference in the construction of its projects of modernity;
an attempted alliance between Irish nationalists and transnational hu-
manitarian networks; European ethnographers and state employees on
whom their fieldwork depended; and the bourgeoisie and artists ques-
tioning whether they had a role to play in furthering the public good.
20 ❘ Introduction

By shifting the focus from organized humanitarianism and reformism

to historically specific instances in which traces of destruction were cir-
culated in order to provide an interpretive frame for the processes of
modernization in Latin America, I explore underexamined practices of
looking that participated in the construction of spaces where moderni-
ty’s aspirations were being tested, judged, resisted, or mourned.
Much like the urban publics addressed by the text/image artifacts I
analyze, the peripheral spaces that the latter try to convey are unstable
and transient. Even when there is an attempt to assimilate traces of
destruction to, for example, a narrative of nation-building or to present
them as what characterizes the experience of modernity in a specific
region, the spaces constituted through these pedagogies are porous, and
are defined in relation to a contested territoriality of unsettled centers
and margins. Hence, while the Amazon, which was at the center of a
booming rubber industry in the first decades of the twentieth century,
appears in almost every chapter of this book, this is not a book about
representations of the “Amazonian region” as we define it today. In fact,
I start the book with a discussion of Euclides da Cunha’s question as
to how to modernize the arid backlands of the Brazilian Northeast, the
infamous sertão, a region that has been often defined in opposition to
the Amazon. Rather than setting up a binary dynamic, the history of the
term sertão itself, as well as da Cunha’s role in it, is illustrative of this
unstable territoriality that can encompass both the supposedly “bar-
ren” rural backlands and the “abundant” Amazonian rainforests. Now-
adays often associated with the Brazilian Northeast due, in large part,
to da Cunha’s characterization of the region in his book Os sertões, the
word sertão had been used by the Portuguese since the sixteenth century
to refer to the yet-to-be conquered inlands of its overseas colonies.38
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the use of the term
in Brazil retained some of its colonial meaning, referring to the areas
considered to be bare—although often populated by Indigenous and
rural communities—or yet-to-be modernized. What the canonization of
the book Os sertões has blurred is not only this preceding, unstable
meaning of the word sertão, but also how da Cunha’s project of edu-
cating the urban public about the obstacles to and need for the modern-
ization and integration of the peripheries of an incipient Brazil built a
peculiar connection between the northeastern sertão and the Amazon.
After the publication of Os sertões, da Cunha wrote a series of articles
and an unfinished manuscript in which the sertanejos (inhabitants of
the sertão) reappear as the main source of labor for the Amazonian rub-
 Introduction ❘ 21

ber industry. Da Cunha’s texts on the Amazon shed light on his earlier
incorporation of the traces of the destruction of Canudos into a broader
political narrative that involves the assimilation of the sertanejo as the
migrant worker who both occupies and transforms the “hinterlands” of
the country.
While da Cunha’s work suggests that the consolidation of part of the
Amazon as “Brazilian” and its incorporation into a global extractive
economy could be achieved through the influx of sertanejo manpower,
Lévi-Strauss’s journey through Mato Grosso up until the Amazonian re-
gion is temporalized through the narrator’s desire to go back in time. As
the anthropologist approaches Amazonian Indigenous groups, he gets
further away from the Kadiwéu, who, according to him, lived like im-
poverished Brazilian peasants, and closer to what the experience of first
contact with a primitive society would be like. Finally, multiple tem-
poralities and geographies can also coexist in these politics of seeing:
Roger Casement’s geopolitical critique of British neocolonialism, for ex-
ample, connects the exploitation of Amazonian labor to the Irish cause,
whilst Mário de Andrade’s Amazon goes beyond national borders and
defies a homogeneous vision of the region, revealing multiple hetero-
geneous environments, people, and modes of life. In all these cases, the
“peripheries” of capitalist modernity are given shape as unincorporated
or only partly incorporated spaces into political and economic projects:
a territory crisscrossed by a variety of circulating nationalities, bodies,
objects, discourses, and images.39
This book unfolds in four chapters, each analyzing one visual trope
that stands for both an evidence of violence and a temporal mode of the
photographic trace: corpse, scar, debris, and shadow. Chapter 1 centers
on the efforts to inscribe the corpses of the 1897 “Canudos Campaign”
and its photographs into a historical narrative of the nascent Brazilian
Republic and its modernizing impulses. The chapter follows the forma-
tion of an incipient public realm in Brazil at a time when photographs
of current events were just beginning to circulate widely. While the half-
tone process, which allowed images to be printed on the same page as
type, had contributed to the regular use of photographs in magazines
in the United States and Europe starting in the 1880s, the press in Bra-
zil did not regularly use images similarly until the early years of the
twentieth century. The chapter is structured around the trajectory of the
photographic image of prophet Antônio Conselheiro’s corpse—first, as
imagined and demanded by an urban public eager to see his face and
framed by the press through discourses of deviance and monstrosity,
22 ❘ Introduction

then as photographed by Flávio de Barros, who presented Conselheiro’s

image to urban publics via electrical projections in 1898, and finally as
described by Euclides da Cunha in the final lines of Os sertões (1902).
Reading Os sertões as a programmatic text, which announces a po-
litical agenda for the “humane” integration and modernization of the
interior of the country, I examine how da Cunha’s ekphrastic narration
of the photograph of Antonio Conselheiro’s corpse allowed history to
be inscribed on his image. Mobilizing and tweaking transatlantic aes-
thetic and scientific tools of racial knowledge, Os sertões points toward
a path for the temporalized formation of the modern Brazilian subject,
capable of transforming tropical, “inhospitable” environments into pro-
ductive zones. The narrative that emerges moves from the fixing of Con-
selheiro’s dead body as modernity’s racialized other to the annihilation
or assimilation of otherness in the context of the nation’s consolidation
following the Canudos Campaign. Through the ekphrastic assimilation
of the traces of destruction of Canudos in a story about national prog-
ress, da Cunha forged an (urban, literate) community of citizens that
should act (through the means of science, engineering, and politics) to
build a nation that demanded a restrained use of armed violence by the
state, unlike that witnessed in the Canudos Campaign.
In chapter 2, I examine how humanitarian and antislavery networks
exposed and circulated images of scarred trees and scarred bodies during
the Amazonian rubber boom in the context of early twentieth-century
global capitalism and humanitarianism. I focus on Roger Casement’s
insistence on a historicity of seeing that makes the Bora and Huitoto
peoples’ scars visible through the lens of an expanded history and ge-
ography of colonialism. As an Irishman, Casement believed he was in
a privileged position to see and to teach about the violent effects of
colonialism. I examine Casement’s articulation of photographs, paint-
ings, and texts, and his use of various iconographic traditions, such as
the anthropometric and the picturesque, in order to demonstrate how
the British consul used the Indigenous body to impart to an educated
European public and its state representatives a specific pedagogy of the
gaze. Casement tried to construct a public based on “a humanitarian or
altruistic standpoint,”40 which would allow for the formation of a state
(or rather states, as he interacted with and criticized Peruvian, US, and
British state representatives) that could act as a regulator of the violence
of capitalist exploitation and imperialist practices.
Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the advent of modern photography and
the concomitant popularization of debates about the ethics of the visual
 Introduction ❘ 23

representation of Indigenous people and exploited workers. These chap-

ters respectively examine accounts of two voyages undertaken after the
collapse of the Amazonian rubber industry in the late 1910s and before
the Estado Novo regime’s (1937–45) new developmentalist agenda for
the Amazon in the context of a rise in demand for rubber driven by
Word War II: the French couple Claude and Dina Lévi-Strauss’s 1935–
36 and 1938 ethnographic expeditions through the Brazilian state of
Mato Grosso into the Amazon basin, and the Brazilian writer Mário
de Andrade’s 1927 trip to the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon. These
travelers followed the paths of two monumental infrastructure develop-
ment projects dating from the first two decades of the twentieth century
that aimed to connect Amazonian regions to the coast of Brazil and to
modernize the interior of the country: the telegraph line constructed by
the Strategic Telegraph Commission of Mato Grosso to Amazonas, and
the Madeira-Mamoré Railway, which connected Bolivia’s rubber indus-
try to the Amazon basin and hence to the Atlantic Ocean. Both of these
projects, publicized early in the twentieth century as heroic engineering
achievements, had become obsolete by the 1920s due to the decline of
the Amazonian rubber industry and the invention of radiotelegraphy.
Chapter 3 focuses on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s use of photographs in
his critique of Western imperial expansion and his efforts to represent
Indigenous people in central Brazil as the debris of lost primitive forms
of life. His book Tristes tropiques (1955), one of the most famous ac-
counts of the perils faced by Indigenous populations in central Brazil,
is both an epistemological reflection on the impossibility of encounter-
ing alterity and a historical critique of the violence of the expansion of
mechanized civilization. It is also here that Lévi-Strauss expresses for
the first time his mistrust of the photographic medium, denouncing it as
both a paradigm of an empiricist form of knowledge and an agent in the
destruction of non-Western communities and primitive modes of exis-
tence. Ultimately, I argue that the book’s narrative of Lévi-Strauss’s mis-
encounter with alterity serves both as a historical argument about the
destruction of primitive ways of life and as the author’s experiment with
a mode of representation that challenged the phenomenology of the
ethnographic encounter. I contend that his cropping, recaptioning, and
montaging of photographs, along with other forms of visual represen-
tation such as drawings and paintings, were all part of an effort to keep
the insurmountable phenomenological dimensions of photography out
of the frame. In framing out the traces of historically specific embodied
encounters between whites and Indigenous peoples, Lévi-Strauss also
24 ❘ Introduction

effaced the role of the French and Brazilian states in organizing and
financing ethnographic expeditions such as his own. Simultaneously, the
photographic selection keeps out of the frame the presence and labor of
his wife, Dina Lévi-Strauss, who worked at the Department of Culture
of São Paulo, directed by Mário de Andrade. Instead of examining how
Lévi-Strauss aimed to mobilize the state to action, this chapter demon-
strates how he kept out of sight the historically specific role of the state
in the 1930s in exercising or preventing violence in the region.
In chapter 4, I will analyze the archives of Mário de Andrade, who
traveled from his native São Paulo to the Brazilian and Peruvian Ama-
zon in 1927, after the decline of the Amazonian rubber industry. If the
main figure in Lévi-Strauss’s travel account is the remnant of the lost In-
digenous subject, Andrade focuses on the shadowy presence of abused
and murdered workers: the rubber tappers, fishermen, loggers, and the
nearly 6,000 migrant workers who died during the construction of the
Madeira-Mamoré Railway and who made the travel of tourists such as
Andrade possible. By analyzing the role of looking in Andrade’s pho-
tographic and written diaries, I argue that, contrary to Lévi-Strauss, he
affirms his limited phenomenological, embodied vision as an ethical and
aesthetic stance, mediating this vision through the processes of editing,
enlarging, and captioning his images. I show, for example, how Andrade
often uses captions to refer to the traces of what “was” present, what is
not seen in the image, or what was transformed or will be transformed
in the future. The subjects he photographed inhabit the temporality of
modern capitalism, but they are also beside or beyond that time, as in
Andrade’s description of malarial faces, in which he sees a particularly
disinterested way of looking at the world, one that resists the productive
temporality of capitalism. Finally, whereas Lévi-Strauss turns a blind
eye to the state, I analyze Andrade’s politics of looking in relation to his
work in the 1930s as head of the Department of Culture of São Paulo,
and his 1942 political critique of the modernist movement and of his
own work. In these reflections, Andrade ponders some of the questions
explored in this book—particularly, the relationship between being a
spectator of injustice and acting politically to end it—and adds a new
one: does acting politically mean working through the state toward a
project of nation-building, or does it demand a radical attachment to
the present, and the participation, with one’s own body, in the march
of the masses?
This book is not therefore about the effort to make visible what
would otherwise be the invisible, subtle, or hidden traces of destruction.
 Introduction ❘ 25

It is about the unsettled and unsettling question of how to see, and what
to see in the corpses, scars, debris, and shadows of modernization, as
asked by and directed toward urban elites who felt responsible for this
process. Through a combination of close readings of these heteroge-
neous strategies to expose photographic traces of modernity’s failure
and reconstructions of the historical contexts of their production and
circulation, I explore the concrete, and thus often unstable and contin-
gent, formation both of practices of looking and of public realms in
early twentieth-century Latin America. Instead of an overarching nar-
rative of the formation of hegemonic structures and ideas, this book
offers a heterogeneous picture of the relationships between projects of
modernization, photographic technology, and unsettled concepts of mo-
dernity and history. In so doing, I hope both to contribute to an untold
history of the use of photography in denouncing the crimes of modern-
ization in Latin America, and to add to the emerging scholarship on
efforts to decentralize the history of concepts and practices related to
photography, violence, and modernity.
Chapter 1

Corpse
The Nation in a Decomposing Portrait

On October 5, 1897, General Arthur Oscar, commander of the Cam-

panha de Canudos (1896–97; Canudos Campaign),1 was notified that
the corpse of the prophet Antônio Vieira Mendes Maciel, known as
Antônio Conselheiro (“the counselor”), had been found among the
ruins of the sanctuary where he had been living under the protection
of an armed guard during the conflict with the Brazilian Republic’s
army. Conselheiro was the religious leader of a community founded in
1893 in the backlands of the province of Bahia—a community which
had already successfully resisted three attempts by the armed forces of
the regional and federal governments to eliminate it. The autopsy of
Conselheiro’s corpse established that he had died approximately two
weeks before the army’s fourth and final assault against Belo Monte,
as the village was called by its inhabitants, or Canudos, as it came to
be known. General Oscar ordered that the corpse be disinterred and
he commissioned the only photographer in the field, Flávio de Barros,
to photograph it (figure 1.1). The photograph was attached to the final
campaign report approved by Minister of War Carlos Bittencourt. Later,
Conselheiro’s body was decapitated and his head was taken to the Fed-
eral University of Bahia to be studied by the celebrated Dr. Raimundo
Nina Rodrigues (1862–1906), the father of criminal anthropology and
medical criminology in Brazil.

27
28 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.1. “Cadáver de Antônio Conselheiro encontrado sob as ruínas da Igre-

ja Nova” (“Antônio Conselheiro’s corpse was found under the ruins of the New
Church”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da
República. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 2.32. Reproduced by permission of Instituto
Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.

This chapter examines the relationships between photographing and

decapitating, between visual culture and scientific and political raci-
alities, and between the production of national territory and history
in the peripheries of an expanding capitalist modernity. The chapter
begins long before the Canudos Campaign, when a photograph of
Conselheiro’s face was but a desire, and written and drawn depictions of
the prophet circulated in the press and were framed through discourses
of deviance and monstrosity. I begin with the writer Joaquim Maria
Machado de Assis’s sharp crônicas (short newspaper essays that revolve
on current events or everyday life) on the role of telegraphy, news media,
and the transatlantic languages of science and spectacle in the produc-
tion of Conselheiro’s likeness for the consumption of an urban public,
in order to examine how the prophet’s face and head became the ra-
cialized surface where the disputed “truth” of Canudos—and hence the
justification for the state’s use of violence to suppress the community—
were inscribed. Machado’s critique of the processes of objectification,
fragmentation, and commodification of Conselheiro’s body before the
final military assault against Belo Monte suggests that the killing and
beheading of Conselheiro and of the conselheiristas (the counselor’s fol-
 Corpse ❘ 29

lowers) were not exceptional. Rather than a deviation from its civilizing
mission, the atrocities about to be committed by the state were framed
by Machado as a consequence of the violence that lay at the very core
of the modern capitalist ideals and practices that the Brazilian elite as-
pired to. The second part of this chapter retraces the making and circu-
lation of photographic images of the Canudos Campaign, in particular
photographs of dead bodies and survivors. The incipient networks of
circulation of photographs of current events, and the unstable mean-
ings inscribed in these photographs, shed light on the contingency of
the later engulfment of Canudos’ photographs and corpses into a hege-
monic historical narrative of the constitution of a modern Brazil. This
leads me to the next section, in which I examine the role of Euclides da
Cunha’s book Os sertões (1902; The Backlands)2 in shaping this his-
torical narrative through the insertion of Flávio de Barro’s images into
a text that decries violence through killing and calls for other means of
assimilation and modernization. In reading Os sertões as a book which
announces a reformist agenda for a “humane” integration and modern-
ization of the interior of the country, I argue that da Cunha’s ekphrastic
narration of the photograph of Antonio Conselheiro allows for history
to be inscribed on his body. Instead of engaging with the question of
whether da Cunha’s words render Conselheiro visible or invisible,3 I
argue that the writer performs a complex assimilation of his image into
the text that outlines the formation of a modern tropical, miscegenated,
non-European nation.4 To do so, I examine how da Cunha engaged
with contemporaneous debates on the relationship between vision and
knowledge, and, more specifically, ethical knowledge, which presup-
poses a temporal and cultural positionality. In other words, I place this
foundational national text in the context of a transatlantic geopolitics
of modernity as a programmatic text that calls for a specific path to-
wards progress—the historical fulfillment of a self-determined subject
capable of transforming deserts into productive lands—in the context
of a peripheral, heterogeneous, and racialized society.
Canudos was originally the name of a farm, and later a small village,5
in the region where Conselheiro founded his religious community, after
he had spent almost two decades making pilgrimages through the semi-
arid backlands of northeast Brazil, the sertão. Strategically located on
the banks of the Vaza-Barris River at the intersection of several roads,
the community soon attracted thousands of people, with estimates rang-
ing between 6,000 and 25,000 inhabitants. Among them were not only
destitute people and the pious, but also peasants, merchants with some
30 ❘ Chapter 1

means, teachers, ex-slaves, Indigenous people, and a diverse body of

sertanejos (inhabitants of the drought-stricken sertão) in search of Belo
Monte’s relatively prosperous communitarian life.6 The rapid growth
of the settlement incited the interest, fear, and anger of local politicians,
landowners, the church, and, ultimately, the nascent Brazilian republi-
can government, which viewed military expeditions as an opportunity
to unite the country and intervene in the rural interior.7
Despite becoming a foundational event in accounts of Brazilian his-
tory, the Brazilian state’s violent assault against Belo Monte was not
odd in the context of the late nineteenth-century Americas. On the con-
trary, the use of armed force by the state was integral to the process of
incorporating peripheries such as the northeastern sertão into national
territories and global capitalist economies.8 The remarkable fact that
Belo Monte resisted the first three attempts by local and then national
authorities to suppress the community was, in this context, instrumen-
talized by different political agents and the media, who profited from
turning Canudos into a national public event. The Canudos Campaign,
the fourth and last military expedition to Belo Monte, was an impres-
sive display of power that marshaled resources from the entire Brazil-
ian army and garnered unprecedented press coverage.9 In this context
Antônio Conselheiro became, in Machado de Assis’s ironic description,
“a celebrity.”
As the Canudos conflict developed over the course of consecutive (and
unsuccessful) military expeditions against the settlement, the prophet
who led thousands of people to resist the force of the state was largely
represented in the press as a frightening remnant of the past, a dangerous
fanatic surrounded by bandits and ignorant primitive souls. These rep-
resentations of Conselheiro drew largely from transatlantic fin-de-siècle
depictions of otherness and deviance—such as crime reports, colonial
exhibitions, and the Gothic taste for monstrosity—and simultaneously
on the popularization, in Brazil, of social Darwinism and scientific rac-
ism. In the last days of the Canudos Campaign, Dr. Raimundo Nina
Rodrigues wrote an article in which he linked racial miscegenation to
mental degeneration, mysticism, and criminal behavior to explain what
he called the “madness epidemic of Canudos.”10 Interestingly, Nina Ro-
drigues’s article includes a footnote about the “news that the telegraph
has just brought” reporting that Antonio Conselheiro’s corpse had been
found in his sanctuary, which revealed that the prophet remained loyal
to his post until his death, even though he could easily have retreated
to a safer place. Rodrigues interpreted this news as proof of his theory,
 Corpse ❘ 31

and as the “final confirmation of Conselheiro’s madness, in thoroughly

performing the role of Blessed Jesus the Counselor, which the transfor-
mation of personality of his chronic delusion imposed on him” (Nina
Rodrigues, “Madness Epidemic of Canudos,” 214–15).
While Conselheiro’s madness, explained as a result of racial miscege-
nation, was turned into the key that explained both his dangerousness
and tenacity, the discovery of his dead body was crucial for the retro-
active justification of the Canudos Campaign. Conselheiro’s dead body
was found on October 5, and the already ruinous settlement of Canu-
dos was torched on October 6, 1897. The details of every step taken in
the discovery and preservation of the corpse were reported, with some
variations, in all the major newspapers as follows: General Arthur Os-
car ordered that the corpse, which had been buried by the prophet’s
followers, was to be exhumed, carefully cleaned, and exhibited to the
soldiers in the square. “Once its identity was undeniably proved,”11 as
the newspaper Gutemberg stated in a report dated October 24, 1897,
Flávio de Barros, the “expeditionary photographer” at Canudos, pho-
tographed the infamous leader of the rebellion. On the orders of chief
battle surgeon Major Miranda Curió, the head of the corpse was cut
off, displayed by soldiers during their homecoming victory parade, and
finally given to Dr. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues to be examined for con-
genital abnormalities, so that, as the newspaper Correio de Noticias
proclaimed on October 23, 1897, “science may clarify the causes of the
mental aberration that has caused so much harm to Bahia and to the
entire country.”
In February 1898, an advertisement in A Gazeta de Noticias an-
nounced the first public exhibition of Flávio de Barros’s photographs
of the Canudos Campaign. The advertisement highlighted the exhibi-
tion’s main attraction: the “faithful portrait of the fanatic Conselheiro.”
Another advertisement, published in the Diário do Espírito Santo,
guaranteed that this was the only “certified” portrait of the prophet.
The photograph (figure 1.1) shows Conselheiro’s corpse lying on a mat
made of reeds, surrounded by soldiers. He wears his prophet’s robe and
sandals, and sports a long beard and a tangled mane of hair that rein-
force previous depictions of him in newspaper articles and caricatures.
The body is isolated and carefully arranged: the hands are crossed over
the chest, following the conventions of funerary portraiture, and the
head is turned towards the camera, in order to allow for a “faithful” re-
production of the prophet’s features. These newspaper announcements
are the only evidence that Conselheiro’s photographic image was circu-
32 ❘ Chapter 1

lated outside the military realm before 1902, when it is mentioned in the
final pages of da Cunha’s Os sertões, framed by a narrative that both
explains and denounces the disproportionate violence employed by the
state against Canudos.
Even though similar resistance communities in Brazil and abroad—
notably, in the United States, Argentina, and Mexico—clashed with
nineteenth-century states in expansion, the Canudos massacre became
one of the most notorious events in the official historical narrative of
Brazil, and even of Latin America, partly because of the enduring suc-
cess of Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões. The book became a bestseller at
a time when at least 65 percent of the Brazilian population over 15 years
of age was illiterate,12 and remains one of the best-known narratives
about the nation even today. In the final pages of the book, da Cunha,
an engineer educated in military school who traveled to Canudos as
a news correspondent for the newspaper Estado de São Paulo, turns
Conselheiro’s photographic portrait into the evidence of a mistake, an
error of judgment by the government, the press, and the urban citizens.
In describing the processes involved in beheading Antônio Conselheiro
and in making the photograph, da Cunha characterizes these as the
ultimate gesture of an irrational military campaign. Most importantly,
he describes the image, which is not printed in the book, as something
quite different from the “faithful portrait” advertised in A Gazeta de
Noticias. On the one hand, da Cunha observes that in Conselheiro’s
features the military men wished to confirm the identity of the defeated
enemy and to find “the evidence of crime and madness.” On the other,
he describes Conselheiro’s corpse as being “in a condition of advanced
decomposition [that] would not have been recognized by those who
had been closest to him in life” (Backlands, 464). Hence, it is as both a
portrait and a ruin, the making of a face and a defacement, that Antônio
Conselheiro’s photograph is described in the last pages of Os sertões,
which was published five years after the end of the conflict.
Os sertões, which claims to address itself to “the eyes of future his-
torians” (Backlands, 1), strives to account for the origins, meanings,
and the outcome of the conflict. Influenced by Hippolyte Taine’s envi-
ronmental determinism, the book is divided into three parts: “A terra”
(“The Land”), “O homem” (“Man”), and “A luta” (“The Battle”). While
the first part is dedicated to providing a Darwinian-inflected analysis of
the dry northeastern landscape and its mestiço people, and the second
part examines the messianic community that was decimated and the
social and psychological conditions that supposedly gave birth to the
 Corpse ❘ 33

community, the final part of the book aims to rewrite the official narra-
tive of the destruction of Canudos, denouncing it as a barbarous crime.
Although other contemporary writers also suggested that the consel-
heiristas were victims of the disproportionate violence of the state, da
Cunha’s version was the one that would become paradigmatic.13 In the
book, the journalist/engineer argues that the victory of the republican
army over the rebels was accomplished at the expense of the rational
ideals on which the republic was founded: in the ruins of the “atavist”
community the nation could find proof of its own barbarism. Present-
ing the bodies and corpses of sertanejos as evidence of “all the cracks
and fissures of our evolution as a society” (Backlands, 281), da Cunha
demands that the public commit itself to the construction of a mod-
ern, civilized, and unified nation. In doing so, he not only represents
the needs of the sertão and the sertanejos, but brings to the fore the
obstacles that Brazilian political and scientific elites faced in seeking
to establish dominion over the country’s land, natural resources, and
workforce. The public addressed by da Cunha was even narrower than
the urban consumers of Conselheiro’s images described by Machado de
Assis: Os sertões addressed an urban, literate political elite that should
learn from the past and act through the means of science, engineering,
and politics to build a national body capable of transforming tropical,
“inhospitable” environments into productive zones.
Considering that for decades Os sertões was praised for performing
what was called an inversion of the roles of criminal and victim by
denouncing a military campaign as a crime, it should be underscored
that this is not what I am suggesting here. The reinscription of the pho-
tograph of Antônio Conselheiro’s corpse at the end of Os sertões is not
only an example of how a photograph intended to “certify,” or con-
struct, the face of an enemy of modernity could be reframed to repre-
sent the subject as a victim of violence. On the contrary, by reading Os
sertões as an effort to reframe a photograph that ultimately remains
unseen, since it is not printed in the book, I examine the formal strat-
egies that da Cunha uses—in both his narrative and in captioning and
placing photographs in Os sertões—to write over Conselheiro’s body in
order to direct readers’ gaze to the physical obstacles, including Brazil’s
racial composition and wild nature, that da Cunha posits as simultane-
ously a threat to and a justification for the republic’s expansionist and
modernizing impulse.
It is noteworthy that Conselheiro is described at the end of Os sertões
as a decomposing body, a body no longer readable by the psychiatric
34 ❘ Chapter 1

gaze, but rather as disappearing back into a land that needed to be stud-
ied and transformed. Ultimately, the process of modernization defended
by Euclides da Cunha depended on knowledge and control of the land.
In an article published in the newspaper O Paiz on May 14, 1904, titled
“Olhemos para a nossa terra” (“Let Us Look at the Land”),14 da Cunha
promotes a “scientific exploration of the land” that would allow for the
transformation of the region’s climate and the expansion of civilization.
If the modern state was to make the backlands of Brazil productive, a
marginal figure like Conselheiro could not be allowed to so easily con-
trol its land and population.
In order to grasp how the photograph of Antônio Conselheiro’s
corpse was reframed by da Cunha in the aftermath of the rebellion, it is
crucial to understand that Os sertões is not only, as many scholars have
pointed out, the exegesis of a theoretical apparatus constructed from
the geological, climatic, sociological, and racial theories of the time and
recounted through literary imagery and metaphor.15 It is also a montage
of images and texts that provides a form of visual testimony that retains
an indexical claim on Canudos. As the product of da Cunha’s effort to
create the definitive document on Canudos for the “gaze of future his-
torians,” the book quotes from hundreds of documents, including ref-
erences about the sertão from his field notes, letters written by soldiers
and priests, Antônio Conselheiro’s manuscripts, and popular poetry. Os
sertões was also the first publication to print three photographs of the
conflict taken by Flávio de Barros in Canudos. There has never been a
study of the way in which da Cunha re-captioned these photographs
or how they are framed in Os sertões’s narrative of the conflict. What
kinds of relationships between images and words are involved in da
Cunha’s re-captioning and ekphrasis in his appropriation of Flávio de
Barros’s images? What do they reveal about his attempt to control the
public’s reading of these traces of violence? How are these images cap-
tured (or not) in the knowledge apparatus and the historical narrative
used in Os sertões?

The Produ c t i o n o f a F ac e
throu g h Sc i e nc e a nd Sp e c tac l e

Let’s take another look at Flávio de Barros’s photograph of Consel-

heiro’s corpse (figure 1.1). Its careful arrangement shows us that this is
not just any corpse lying on a battlefield, but one that we should rec-
 Corpse ❘ 35

ognize. Conselheiro died around September 22 of an unknown cause.

Some historians suggest that he died of dysentery; others believe he died
from a wound caused by a grenade explosion. His body was buried by
his followers, wrapped in a sheet. The conflict officially ended on Octo-
ber 5. The corpse was then found by the army and exhumed, brought
into the light, and made visible.16 According to a report by the first col-
umn’s commander, the body was taken to the square so that it could be
seen. In this open space, it was photographed “so that we would have
proof that it was indeed this person.”17 The sun of the sertão floods the
image. It must not have been easy to isolate the body, to exclude the
crowd of soldiers eager to see for the first time the infamous, now de-
feated, Antônio Conselheiro. These spectators nevertheless make their
way into the upper margin of the photograph: we see their feet and their
shadows. In both isolating Conselheiro’s corpse and failing to do so,
Barros’s image becomes more than a portrait of the dead prophet—it
inscribes the desire to see Conselheiro into the relationship between the
transformation of the prophet into a corpse and an image.
A few months before Barros went to Canudos in January 1897, the
writer Machado de Assis wrote one of his weekly crônicas in A Gazeta
de Noticias18 in which he mocked the public’s desire to see Conselheiro’s
face, and suggested that a “patient and clever reporter, partially pho-
tographer, partially illustrator,” should go to Canudos “to bring back
the features of the Conselheiro . . . and thus collect the truth about the
sect.”19 Taking as a starting point Machado de Assis’s observations of
the media spectacle in Canudos, I would like to explore the production
of Conselheiro’s image for the consumption of the public. By this time,
Machado de Assis had already published some of his most important
novels, in which he derided the popularization in Brazil of strands of
social thought inspired by Comte’s and Spencer’s positivism, social Dar-
winism, anthropological criminology, and psychiatry. The portrait—or
rather the face—was connected to both the scientific and popular ap-
propriations of these fields of knowledge and occupied an important
place as the visual threshold between surface and depth, between physi-
cal traits and character, as well as between the individual and the social
“type.”
Much of the research in nineteenth-century physiognomy consisted
in searching for the visual markers of specific human types: the lunatic,
the primitive, the criminal. While physiognomy and phrenology long
predated the invention of photography, the new medium revitalized
both fields, offering what appeared to be a rigorous scientific basis that
36 ❘ Chapter 1

would dispense with the occultist connotations of each. As Tom Gun-

ning notes, both the study of the face and the development of photog-
raphy were driven by a desire to see, and to know, a living face in its
smallest and most fleeting expressions.20 Disciplinary institutions such
as prisons and hospitals soon built their own photographic studios and
protocols, hoping to apply photographic imaging to the identification
and classification of the facial markers of individual or collective mad-
ness and degeneration. One of the hypotheses used at the time to ex-
plain the formation of the community led by Antônio Conselheiro—an
idea defended by, among other people, the examining doctor Nina
Rodrigues—connected race and phenotype to religious atavism and to
innate tendencies to commit crimes.21 Thus, it is not hard to surmise
that a photograph of Conselheiro was expected to reveal, in Machado
de Assis’s words, some kind of “truth about the sect.” But Machado’s
essay objects to the transformation of a face into a bearer of signs to be
decoded by the lens of science, and instead does something rather unex-
pected: it uses Canudos to defend the right to mystery and imagination.
Although conflicting stories about the “canudenses” appeared in the
press,22 Conselheiro was largely portrayed in the news as the “fanatic”
leader of a sect of poor, ragged souls. Initially, Conselheiro and his fol-
lowers were not exceptional. Newspapers mentioned the appearance
of what writers deemed to be signs of persistent Brazilian religious fa-
naticism and backwardness. About a religious procession in downtown
Rio, for example, Olavo Bilac wrote: “It gave me the impression of a
monstrous anachronism. . . . The savage times were returning, as a spirit
from another world coming to disturb and bring shame to civiliza-
tion.”23 The appearance in newsprint of pilgrims and religious preachers
in rural areas of the country was common, as Machado de Assis him-
self points out in one of his articles. And unlike urban manifestations
of “savagery,” to use Bilac’s word, the religious pilgrims in the sertão
posed the larger problem of how to control, modernize, and integrate
the “unknown” and “inhospitable” backlands into a nation that was
still being invented.24
When Conselheiro settled in the backlands of Bahia and founded a
fully functional community that later became one of the largest towns
in the province,25 he became more than just one of these pilgrims who
made the news and quickly disappeared like ghostly appearances from
the past. After the foundation of the village and its subsequent growth,
Conselheiro entered the crosshairs of local economic powers. Land-
owners complained that workers were leaving their farms to follow the
 Corpse ❘ 37

prophet, and that the community posed a danger to private property in

the region.26 Canudos might have remained a problem for local civil au-
thorities only—and would not have received national and international
attention—if the community had not successfully resisted for an entire
year the powers trying to exterminate it. The conselheiristas defended
their right to occupy the locality, and in this resistance they became
central to the “conversion of the military campaign into a revolutionary
crusade for the consolidation of the regime.”27
It was after the defeat of the second military expedition to Belo
Monte, organized by the state of Bahia, that the community came under
the radar of the federal government. “Canudos” was transformed into a
national public enemy and framed as a movement for the return of the
monarchy. National media contributed to the hysteria, with a burst of
sensational articles, caricatures, essays, and even poems depicting Con-
selheiro as the leader of a sect of faithful and resilient fanatics. Machado
de Assis wrote his essay suggesting that a photographer should go to
Canudos to “collect the truth about the sect” as a response to this media
frenzy, but when photographers or reporters had yet to go to Canudos,
news arrived through telegrams sent by soldiers, or by reporters writing,
as Machado points out, from Salvador, the capital of Bahia state (“A
Semana,” January 31, 1897). Like the news articles, the drawn portraits
of Conselheiro reproduced in the press were based on a mix of oral tes-
timony, rumors, and collective imagination, and frequently equated him
with religious and premodern figures (figure 1.2). In late nineteenth-
century Brazil the literate public was very limited, and newspapers and
magazines sought to expand their audience by including visual repre-
sentations in articles and columns.
Machado de Assis suggested that at the same time as the multitude
of texts and images about Conselheiro seemed to increase the mystery
surrounding him, the media’s obsession with him was a response to the
desire to control his image and use it in the name of progress. Machado
protested the persecution of Conselheiro, a man “who founded a sect
of which no one knows the name or the doctrine.” While Conselhei-
ro’s words remained unknown,28 the prophet’s face became a surface
wherein the truth of the sect, and thus the fate of the Brazilian Re-
public’s crusade, was inscribed. When Machado (ironically) exhorted
photographers “to bring back the features of the Conselheiro” he isn’t
referring to just any kind of representation, but to the production of
a “resemblance through contact”29 in the double sense of contact as
both encounter and inscription, containing both the likeness of the por-
38 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.2. Revista Illustrada, Rio de Janeiro, no. 727, 1897,

4–5. Reproduced from Biblioteca Digital, Fundação Bibliote-
ca Nacional, Brazil.

trait and the technical efficacy of the index (Peirce), or the trace, which
would reveal the true nature of Canudos. Machado de Assis does not
ask the photographer to record but to “collect” and “bring back” the
features of the prophet. When the New York Times reported on October
20, 1862, that Mathew Brady through his photographs had brought
back bodies from the American Civil War “and laid them in our door-
yards and along the streets,” it stressed this double fascination with (and
horror at) photography as semblance and vestige: “It seems somewhat
singular that the same sun that looked down on the faces of the slain,
blistering them, blotting out from the bodies all semblance to humanity,
and hastening corruption, should have thus caught their features upon
canvas, and given them perpetuity for ever.”
Reinforcing this association between the indexical nature of photog-
raphy and discourses of truth, Machado de Assis adds that collecting
Conselheiro’s traits would be a remarkable achievement almost iden-
tical to the “removal of the Bendegó,” referring to the expedition that
brought the large meteorite named Bendegó from the backlands of Ba-
hia to the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. This analogy with the
meteorite is auspicious: the Bendegó had been found a century before
near Monte Santo, the town that would become the headquarters of
the army during the Canudos Campaign. In 1888, the year before the
fall of the Empire of Brazil, the emperor Dom Pedro II ordered the
 Corpse ❘ 39

meteorite’s transportation to Rio de Janeiro. The removal of Bendegó

from Bahia to the capital of the empire had previously been narrated
by Machado in an 1888 crônica that commented on the incongruous
adoption of a federalist regime in a centralized monarchy. This polemic
is not irrelevant to the political context of the republic’s military inter-
vention in Canudos, which was seen by Machado as evidence of the
new republic’s old authoritarianism. Besides the subtle critique of the
republican regime, Machado’s mention of the Bendegó also satirizes the
representation of Conselheiro as a remnant of the past, and an object
for the public and scientific gaze, whose place is in a museum.
At the outset of the third military expedition, it received unprece-
dented press coverage as new telegraph lines were extended to the
vicinity of Canudos. The campaign was led by the infamous Colonel
Moreira César, known as the “corta cabeças” (cutter-of-necks) after his
role in the violent suppression of the Federalist Revolt in Santa Catarina.
Moreira César’s epithet made the prospect of collecting Conselheiro’s
traits even more literal and sinister. One cannot avoid referencing here
the long-studied relationship between photography and corpses,30 for
if Conselheiro’s traits were not to be “collected” through photographic
technology, they would be through murder and decapitation.
On February 14, 1897, during the preparations for Moreira César’s
military expedition, Machado de Assis wrote another crônica reacting
to the unprecedented attention that Canudos had attracted. In this es-
say, the last one Machado wrote for the series published in his weekly
column “A Semana” in the Gazeta de Notícias, the question of truth
fades away as he focuses on the inscription of Antônio Conselheiro in
a global language of reproduction, circulation, and consumerism: “I
learned yesterday what celebrity is. I was buying newspapers . . . when
I saw a common woman approach the vendor and say in a dimmed
voice: ‘Give me a paper that brings the portrait of the man who fights
out there.’” Although the woman did not remember his name, the man
could be none other than Antônio Conselheiro, about whom many sto-
ries “with a lot of mysterious details, much aura, and myth” had been
circulating. The woman, who “probably could not read,” had heard
that some periodical had published a portrait of the “Messiah from
the sertão” and decided to buy it. Significantly, Machado refers, in the
same February 1897 essay, to both the event’s actuality and the nation’s
future memory of the “extinct sect”: “The name of Antônio Conselheiro
will end up entering in the memory of this anonymous woman and it
won’t ever leave. . . . One day she’ll tell the story to her daughter and
then later to her granddaughter.” Machado also predicts that the story
40 ❘ Chapter 1

will later be inscribed in a future book.31 Maybe in a hundred years,

Machado continues, there might be a celebration of Conselheiro’s ca-
beleira (mane) just “as now, according to the Jornal do Commercio, the
centenary of the invention of the top hat is being celebrated in London.”
In the same nineteenth century that had witnessed the consolidation
of global capitalism, “Canudos”—like the chapéu alto (top hat), which,
as Machado reminds us, could also have been called a canudo (which
means, literally, a long cylinder, such as a straw or pipe)—was being
invented and consumed by a fin-de-siècle urban public that was avid
for novelties.32 In fact, Conselheiro had become more than a subject of
newspaper articles: he figured in popular poetry, advertisements for all
kinds of goods, and even in carnival costumes.33 The top hat, a sign of
aristocratic distinction, and Conselheiro’s “mane” of long tousled hair,
which functioned as a symbol of primitivist religiosity, were appropri-
ated and consumed by the growing urban masses.34 In the context of
turn-of-the-century visual culture, Machado’s comparison between the
mane and the top hat was also an astute reminder of the relationship
between the bourgeois portrait and the mug shot, which, as Alan Sekula
has argued, are both informed by conceptions of individuality grounded
in private property rights.35
More importantly, Machado seems to have realized that at the same
moment when Conselheiro was being born as an image for the consump-
tion of the urban public, he was sentenced to die. In this sense, Macha-
do’s text is simultaneously comical and somber. It is about the making
of a celebrity and of a corpse. The comical effect is mainly a result of the
decontextualization of Conselheiro, specifically of Conselheiro’s mane,
and its recontextualization in the sphere of fashion. Not only is Con-
selheiro’s image detached from his words and his community, but his
body itself is fragmented. The comical image of Conselheiro’s cabeleira
takes on a somber dimension at the end of Machado’s article, when he
reminds the reader that whether one chooses a chapéu alto (high cul-
ture) or a baixo (low culture), what is important is to safeguard one’s
head. Machado’s warning about losing one’s head probably alludes to
Colonel Moreira César’s reputation as a “cutter-of-necks.” The desire
to find in Conselheiro’s face a true representation of his traits, and by
extension the truth of Canudos; the reproduction and circulation of
Conselheiro’s mane, or its transformation into a commodity; and the
promise of acquiring Conselheiro’s cut-off head are astutely entangled
in Machado’s analysis of the transformation of Canudos into a historic
and media event.
 Corpse ❘ 41

No one could have expected that the conselheiristas would defeat

Moreira César’s expedition. This outcome gave birth to a series of even
more spectacular and sensationalist representations, stemming prin-
cipally from incredulity that a hinterlands prophet and his followers
could defeat a national military campaign. After this defeat of the third
expedition, representations of Conselheiro and his followers as poor,
sickly fanatics gave way to an increasing tendency to represent Conse-
lheiro as a monstrous character. Theories about Canudos being a mon-
archist conspiracy also gained credence. This was the case in Euclides da
Cunha’s first article on the conflict, titled “A nossa Vendéia.” The met-
aphor of the Vendée–—which da Cunha would abandon in Os sertões,
where he questions the hypothesis that the canudenses, as atavist prim-
itives, had any clear political project—incorporated Canudos into the
history of the French Revolution, as it was being relived through the
imagination of the Brazilian republicans of the time. Some rumors went
so far as to declare that Canudos was financed by foreign governments
interested in destabilizing Brazil’s new regime. As a March 10, 1897, ed-
itorial from the newspaper A Republica suggests, however, Conselheiro
was mainly seen as a “brutish and taciturn jagunço [outlaw], cloaked in
sordid rags, sandals on his feet, his locks long and filthy, disoriented by
religious megalomania” and hence no more than “a vile instrument” of
external political actors.
Besides ending in defeat for the republicans, the failure of the third
expedition posed a problem for the political interests supporting the
military and the reputation of the recently modernized army. The re-
sponse was the organization of a spectacular fourth expedition, a far
greater display of military power. And for the first time, journalists and
photographers were sent to the front, although their telegrams were
fiercely inspected and censored by the army.
One of these journalists was a correspondent for O Estado de São
Paulo, Euclides da Cunha, who revealed himself an ardent republican,
and remained faithful to the cause of the republican army until he fell
ill on October 3 and left the field. In contrast, other reporters, such as
Favila Nunes and Manuel Benício, although restricted by censorship,
managed to circulate news about mismanagement and cruelties on both
sides of the conflict. One of their central accusations was that the army
had adopted the practice of murder through the beheading of conselhei-
ristas captured during combat.
One widely reported beheading was that of Conselheiro himself, even
though, since he was already dead, his decapitation was less an object
42 ❘ Chapter 1

of indignation than one of curiosity. By cutting off Conselheiro’s head,

the army aimed to bring to the urban (scientific and popular) gaze those
“features” that Machado de Assis’s anonymous character wanted to
see. This double construction of Conselheiro’s face as both commodity
and scientific object corresponded to the double destiny of his head: it
was photographed to later be exhibited for urban publics and taken for
study to the Federal University of Bahia. When Machado de Assis sug-
gested that photographing Conselheiro would be an accomplishment
similar to the removal of the Bendegó meteorite from the sertão to the
Museu Nacional, he seems to have predicted what was about to come
to pass. Despite the disappointing findings of the medical evaluation
carried out by Dr. Nina Rodrigues, Conselheiro’s skull was preserved as
a relic at the Medical School of Bahia.
Machado de Assis’s crônicas, written before this dual gesture of
the Brazilian army—the photographing and beheading of Antônio
Conselheiro—were premonitory in the way they commented on the
symbolic fragmentation and objectification of Conselheiro’s body in the
context of two related functions of what he called “industrial bourgeois
society”: the making of a deviant face through scientific discourses and
practices, such as criminal anthropology, psychiatry, and medical crim-
inology, and the making of a celebrity for the consumption of the ur-
ban public. Machado’s essays portray techno-scientific modernity and
consumer society as entangled forms of mystification that revealed the
contradictions inherent in the accusation that Antônio Conselheiro was
a mystical fanatic. By doing so, Machado challenges the binary logic
that sustains the production of otherness.36 This gesture, so character-
istic of Machado, appears in a more explicit form in a crônica written
in 1896, in which he questions why a preacher should be criminalized
for preaching. Machado asks the readers if freedom of speech is only
valid for journalists and politicians and how anyone could be sure that
what the prophet says is false. After all, he adds, the “latest discoveries
are astonishing: bones and fetuses can be photographed. Anything is
possible in this world and at the end of this great century” (“A Semana,”
September 13, 1896).
Ultimately, Machado invites the reader to ask what, after all, the dif-
ference is between a journalist and a preacher, a politician and a prophet,
between science and myth, and thus to question the divide between the
modern and the primitive that was so important in the construction of
Antônio Conselheiro as an enemy of the modernizing project of the new
republic and in the condemnation of his community. Finally, Machado’s
 Corpse ❘ 43

critique of the injustice being committed against Canudos—written be-

fore the final massacre of the conselheiristas—is an interesting point of
departure from which to analyze the mainstream critique of Canudos in
the aftermath of the war and particularly its canonization through Os
sertões. For Machado, it was not excessive violence, unlawful behead-
ings, and the barbarous exhibition of decapitated heads that should be
denounced, but enlightened scientific discourses themselves. Violence is
at modernity’s core: in the scientific discourses and practices that racial-
ize bodies, in the economic capitalism that alienates and fragments them,
and in a repressive state apparatus that allows marginalized bodies to be
contained and controlled. If violence is at modernity's core, there is no
call for reform or modernization in Machado’s critique.

Photog r a ph s o f C a nudos: C o r p ses an d S u rvi vo rs

Despite the increasing interest in Canudos recounted by Machado de

Assis, there were only two photographers present on the site, who ar-
rived with the very last military expedition. This may appear scanty if
we compare Canudos to, for example, the recording of the Wounded
Knee massacre in the United States in 1890, which attracted at least
five photographers and produced a much larger number of images. The
role of the North American media in spreading fear that a bloody Sioux
rebellion would soon occur at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation and the
consequent violent repression of the Ghost Dance cult, a messianic re-
sistance movement among them, was no less central than the role of the
Brazilian media in the Canudos massacre. In the United States, however,
the halftone process, which allowed images to be printed at the same
time as type, had contributed to the regular use of photographs in maga-
zines starting in the 1880s. The press in Brazil did not regularly use pho-
tographs in the same way until the very end of the nineteenth century.37
In addition, the difficulty and expense of covering the events in the
remote backlands of the Brazilian Northeast made the enterprise eco-
nomically risky for independent photographers. There is evidence that
the two photographers who went to Canudos were sponsored by the
army. In addition to Flávio de Barros, Canudos was photographed by
Juan Gutierrez,38 a military man who owned a photographic studio
in Rio de Janeiro called the Brazilian Photographic Company. Gutier-
rez, who had previously documented the Revolta Armada in Rio de
Janeiro (1893–94), the first armed conflict in Brazilian territory to be
44 ❘ Chapter 1

photographed, died on the Canudos battlefield on June 28, two months

before Flávio de Barros arrived.39 In early 1898, newspapers reported
that the headquarters of the Brazilian Photographic Company had been
destroyed by a fire. It is likely that almost all of Gutierrez’s photographs
of Canudos were destroyed in the incident. According to evidence from
Euclides da Cunha’s field notes and from the newspapers, the writer,
who was not a professional photographer, had also taken a camera to
the field. Da Cunha’s photographs, however, were never found. Barros’s
photographs, therefore, are the only ones we have today.
As opposed to Gutierrez, who had a well-known studio in Rio de
Janeiro and was already recognized for his photographs of the Revolta
Armada, little is known about Flávio de Barros. All historians can say
about the photographer is that he worked in the capital of Bahia, having
used at least two addresses in that city.40 Moreover, Barros was not, like
Juan Gutierrez, a military man, but was appointed “fotógrafo expedi-
cionário” (expeditionary photographer) by the military command, ar-
riving in Canudos just days before the final attack on October 1, 1897,
together with a new contingent of soldiers and the Brazilian minister
of war. In the first days of September 1897, an article in the newspa-
per A Notícia announced that among the new weaponry, such as the
“Canet”—a type of cannon developed by the French engineer Gustave
Canet, which was often mentioned in news reports at the time—and the
“illustrious soldiers” arriving at Monte Santo, the army’s base of oper-
ations, there was also a photographer who had traveled there with the
“aim of acquiring portraits of all members of all the battalions as well
as multiple views of the road that leads to Canudos.”41 If, as Natalia
Brizuela suggests, the presence of photographic technology in the field,
together with cannons and soldiers, was announced as a means to attest
to the power and modernity of the state, photography was also used to
represent this power, as we can see in the photograph “Divisão Canet”
(“Canet Division,” figure 1.15).42
Contrary to other examples of photographs of battlefields in the
nineteenth century, however, Barros’s photographs were not exhibited
or circulated during the conflict, both because the Brazilian illustrated
press had not adopted photographic printing yet, and because Barros’s
use of dry plates43 made it difficult to process the photographs on-site.
In comparison with the wet-collodion process, dry plates could be pre-
pared in advance, making it easier to transport and handle the negatives,
and they also needed a considerably reduced exposure time, thus allow-
ing the capture of somewhat moving scenes. In favorable conditions, the
exposure time for a large plate could be less than one second. Having
 Corpse ❘ 45

a mobile laboratory to develop the images in the field would, however,

require carrying a large amount of materials and also dealing with the
extreme variations of temperature in the sertão.44 So, in addition to his
late arrival on the field, Barros only developed and selected prints upon
his return to Salvador, the capital of Bahia, after the end of the conflict.
The images available today are divided into two albums, one containing
15 photos and the other containing 54 of them.45
Given the technical aspects of nineteenth-century photography, which
still demanded relatively long exposures, as well as the aesthetic conven-
tions of the time—related not so much to the idea of the instantaneous
and to the interruption of movement, as to the construction of a scene—
and Barros’s late arrival on the field, most of his photographs are posed
portraits, landscapes, and ruins. In order to build his photographic se-
ries as an eyewitness account of an ongoing war, Barros resorted to a
strategy that had been common since the first photographic represen-
tations of battlefields:46 he used both explanatory captions to build a
narrative and the conscious placing of people and objects in front of
the camera. The photograph titled “Ataque e incêndio em Canudos”
(“Attack and fire in Canudos,” figure 1.3), for example, by framing the

Figure 1.3. “Ataque e incêndio em Canudos” (“Attack and fire in Canudos”).

Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República,
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 01.03. Reproduced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro
de Museus, Museu da República.
46 ❘ Chapter 1

artillery on the left and the settlement in flames on the right, suggests an
attack. Another “action” simulated for the camera was the enactment of
the arrest of jagunços (figure 1.4). The term jagunço, which Barros uses
in the title of his photo, referred to an armed sertanejo, and sometimes
signified a bandit from the sertões, and, during the Canudos Campaign,
a combatant from Belo Monte. Although Barros uses this term to refer
to the few conselheiristas who appear in some of his photos, the subjects
performing for the camera in this photograph are probably all soldiers.
Barros’s images reenacting war scenes were, however, an exception.
The construction of a visual memory of the conflict consisted in great
part of depictions of the military, and soldiers, officers, and their families
were the potential consumers of these shots. The majority of Barros’s
photographs portray routine military maneuvers or are group portraits
of the different battalions (which make up by far the largest number
of prints) and portraits of individual officers, all in accordance with
the conventional representation of war as a collective and hierarchical
enterprise. Adherence to these conventions generated an archive of hor-
izontally framed, straight-on shots, taken at middle to long distances.
In the portraits of battalions and routine military scenes, the camera is

Figure 1.4. “Prisão de jagunços pela cavalaria” (“Cavalry soldiers arrest jag-
unços”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da
República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 01.10. Reproduced by permission of Instituto
Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.
 Corpse ❘ 47

commonly placed at eye level. In a few instances when the photographer

sought to portray soldiers in the context of a particular site, such as the
field hospital or prison, the camera is positioned at the top of an eleva-
tion and angled downward. One of Barros’s group portraits that did not
include prominent officers or individually identified figures is included
in Os sertões (figure 1.16). Later, I will examine the reappropriation of
these photographs in the context of da Cunha’s attempt to denounce the
flaws of the republic’s assault on Canudos. For now, it is important to
note that Flávio de Barros’s images, on the contrary, intended to portray
the military assault as a successful enterprise.
Death, for example, is largely erased from Barros’s photographic rep-
resentation of Canudos, especially the death of military men, which is
only alluded to once, in “Sepultura do Capitão Aguiar” (“Captain Agu-
iar’s grave”), a photograph showing the burial of a captain receiving
due ceremony and military honors (figure 1.5). The deceased captain

Figure 1.5. “Sepultura do Capitão Aguiar” (“Captain

Aguiar’s grave”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros,
1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República, Rio de
Janeiro, Brazil. 02.21. Reproduced by permission of
Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.
48 ❘ Chapter 1

Antônio Manuel Aguiar e Silva was a personal friend and assistant to

General Carlos Eugênio de Andrade Guimarães (the commander of the
second military column), as well as the brother of the commander-in-
chief Arthur Oscar, and was the most photographed officer in Canudos.
It is likely that Flávio de Barros was working under the auspices of
Andrade Guimarães, who commissioned the photographer to record
the burial of Captain Aguiar. While this is the only photograph of the
death of a military man in Barros’s albums, we know that approxi-
mately 5,000 soldiers died during the entire conflict between the state
forces and the conselheiristas.
Barros’s erasure of military corpses was part of a larger attempt to le-
gitimate the military intervention and to produce a positive image of the
army. This need for legitimation can be better understood if we remem-
ber that the military was one of two main forces—the other being São
Paulo landowners—that had pushed for the creation of a new repub-
lic. In the 1890s, however, these two forces were competing for power
within the new regime. The army had had only a marginal role during
the imperial period, but it gained some importance and underwent a
series of modernizing reforms after its triumph in the War of the Triple
Alliance (1864–70). Based on the French and German models, the Bra-
zilian army undertook a crusade to promote national unity, and many
of its new recruits believed that they had a role in overthrowing the
monarchy and building a modern republic. The military was in power
during the first years of the Brazilian Republic (although during the
Canudos Campaign the president, Prudente de Morais, was a civilian).
By the time Barros arrived in Canudos, despite the military’s control
of telegraph lines, the press was rife with reports about the mismanage-
ment of supplies, the soldiers’ lack of discipline, the inefficiency of the
commanders, and the excessive and systematic brutality of the army.47
From historian Ana Maria Mauad’s pioneering analysis of Barros’s al-
bums, which follows a semiological methodology, to Cícero Antônio F.
de Almeida’s historical overview of Barros’s work, to, more recently,
Jens Andermann’s reading of his photographs in the context of the con-
solidation of Latin American states and their fields of visibility, schol-
ars agree that Flávio de Barros’s photographic choices reflect to some
extent the mission he was tasked with, namely that of attesting to the
modernity and legality of the army’s actions in the context of a growing
critique of its brutality.48 Barros’s photograph showing soldiers having
a plentiful meal (figure 1.6), for example, has been read as a counter-
image to the reports about the extreme scarcity of food in the campaign:
 Corpse ❘ 49

Figure 1.6. “Bóia na bateria do perigo” (“Meal at the ‘hazard artillery’”). Pho-
tograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República, Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.29. Reproduced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de
Museus, Museu da República.

“I have seen battalion commanders humbly request a handful of manioc

flour,” wrote the reporter Manuel Benício in a telegram published in the
Jornal do Commercio on August 8, 1897. “I do not exaggerate. When
this is over, thousands will attest everything that I have been describing
here.” Because of his critical reports, Benício was later obliged to leave
the battlefield. Other examples of Barros’s photos used to support the
interpretation that he tried to validate the army are those images erasing
the extreme and systematic violence of the army, which included the
murder of captured conselheiristas. In the photograph “Corpo sanitário
e uma jagunça ferida” (“Medical staff and injured female jagunça”),
for example, the army appears to be providing medical treatment to
wounded enemies (figure 1.7), while in “Um jagunço preso” (“Jagunço
prisoner”) a jagunço, as Barros captions him, is presented to the camera
(figure 1.8). Both images contradict reports at the time which suggested
that prisoners were usually executed when captured alive. Jens Ander-
mann’s insightful analysis of these two images emphasizes the fact that
Barros’s photos organize a “space of legality,” while excessive violence
and death—the suspension of law—are out of the frame.49 Interestingly,
50 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.7. “Corpo sanitário e uma jagunça ferida” (“Medical staff and injured
female jagunça”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos,
Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.47. Reproduced by permission
of Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.

it is through Euclides da Cunha’s writing that Andermann reads this

externality that is inseparable from the frame. Os sertões would be the
text that writes over this photograph by describing a jagunço prisoner
and his subsequent execution. Andermann builds on Berthold Zilly’s
suggestion that da Cunha based some of his descriptions of the conflict
on Flávio de Barros’ photographs, suggesting that da Cunha’s text sup-
plements these images with a violence that is not shown by the camera.50
Although I agree with Andermann’s suggestion that Os sertões re-
inscribes violence into Barros’s images, I argue that this gesture is con-
structed by da Cunha as part of his revelation that the conselheiristas
were all killed, which is a crucial aspect of da Cunha’s own capture and
control of the traces of military violence. As Adriana Campos John-
son reminds us, da Cunha’s most powerful and at the same time most
deceptive statement about the Canudos Campaign is that Belo Monte
was totally annihilated and that its defenders fought (and died) literally
to the last man.51 By suggesting that Belo Monte had no survivors, da
Cunha can, as Campos Johnson suggests, speak for the conselheiristas:
he can silence them. I add that by symbolically burying the community
of Belo Monte in the land that came to be known as Canudos, da Cunha
 Corpse ❘ 51

Figure 1.8. “Um jagunço preso” (“Jagunço prison-

er”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção
Canudos, Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Bra-
zil. 02.48. Reproduced by permission of Instituto
Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.

asks his readers to “move forward,” diverting their gaze from the con-
selheiristas to the future of the sertão and the sertanejo.52 He asks the
reader to perform a colonizer’s work: to look at the land, study it, and
occupy it productively, thus civilizing and absorbing the workforce and
the knowledge of the sertanejo.
Oral history, however, has shown that there were many survivors of
Belo Monte. Survivors were interviewed by journalists including Odor-
ico Tavares (1947) and appear in the work of historians like José Cala-
sans. They were photographed by Pierre Verger (1946), Artur Ikishima
(1977), and Mário Cravo Neto (1980), to cite only a few. Survivors also
figure in novels about Canudos that have been overshadowed by the
success of Os sertões, such as O rei dos jagunços by Manuel Benício
(1899) and Os jagunços by Afonso Arinos (1898). If we look carefully
52 ❘ Chapter 1

at Barros’s own photographs—even in the formally arranged portraits

of soldiers—we can also find some of these survivors.
The survivors who appear in Barros’s photographs are mostly chil-
dren, probably orphans, who enter the photographic frame but remain
unmentioned in his captions. Three of these children are visible, for in-
stance, in the lower right-hand corner of the image mentioned above
showing the soldiers’ meal (figure 1.6). Making their way into the frame,
these children create an imbalance in the orderly composition of the im-
age. In other images, children stand almost invisibly among soldiers, as
if their presence is that of non-subjects, ghostly vestiges who happen to
leave a trace on the photographic plate without being the subjects of the
portrait. They might have been included in the image as a curiosity or as
yet another sign of the humaneness of the army.53 But they are not men-
tioned in any of the captions and appear only marginally in the frame.
Perhaps these children were attracted to the camera and forced them-
selves into the visual archive of Canudos. In any case, very little was
written about the survivors of Canudos in the first half of the twentieth
century, when da Cunha’s narrative of Canudos’s total annihilation pre-
vailed. In Os sertões, these orphans of Belo Monte are not mentioned,
although da Cunha himself wrote in his diaries and letters about an
orphan he took to São Paulo who later became a teacher,54 fulfilling da
Cunha’s own creed concerning the civilizing mission of education.
In addition to these children, corpses are another underexamined
presence in Barros’s albums. Even though the death of military men
is erased from his representation of the conflict, there are two photo-
graphs showing the corpses of conselheiristas. One of these is “Flanco
esquerdo da igreja do Bom Jesus” (“Left wing of Bom Jesus church”),
a photo of the structure also known as the Igreja Nova (New Church)
by the Belo Monte community (figure 1.9). This solid and imposing,
yet unfinished, building, which was designed by Conselheiro and con-
structed by his followers in Belo Monte’s main square, became a stra-
tegic site for the conselheiristas during the conflict. Consequently, the
destruction of this church had a symbolic importance for the army. The
church was Conselheiro’s monumental work, representing both his skill
and his prominence in the life of the community. Moreover, the story of
its construction lies at the origin of the violent repression of the commu-
nity. According to the official narrative, the conflict began when some
lumber for the construction of the church was not delivered to Canudos
even though the residents had paid for it. When some residents of Canu-
dos declared that they would go find the lumber in the town of Juazeiro,
 Corpse ❘ 53

Figure 1.9. “Flanco esquerdo da igreja do Bom Jesus” (“Left wing of Bom Jesus
church”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da
República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.43. Reproduced by permission of Instituto
Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.

city officials claimed that the city was being threatened, and the gover-
nor of Bahia responded by sending 100 armed men to the region. This
led to the first military confrontation, which ended in the first defeat of
the (local, in this case) government.
Barros’s photograph shows dozens of soldiers standing in front of
the destroyed building’s facade, as if occupying the enemy’s territory.
Some of them look straight at the camera, while others seem unaware
of its presence. An unidentified black soldier in uniform, his eyes hidden
by his hat, appears at the left of the frame holding his gun, while white
officers, wearing garments that identify their origins (such as the typical
bombacha from the south of Brazil), pose confidently for the camera.
The photograph inadvertently inscribes the racial and economic hier-
archies of a post-slavery society into its composition. It is likely that
some of these officers, whose poses reproduce a larger body of war por-
traiture encountered in painting and in the conventions of studio pho-
tography, intended to buy some of Barros’s photographs as souvenirs.
The presence of blurred figures, however, suggests that not everyone
was posing for the camera, imbuing the photograph with a rare sense
of spontaneity. At the lower right of the image lies an apparently unno-
54 ❘ Chapter 1

ticed corpse. Slightly to the left, another almost invisible corpse can be
spotted among the soldiers’ feet. In this postwar photograph, an image
of victory and occupation, the corpses, which do not have prominence
in the image, are captured as remains, spoils of war.
In the only other photograph showing corpses, these emerge as
the main subject of the image. “Cadáveres nas ruínas de Canudos”
(“Corpses among ruins of Canudos”) was taken in the midst of debris
from destroyed adobe houses (figure 1.10). Composing the picture must
have been difficult, since the left third of the image shows what seems
to be the inside of a house and the exposed wooden battens that com-
posed its structure. The camera is facing slightly downwards, to frame
the ground, where two corpses are laid out. At the top of the image,
we see soldiers. Their heads are almost out of the frame and they are
not posing for the camera, even though their pale clothing stands out,
making them look like ghostly figures in a scene of death. This image is
unique in the context of Barros’s archive because it is the only photo-
graph taken in the midst of common houses in ruins and shows corpses
of Belo Monte villagers, and also because of its decentralized framing
and its non-posed subjects. In contrast to the photograph of soldiers in

Figure 1.10. “Cadáveres nas ruínas de Canudos” (“Corpses among ruins of

Canudos”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu
da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.41. Reproduced by permission of Insti-
tuto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.
 Corpse ❘ 55

front of the ruins of the Bom Jesus church, the focus here is not on the
victors and their defiant enemy, personified by the massive church, but
on violence itself, on anonymous, unjustified deaths.
The two pictures displaying corpses perform a similar gesture: they
show the victory of the state through the fact that the camera, along
with the soldiers, now occupy spaces in Belo Monte.55 In this sense, they
contrast with Barros’s panoramic images of Belo Monte, which invoke
the moments before the final assault. Respecting the conventions of
landscape photography, with a balanced horizontal composition, these
vistas de Canudos are taken from different locations outside of the set-
tlement (figures 1.11 and 1.12). In all of these vistas, the lower third of
the image is occupied by rocky barren land, the middle section shows
houses at a distance, while the sky occupies the upper third of the frame.
If it were not for the captions and the Bom Jesus church—a massive
building that stands out from the others—an ordinary viewer would
hardly notice that these three vistas parciais (partial views) show differ-
ent points of view of the town. These landscape photographs, together
with the “Panorâmica de Canudos antes do assalto final” (“Panoramic
view of Canudos before the final assault”), which is a combination of
two complementary photographs, offer the viewer the privileged point

Figure 1.11. “Vista parcial de Canudos e Rio Vaza-Barris, ao nascente” (“Partial

view of Canudos and the Vaza-Barris River, east”). Photograph by Flávio de
Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
02.33. Reproduced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da
República.
56 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.12. “Vista parcial de Canudos ao norte” (“Partial view of Canudos,

north”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da
República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 01.06. Reproduced by permission of Instituto
Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.

of view of the conqueror at the moment before he secures control of the

territory. Still separated from the town by the barren land that we see
in the lower part of the photographs, the camera, and thus the viewer,
will soon be brought into the territory of the enemy, once this territory
has been conquered by the technologies of war. In offering up the land
for the viewer’s appropriation, Barros’s vistas are part of a broader in-
ternational archive of what W. J. T. Mitchell refers to as “imperial land-
scaping.” In Barros’s landscapes, the viewer is not offered, in Mitchell’s
terms, “utopian fantasies of the perfected imperial prospect” but their
counterpart: a defiant territory and “unsuppressed resistance” that are
soon to be conquered in the name of a modernizing project.56
When referring to images of dead bodies in photographs of the
American Civil War, Timothy Sweet suggests that “when the corpses
of soldiers were textually or visually represented within the scene of
the landscape, they became objects appropriated by the state no less
than the land itself over which they fought.”57 For Sweet, Civil War
photographs’ evocation of the American pastoral and the picturesque
 Corpse ❘ 57

harmony of the landscape helped efface “history” in the name of a total-

izing ideal of the garden of America. In contrast, the corpses in Barros’s
photographs are not incorporated into the landscape, but are framed
by the destroyed walls of a town. “Left wing of Bom Jesus church” and
“Corpses among ruins of Canudos” (figures 1.9 and 1.10) capture the
ruins of a rebellious town before it was further destroyed, dynamited,
and burned in order to return “Canudos” to its supposed original state
of bare land. In his account of the last day of the Campaign, Col Dan-
tas Barreto describes these two gestures: the victorious soldiers’ eager
entrance into the ruinous houses of Belo Monte which they curiously
inspect, and then their desire to annihilate the town, to make sure that
nothing should remain to “remind the traveler of the past existence of a
large population, of the largest resistance ever encountered by republi-
can forces” (A última expedição à Canudos, 228). It is only as ruins that
“Belo Monte” becomes “Canudos.” And it is as bare land, not as the
ideal fertile field of the American pastoral imagination, that the sertão is
framed as a land to be conquered and appropriated.
One could argue that instead of incorporating corpses into harmo-
nious landscape compositions, Barros places them in the long tradition
of ruin-gazing, and thus they are a reflection on history: discontinuities
and continuities, construction and destruction, rise and decline, and the
meaning of the past for the present.58 The nineteenth-century fascination
with ruins certainly appears to have influenced two of Barros’s other
photographs: “Igreja de Santo Antônio (velha)” (“Church of Santo An-
tonio (old),” figure 1.13) and “Igreja do Bom Jesus (nova)” (“Bom Je-
sus Church (new),” figure 1.14). These two photographs of the facades
of the “old church” and “new church” of Canudos resemble common
nineteenth-century postcards in their careful framing and vertical com-
position. In accordance with the conventions of the time, people are
placed at different points near the structures, both providing a sense
of scale and placing the ruins in relation to human subjects. Their still
poses are held for varying amounts of time according to the need for
shorter or longer exposures and the technology used in the period, but
long enough to impregnate these images with a sense of duration. In the
case of Barros’s images, the two almost identical compositions, however,
end up calling attention to their differences. While the photograph of
the old church might instill in the fin-de-siècle urban viewer a nostalgia
for a picturesque rural Catholicism, the almost unrecognizable ruin of
the new church fascinates the viewer with the double magnitude of its
construction and destruction. It is as if the new church—Conselheiro’s
58 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.13. “Igreja de Santo Antonio (velha)”

(“Church of Santo Antonio (old)”). Photograph by
Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu
da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.52. Repro-
duced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de Mu-
seus, Museu da República.
largest architectural project—represented the impossibility of his dream
of establishing a religious mecca in Belo Monte. While the Santo Antônio
church, which Conselheiro and his followers built in 1893, the year they
settled in the region,59 may appear to an urban audience as an identifiable
and even somewhat inhabitable past, the ruins of the more ambitious
new church do not show any recognizable ecclesiastical form. Instead
of eliciting a nostalgic response, this image fosters the sense that we are
gazing at the remains of something that never had a meaningful reality.
In the photographs showing corpses among ruins, however, the ruins
do not represent images of time—of destruction and progress, or nostal-
gia and awe—to be contemplated. The soldiers and officers who appear
in the images do not seem to be contemplating or even posing with
these ruins. They are occupying the space. Unlike in the photographs of
 Corpse ❘ 59

Figure 1.14. “Igreja do Bom Jesus (nova)” (“Bom

Jesus Church (new)”). Photograph by Flávio
de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da
República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.19. Repro-
duced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de Mu-
seus, Museu da República.

the ruinous facade of the old and new churches, the composition here
is unbalanced, and some figures are blurred, suggesting a slightly more
improvised action shot. The buildings seen in ruins in “Corpses among
ruins of Canudos” (figure 1.10) are adobe houses, a common type of
housing in rural areas, and one that would not last, or even leave traces,
if it were not for Barros’s photograph. By inscribing what should soon
be entirely effaced from the land of the sertão, especially after a dam was
constructed in the area where Belo Monte had existed, “Corpses among
ruins” is an image of what Ann Stoler has called ruination, “the ongoing
nature of the imperial process” of dislocation and dispossession.60
In contrast to these two photographs of corpses among ruins, Antô-
nio Conselheiro’s corpse was purposefully separated from the ruins and
60 ❘ Chapter 1

moved to an open space in order to be photographed. His followers had

buried him next to the old church, in the ground where he lived and
preached. When his corpse is found, under ruins and earth, the army
separates his corpse from the debris, unburies him, brings him into the
light, cleans his face, and brings people to identify him. His head is
preserved with the use of chemicals, such as quicklime, and his face is
(re)produced through the photochemical processes carried out by Flávio
de Barros. Conselheiro’s corpse is not incorporated into the ruined land
and appropriated by the state in the same way as the bodies of the other
conselheiristas. Its destiny is to be individualized, displaced, and pre-
served through chemicals and light so that he can become an object for
the scientific gaze and an image for the consumption of an urban public
that had closely followed the final phases of the conflict as covered in
the newspapers. Conselheiro’s body, and, more specifically, his head and
face, were destined to be preserved and illuminated by the peculiarly
modern combination of science and entertainment. While there are no
traces of the photographs of corpses among ruins having circulated in
the aftermath of the conflict, the image of Conselheiro’s corpse was
mentioned a few times.
The actual circulation of Barros’s photographs of Canudos is not
clear. Even for someone appointed the official photographer of the army,
photography was still primarily a private enterprise. According to Cí-
cero Antônio F. de Almeida, Barros probably sold some of the photo-
graphs to the officers he portrayed.61 On October 30, the newspaper O
País reported that Barros had organized a private screening of lantern-
slide versions of his pictures for journalists, and it disclosed the pho-
tographer’s intention to organize “a public exhibition of his works,
which are the object of great curiosity.” According to an advertisement
in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper A Gazeta de Notícias, on February 2,
1898, an electrical projection featuring twenty-five life-sized images of
Canudos would bring to the urban public “scenes” of the “extraordinary
event” that had ended, four months before, in the destruction of the
settlement. The advertisement promised an exposition of the “true and
faithful portrait of Antônio Conselheiro,” confirming the expectation
that this photograph would provide both identity and resemblance; in
other words, that its referent was truly Antônio Conselheiro and that the
image faithfully reproduced his traits. This advertisement and a second
one published in the newspaper Diário do Espírito Santo in the same
month are the only records we have of the public circulation of this pho-
tograph, or any of Barros’s photographs, in the aftermath of the conflict.
 Corpse ❘ 61

As a proto-cinematic technology, this electrical exhibition promised

a realistic spectacle, in which twenty-five “life-size” images would be
projected to the amazement of any audience member able to afford a
ticket. The first cinematographic projection in Brazil had been staged
for journalists in Rio de Janeiro less than two years before, in July 1896,
but cinematic spectacles restaging real-life violence and capitalizing on
sensational newspaper coverage only became popular at the beginning
of the twentieth century. In her study of the relationship between the
development of early twentieth-century film and sensationalist visual
culture in Latin America, the film scholar Rielle Navitski shows how
early films capitalized on illustrated crime news to build an audience.62
The Canudos Campaign, which happened right before this period, at
a moment when photographs were not often printed in newspapers,
occurred at an interesting transitional moment in the history of visual
technologies in Brazil. Natalia Brizuela astutely suggests that the lack
of critical language for new cinematic or proto-cinematic technologies
could be one explanation as to why there were no responses to or re-
views of Barros’s electrical exhibitions in the newspapers.63 Since there
are no published materials about these exhibitions, we have very little
information about which images were exhibited or the order in which
they were shown, and thus, of how the photograph of Conselheiro was
contextualized. Was it inserted in a chronological narrative of victory?
How did it appear in relation to the photographs of prisoners, or to
the vistas? Were there narrations or captions accompanying it? What
we do know is that the advertisement for the exhibition built on the
sensationalist language of shock and amazement: “Curiosity! Horror!!
Misery!!!” The exhibition was entertainment.
In 1898 and 1899, several reports and books about the conflict were
published that formulated important accusations against the army.64 Al-
though most of these texts derived their authority from the fact that
they were eyewitness accounts, none of them included photographs by
Flávio de Barros. It is not my intention here to speculate on why this
was, but it is important to remark that, although possible, the reproduc-
tion of photographs in books was still an expensive process that had
not yet been widely adopted by the Brazilian press. Photojournalism
was inaugurated in Brazil in 1900 with the Revista da Semana. In 1902,
by which time photographs accompanying printed texts had become a
widespread phenomenon, Flávio de Barros’s photographs were printed
for the first time in a book that presented itself as an eyewitness account
of the conflict: Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões.
62 ❘ Chapter 1

Although they are marginal in Barros’s photographic corpus, his pho-

tographs showing orphans and corpses give us a different perspective on
Os sertões’ self-proclaimed feat of being a revelation of the truth about
the war, and as a vengeful voice that spoke for the sertanejos, a charac-
terization which was largely accepted in the public sphere and even in
a large part of twentieth-century historiography. In presenting his book
as a text that exposed the horrors committed against Belo Monte by the
forces of the state, da Cunha overshadowed previous accounts of such
violence and the existence of survivors who could themselves testify
to such violence. As for the photographs published in Os sertões, da
Cunha carefully re-captioned them, and inserted the images into a nar-
rative that places “Canudos”—understood as both the emergence of the
community of Belo Monte, and the event of its destruction—in the past.
This past provided a double lesson from which the urban public should
learn in order to call for a “humane” integration and modernization of
the interior of the country.

O S S E RT Õ E S

Os sertões, Euclides da Cunha’s first book-length manuscript, became

both an instant best-seller and a literary classic, and remains the most-
cited work on Canudos even today. More than that, Os sertões has
become a reference book about Brazil, a kind of foundational text for
Brazilian studies, as Regina Abreu has suggested. This outcome, how-
ever, was far from obvious at the time. The manuscript had been re-
jected by O Estado de São Paulo and Jornal do Commercio before it
was finally accepted by Laemmert through recommendations from the
critic José Veríssimo and the writer and jurist Lúcio de Mendonça. Da
Cunha had to cover half of the publishing costs himself, contributing
a total of 1 conto and 500 mil-réis, which represented almost twice
his yearly salary as an engineer for the state of São Paulo.65 The first
edition came out on December 2, 1902, in a printing of 1,200 copies
of 637 pages each, plus geographic, geological, and botanical maps, as
well as three of Barros’s photographs. Even though da Cunha chose to
print these three photographs in the edition that he partially funded
by his own salary, later editions of Os sertões chose not to publish
any photographs, or else to publish a larger number of them, as if da
Cunha’s photographic selection and captioning were not really relevant
to his work. In contrast, almost all publications of Barros’s photographs
 Corpse ❘ 63

throughout the twentieth century used Euclides da Cunha’s words as

captions or accompanying texts, as if the images would be incomplete if
they were to be published alone. In order to examine this suturing of da
Cunha’s words to Barros’s photographs, it is crucial to reintroduce the
three photographs initially published in Os sertões, taking seriously da
Cunha’s decision to include them in the book and to re-caption them.
The engulfment of the photograph of Antônio Conselheiro’s body by
da Cunha’s words in the ekphrastic gesture that closes Os sertões was
another formal strategy to perform this suturing.
Before describing the relationship between photography and text in
the book, there is something to be said about the use of visible evi-
dence in Os sertões as a whole and the writer’s recourse to eyewitness
testimonial authority. By resorting to visual testimonies, what does da
Cunha seek to show or to prove? In his “Nota Preliminar” (“Prelim-
inary Note”), he argues that Os sertões has a double aim: first, “to
sketch out . . . the most expressive characteristics of the sub-races that
inhabit Brazil’s backlands today” and, second, to denounce the Canu-
dos Campaign as a crime (Backlands 1, 2). These “intentions,” he ex-
plains, developed as a consequence of the delay in the publication of his
book, which was only released after Canudos had “lost its actuality”
(1). Da Cunha’s emphasis on this delay frames the temporal structure
of the book. First, it allows for the construction of a narrator who pres-
ents himself as both an eyewitness traveler/observer and an “armchair”
writer—part historian, part social scientist—who sets out to make sense
of sensory data and archival materials only years after Canudos was
destroyed in order to present them to the “eyes of future historians” (1).
Second, and most importantly, this delay helps connect the book’s call
for moral indignation over the extermination of the conselheiristas with
its encouragement of readers to support or pursue a deeper knowledge
about the nation. Using the distance of time, Os sertões can present
the emergence and destruction of the messianic community as a missed
lesson not understood by either the republic or by his younger self, the
da Cunha who traveled to Canudos as a news reporter, and thus as an
opportunity for advancing knowledge: “This eruption of the past into
our present, baring all the cracks and fissures of our evolution as a so-
ciety, should have alerted us to the opportunity to correct those flaws.
But we did not understand the lesson. In the capital of our country,
citizens were happy with burning a few journals at the stake and the
government then began to act. That meant calling up new battalions”
(Backlands, 281).
64 ❘ Chapter 1

If the republic (and the reporter) failed to learn this “lesson,” it is

because both lacked the scientific and political tools to understand their
own country. Consequently, the annihilation of Belo Monte is presented
as the result of flaws in the incipient regime and the not-yet-modern
society. If the first lesson about the nation, the reasons for the birth of
Canudos, were not understood at the time, the massacre of Canudos
is presented as a lesson that can still be learned. Although the first les-
son dominates the first two parts of the book, “The Land” and “Man,”
which present a pseudoscientific study of the “mestiço” people and the
“inhospitable” land of the sertão, the second lesson is the focus of the
third part of the book—“A Luta” (“The Battle”)—which condemns the
destruction of Canudos as a criminally conducted military campaign
that stemmed from an error of judgment. Both of these lessons are ref-
erenced throughout the book, but if in the “Preliminary Note” we see
them as separate “aims,” it is in the final images of the book—the ver-
bal depiction of the photograph of Conselheiro’s decomposing body
and skull—that the main figures of this double lesson come together. It
is in da Cunha’s description of the photographing and decapitating of
Conselheiro that the face of the deviant other of the republic is engulfed
in a critical portrait of the Brazilian nation. At the same time that da
Cunha affirms that there was nothing to see in Conselheiro’s portrait
and skull, that no visible mark of degeneration could be fixed there,
Brazil emerges as a racialized nation of mestiços that needs to know
itself in order to govern itself according to its own needs. By reframing
Canudos as an epistemological problem, da Cunha relates the scientific
and the prescriptive, knowledge and reform, and presents a past event
as an opening onto the future.

Knowledge and History

In Euclides da Cunha’s inaugural speech to the Brazilian Academy of
Letters in December 1906,66 he forges an image of himself as an “ac-
cidental writer” who is, above all, an observer. He begins his speech
by distancing himself from the subjectivism of writers of literature, for
whom anything unknown is a “not yet seen aspect of the self.”67 In
contrast to those capable of making interpretations “a priori,” he is
accustomed to contemplating facts “de terra a terra” (during earthly
strolls). He then further complicates the terms of objectivism and sub-
jectivism, however, by bringing to the fore a subjective self that exists
in the realm of objective observation. While the writer of fiction is the
 Corpse ❘ 65

sovereign of his creation, da Cunha argues, nonfiction writers like him-

self, who traverse the “unstable” terrain of objective interrogation “ao
rés das existências” (at the level of existences), can become fragile and
disturbed, perpetually confronted by the imbalance between ideas and
what exists, constantly comparing logical and aesthetic syntheses with
the ever-changing tableaux of reality. Da Cunha fashions himself in this
speech as a writer-observer in the context of late nineteenth-century de-
bates around empiricism and idealism, knowledge and representation.
This depiction of a fragile scientific observer “abreviando o espírito à
contemplação dos fatos de ordem física” (abbreviating his spirit in the
contemplation of facts) resonates with what historians of science Lor-
raine Daston and Peter Galison call the “epistemic virtue” of the late
nineteenth-century scientific observer, whose identity was forged in the
struggle of the will against itself, a will strong enough to reach out to
the world with an active and disciplined attention, yet at the same time
able to prevent itself from imposing potentially erroneous interventions
upon the observed.68
Da Cunha’s focus on the unstable scientific self resonates with the
positivist epistemology of the French thinker and historian Hippolyte
Taine, whom da Cunha cites in his short prologue to Os sertões. Taine’s
own model of empirical knowledge is that of an unstable subject receiv-
ing impressions via sensations, inherently exposed to perceptual error,
and constantly at the threshold of hallucination.69 Not an absence of
hallucinations, but the capacity to steer perception away from the per-
petual risk of erroneous images is what constitutes the normal func-
tioning of intelligence.70 To contextualize “normal” we must take into
consideration Taine’s evolutionist approach to both human psychology
and culture, in which environment, race, and epoch (which is insepara-
ble from the first two) play a crucial role.71
In Os sertões we can see the creation of a narrator who embraces
both the idea of rational self-determination and that of biological and
geographic determinism. While conceiving of the narrator as a histori-
cal subject who embodies Man’s (the European male subject) progres-
sive if irregular path to acquire dominion over nature, da Cunha also
depicts the sertanejo as “affectable,” to use Denise Ferreira da Silva’s
concept, as subject to natural conditions.72 On one hand, there is the
fragile traveler-narrator who navigates the geographic distance from
the urban coast to the backlands as a space of instability between sen-
sory perceptions and ideas and between the seeable and the sayable,
constantly correcting his senses and adjusting his perceptions and his
66 ❘ Chapter 1

ideas (including ideas that are not originally his). On the other hand,
da Cunha depicts the inhabitants of the backlands and the fanaticism
of the conselheiristas as a sign of the primitive/pathological mind of a
“sub-race” which, being impressionable and affected by biological and
environmental factors, fell prey to religious delusions.73
The narrator’s references and images, which borrow from various
literary and scientific traditions, as well as his attempts to build grand
schemes and causal explanations that sometimes seem precarious or
unstable, are not, as some scholars have argued, only signs of a failed
attempt to control reality through representation—even though one can
argue that they actually point to an imminent failure. They are above
all a representation of the process of acquiring knowledge and of repre-
sentation itself.74 Confidence in the advancement of knowledge is per-
formed through its limitations.
But da Cunha’s narrator is not just a reproduction of the European
subject. In his struggle, the narrator embodies a project of knowledge
and self-determination in the tropics. Without denying the global his-
torical fulfillment of the self-determined subject, da Cunha insists on
the positionality of this project in a racialized tropical nation. The lim-
itations faced by the narrator of Os sertões are not universal or a pri-
ori, but mirror the limits faced by Brazilian science, which was in a
somewhat delayed phase on the path toward knowledge and modern-
ization in relation to Europe. Regina Abreu argues that what made da
Cunha’s book such an important reference point in the development of
a twentieth-century tradition of essays on national identity in Brazil is
the fact that instead of holding up European science as a model to be
copied, da Cunha argued that Brazil needed to find its own concepts,
technologies, its own path toward progress.75 True knowledge about
Brazil could only emerge through a long-term study of its people and
territory, whose hinterlands had only been studied briefly (and thus in-
efficiently) by foreign travelers and were totally ignored by the coastal
elites, enamored as they were of European ideas.76
Instead of determining whether Os sertões expresses confidence or
hesitation with regard to the progress of modern science and society, I
suggest that both stances work together within the temporal framework
of the book, which contains a call for national modernization. This call
is supposedly complicated by the challenges that the New World’s racial
and environmental determinants, such as racial miscegenation or trop-
ical climate, posed to the adoption of late nineteenth-century trends of
evolutionist thought by the Brazilian scientific and political elites. Here,
 Corpse ❘ 67

I refer to how da Cunha notoriously adapted racial theories of the time

that identified miscegenation with degeneration to the particular case
of the sertões.77 These are the main topics of the first two parts of Os
sertões, “The Land” and “Man.” In brief, da Cunha describes the ser-
tanejos as a somewhat homogeneous mixed-race type—even though the
population of the region (and of Canudos specifically) was in reality very
diverse and included Indigenous and black populations—in the context
of a theoretical framework that understood racial miscegenation as a
source of biological degeneration. The formation of this homogeneous
“sub-race” of the backlands would have only been possible due to its
supposed geographical isolation, which offered a certain advantage to
the mixed-raced sertanejo in relation to the greater miscegenation that
da Cunha saw among the coastal populations. Additionally, the sta-
bility of this sub-race meant that the sertanejos were adapted to the
harsh environment of the sertão, which, for da Cunha, explained both
their strength and their backwardness. And that is how he transforms
the “retrograde” type of the sertão into the seed of a future national
type, the “bedrock of our race.” In his later work À margem da história
(The Amazon: Land without History), the sertanejo who migrates to
the Amazonian region to work in its extractive industries becomes an
important actor in the occupation and exploitation of this other frontier
of national expansion.78 Thus, the sertanejos are also the ideal work-
force needed for the occupation and transformation of the land. While
the lives and characteristics of the populations of the backlands were,
for da Cunha, determined by their harsh environment, a modern nation
would have to carry out an adaptation of this environment through
long-term study, engineering, and work. As he suggests in a 1904 article:
“There is no higher mission to our engineering. Only here, at the end of
a long enterprise . . . will we be able to delineate a strategic plan for this
formidable campaign against the desert.”79
One of the few critics to focus on da Cunha’s “Preliminary Note,”
Costa Lima, calls attention to the fact that da Cunha both affirms that
Canudos was a crime and announces that he will provide a study of the
sub-races of the sertão that, in his own words, “will soon be vanished
types from extinct traditions” (Backlands, 1). Costa Lima suggests that
da Cunha’s evolutionist perspective on the necessary disappearance of
the sertanejo is contradictory to, or at least contributes to, a weakening
of his denunciation of their massacre, and he argues that this contra-
diction is explained by the fact that da Cunha’s denunciatory aim is
independent from the scientific (evolutionist) perspective he adopted in
68 ❘ Chapter 1

his book.80 I contend that the scientific and the historic, the evolutionist
and the reformist, the racial and the political arguments are all intrin-
sically connected in the book’s temporal organization, which locates
European scientific discourses within the project of the creation of a
modern Brazilian subject. Da Cunha’s indictment of the massacre is cru-
cial for his defense of a mode of obliteration of the other in the form of
an engulfment or assimilation of this other, as part of the trajectory of
a future realization of a self-determined subject within a heterogeneous
(racialized) society. This engulfment of otherness happens in all parts of
Os sertões. It is performed in the scientific dimension of the text, such as
in the description of the sertanejos as mestiços (persons of mixed race),
which obliterates the Indigenous and black subjects from the imagi-
nary space of the nation. And it is played out in the way in which da
Cunha denounces the massacre, dissolving the binary language of war
and turning the public’s attention to its own backwardness and its own
role in the construction of this locally specific, tropical and miscege-
nated modernity: “It proves that we are not much more civilized than
our backward countrymen” (Backlands, 281). In attempting to teach
the public how to read the bodies and ruins of Canudos, and pointing
out the obstacles for a true modernizing national project, Os sertões
turns the barbaric violence committed against Canudos into a necessary
step in that assimilation of the other because it allows the urban elite to
finally see, in the traces of this violence, the birth of the national subject.
In terms of the political and reformist dimensions of the text, we
should not forget the identity of the addressee of da Cunha’s denuncia-
tion of the Canudos massacre, who is now responsible for acting: “But
we did not understand the lesson. In the capital of our country, citizens
were happy with burning a few [newspapers]81 at the stake and the
government then began to act. That meant calling up new battalions”
(Backlands, 281). Who is this “we” who should have known better? If
the literate urban citizens, the press, and the government are the subjects
of this accusation, it is because these are the same people responsible for
the progress of the nation. Da Cunha’s criticism is particularly directed
at the state and the press, the two institutions that could regulate or me-
diate the potential excesses of the masses. Inspired by contemporary so-
cial psychology’s studies of the dangers of a rising of the urban masses,82
da Cunha describes how the accelerated change of regime brought about
by the fall of the Brazilian Empire, which was not accompanied by an
increase in education, fostered the debasement of democratic principles,
social instability, and the emergence of strong leaders and cynical agita-
 Corpse ❘ 69

tors who “made all manner of excess possible” (234). For da Cunha, the
retrograde wrath exhibited by the urban dwellers against Canudos—the
epitome of which appears at the end of the book when he describes
Conselheiro’s decapitated head being “taken to the coast, where it was
greeted by crowds dancing in the streets in impromptu carnival celebra-
tions” (464)—evinces both the state of barbarism of a mestiço society,
and also the lack of a politically educated class and solid political insti-
tutions: “we must interrupt our search through the debris and focus our
attention on a certain similarity between the events at Rua do Ouvidor
and an incident in the caatinga, both of them equally savage” (280).
More than two separate “intentions,” scientific and ethical knowl-
edge converge in the narrator’s own trajectory from ignorance to illumi-
nation, a narrative that needs the scene of the barbarous annihilation of
the conselheiristas to take place. The violent massacre of Canudos was
the necessary (mis)step of the urban political and military elite that can
teach the narrator the true lesson about the nation. At the same time
that da Cunha’s narrator enacts, in the first two parts of the book, the
self-determining subject in the process of acquiring knowledge, he sug-
gests, in the “Preliminary Note,” that a delay was necessary in order for
that subject to be forged, because this subject is born after the massacre.
This also helps explain why the first two descriptive parts of the book
are interpolated with omens of the tragedy to come: images of death
and plants that look like decapitated heads infuse the book, as Antônio
Cândido has remarked, with a tragic element. As poetic predictions of
an outcome already known to the reader, this tragic dimension also
helps to construct the relationship between human error and necessity,
between moral condemnation and acceptance of the death of the con-
selheiristas that pervades Os sertões. Ultimately, the supposed absence
of survivors of Canudos means that the problem we have to face is not
“them” but “us”—we must acknowledge that “they” live in “us” as a
nation.

Photographs, Captions, and Ekphrasis

All of the three photographs printed in Os sertões are included in
part 3, “The Battle,” and thus are part of the narration of the second
lesson, which concerns the mistakes made by the republic. Da Cunha
himself did not witness the most emblematic scenes of violence against
the conselheiristas, the decapitations and executions that, according to
Os sertões, revealed the barbarity of the army. In fact, although the
70 ❘ Chapter 1

narrator in the third part of Os sertões derives his authority from being
an eyewitness account of a brutal massacre, da Cunha did not actually
see very much. He was in the area of the conflict only for the last part of
the fourth expedition, and most of his time was spent in Monte Santo,
a village that served as the operational base for the army. Invited by the
newspaper O Estado de São Paulo to cover the Canudos Campaign, da
Cunha left São Paulo on August 1, 1897, and arrived in Salvador, the
capital of Bahia province, on August 7. During the twenty-three days
he stayed in Salvador, da Cunha investigated historical, geographic, and
climatic aspects of the backlands, interviewed people who had returned
from the front (including a fourteen-year-old boy), took notes in what
would become his Caderneta de Campo,83 and wrote articles for O Es-
tado de São Paulo in which he supported the army’s efforts to put down
what he saw as a regressive anti-republic uprising. After ten days in
Monte Santo, da Cunha arrived in Canudos on September 16 and left
on October 3 after falling ill.
A large part of Os sertões is composed of scientific, historical, jour-
nalistic, and fictional texts by other authors. Situating it in relation to the
Brazilian modernist movement, Leopoldo Bernucci calls Os sertões the
first great “cannibalist” work in Brazilian literature.84 The book includes
da Cunha’s own field notes and articles, but it also paraphrases newspa-
per reports, diaries, and telegrams from other journalists and from sol-
diers, sometimes citing its sources and sometimes not. They are arranged
here in a narrative told by a double gaze, that of the traveler-observer and
that of the historian who later makes sense of documents and sensory
perceptions. It is not unlikely that da Cunha’s descriptions of Canudos
and the canudenses were based on some of Barros’s images, as Bertold
Zilly, and later Jens Andermann, have argued. As with its use of other
archival materials, the photographs played a part in turning Os sertões
into a work of history through its assimilation of documents. Da Cunha’s
direct use of Barros’s photographs, however, is discreet.85 The three im-
ages printed in the first edition of Os sertões do not show dead bodies
or ruins, jagunços, or vistas of Canudos. They show the two sides of the
conflict, specifically, soldiers and captured conselheiristas. The captions
used by da Cunha explain why and how we should view these images.
Barros had captioned the photographs “Divisão Canet” (“Canet
Division”), “7º Batalhão de Infantaria nas trincheiras” (“7th Infantry
Battalion at the trenches”), and “400 jagunços prisioneiros” (“400 cap-
tured jagunços”), but da Cunha changed their titles to “Monte Santo
(Base das operações)” (“Monte Santo (Base of operations)”), “Acampa-
 Corpse ❘ 71

mento dentro de Canudos” (“Campsite inside Canudos”), and “As pri-

sioneiras” (“The female prisoners”) (see figures 1.15, 1.16, and 1.17).
In the first two photographs, which portray the army, the change in
caption recasts the images to make them more representative and less
specific, while locating them geographically.
Monte Santo, located southwest from Canudos, is described in Os
sertões as a pleasant landscape as seen from above, described by the
reporter as soon as he arrives:

Tucked at the base of the only mountain in the region, the

town provides a contrast to the otherwise sterile landscape.
Walls of bare rock rise to the north and east and form a
barrier to the sea breezes. The sudden ascent of the wind up
the mountain wall provides a cooling effect and condenses
the scant moisture it holds, regularly depositing it as rain.
This creates a better climate than that of the neighboring
backlands where the wind blows dry after its descent from
the highlands. (Backlands, 206)

Monte Santo appears at the start of “The Battle,” the narrative of the
armed conflict, as a kind of pleasant final step before entering the reality
of the conflict and of the dry and inhospitable sertão. In narrating the
second military expedition to Canudos, da Cunha ironically describes
the misguided optimism of the troops:

The rebels would be destroyed by iron and fire. Like the

wheels of Shiva’s chariot, the treads of the Krupp cannons
would roll over the vast plains, over the high ridges and
down into the broad valleys, leaving behind furrows filled
with blood. It was important to teach these barbaric crimi-
nals a lesson. These backward heathens had committed the
grave sin of stupidly clinging to ancient traditions. Energetic
corrective measures were needed to drag them out of the
barbaric behavior that was a stain on our country. They
should be prodded into civilization at sword point. Every-
one was convinced that an example would be made of these
people. (Backlands, 210)

The irony in this passage is directed not only at the bloodthirsty soldiers
who condemn the conselheiristas’ barbaric behavior without realizing
72 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.15. “Divisão Canet” (“Canet Division”). Photograph by Flávio de

Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
02.44. Reproduced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da
República.

their own barbarity, but also at the army’s blind confidence in its tech-
nological superiority. In this chapter, titled “Victory Taken for Granted,”
da Cunha explains that “Monte Santo got the impression that victory
was guaranteed” (Backlands, 211). Upon advancing through the text, the
reader learns that what led to the failure of the second expedition was
not only wrongheaded optimism, but a lack of military knowledge, orga-
nization, and tactics, a “total ignorance of the basics of warfare” (213).
The expedition departed without proper information about the terrain
or the enemy, and thus without a plan for a strategic distribution of its
troops. The commanding officers believed they could win the “war” with
a set of obsolete formulas for warfare and a set of modern weaponry that
was “completely inappropriate for the current situation” (213).
Captioned by da Cunha as “Monte Santo (Base of operations),” the
first photograph to appear in Os sertões shows soldiers posing with two
cannons and two loaded carts in the pleasant square of Monte Santo.
With the town’s church on their left side and the hill in the background
carefully framed by Barros, the few soldiers and their weaponry oc-
cupy almost the entire visible section of the plaza. They all pose for and
look at the camera. While Flávio de Barros’s caption, “Canet Division,”
 Corpse ❘ 73

emphasizes the role and prestige of the division that would bring tech-
nologically superior weaponry to the Canudos Campaign, da Cunha’s
caption calls the reader’s attention to the specific location where the
photograph was taken. In erasing the reference to the Canet Division,
da Cunha disassociates the photograph from the victorious narrative of
the fourth expedition. When reading this image alongside da Cunha’s
descriptions of Monte Santo, these soldiers seem presumptuous and
misinformed. They are about to lose, if not the war, their aura of mo-
dernity and technological superiority.
To support da Cunha’s critique, the second photograph, titled by the
photographer “7th Infantry Battalion at the trenches” and re-captioned
by da Cunha as “Campsite inside Canudos,” emphasizes what the sol-
diers looked like at Canudos (figure 1.16). The photograph should take
us closer to what the battle, according to da Cunha, was really like: “the
brutal manhunt beating through the brush for the target at Canudos,
was going to be reduced to a series of fierce attacks, agonizing delays,
and sudden skirmishes” (Backlands, 214). This is one of the few of Bar-
ros’s photos in which the soldiers are not in lines or formation, and

Figure 1.16. “7º Batalhão de infantaria nas trincheiras” (“7th Infantry Battalion
at the trenches”). Photograph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos,
Museu da República, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. 02.05. Reproduced by permission
of Instituto Brasileiro de Museus, Museu da República.
74 ❘ Chapter 1

in which there is not much space between officers and soldiers. In the
foreground, sitting on the floor or standing on the sides at the margins
of the frame, we see soldiers wearing ragged clothes, opened shirts, and
sandals. There are so many soldiers that they fade away into the back-
ground of the photo.
By emphasizing the difference between Monte Santo and the army
camps, the new captions chosen by da Cunha suggest a correspondence
between the images and the author’s double critique of the Brazilian
army. As an engineer trained in a military school, he suggests, on the one
hand, that the army was barbarically chaotic, lacking rationality and
strategy: “They were going to face the unknown with the fragile armor
of their impulsive bravery, so typical of our people” (Backlands, 203).
On the other hand, he criticizes it for attempting to mimic the European
model, following books and manuals and using equipment that were
not suited to the sertanejos’ terrain: “The commanding officer of the
expedition borrowed a few principles of Prussian tactics as if he were
leading a small army corps through some meadow in Belgium” (213).
While da Cunha’s use of the first photo seems to refer to the sophisti-
cated but useless weaponry that was brought to Monte Santo but could
not serve in the field, the second photograph shows the disorganization
of a brave but savage battalion that fought in the trenches. Brazil’s lack
of a modern army is also part of Os sertões’ core argument: The Canu-
dos Campaign was not a victory of the republic over a monarchist insur-
gency (as da Cunha himself had initially believed), but evidence that the
nation wasn’t modern enough. Modernity, in this sense, was not merely a
set of rules that could be applied to the Brazilian geographic and cultural
reality, but rather the capacity to rationally adapt to this reality:

They should have been prepared for this situation and issued
appropriate clothing, such as the cowmen wore. The leather
armor of the sertanejo, the sturdy sandals, shin guards, and
leggings through which the thorns of the xique-xiques could
not penetrate, as well as chest protectors and leather hats
anchored firmly with chin straps, might have allowed them
to travel safely through this vegetation. One or two properly
equipped and trained units would have been able to mimic
the amazing mobility of the jagunços. . . . This would not
have been excessive. The European striped dolmans and
highly polished boots were much more out of place in the
caatingas. (Backlands, 292–93)
 Corpse ❘ 75

The kind of adaptation the narrator envisions suggests that the army
should have strategically imitated the jagunços’ relationship to their
environment and the ways the rebels used their knowledge of the land
to fight: “Given the nature of the land and the people, this war should
have been in the more capable hands of a guerrilla warfare strategist—
someone who could innovate on the spot” (Backlands, 214). This dou-
ble critique of the Brazilian army corresponds to the broader lesson
that the extermination of Canudos revealed and, consequently, to da
Cunha’s own national project: he supported neither the barbaric natu-
ral man nor the thoughtless importing of European ideas, but the trajec-
tory of the Brazilian man (gender intended) toward self-determination
through the assimilation of the other of modernity. The (assimilable)
characteristics of the “sub-race” of the sertão were precisely those that
made them well adapted to the land. If it is through a kind of perfect
biological adaptation to his environment that the sertanejo can be seen
as a “strong race,” the value of the jagunço, the combatant or bandit of
the sertão, is his knowledge of the land.86
This leads us to the third photograph published in the book, which
is the only image printed by da Cunha that exhibits the other side of
the conflict, the conselheiristas (figure 1.17). As I have mentioned, none
of Barros’s photographs of the settlement that da Cunha describes us-
ing so many metaphors and adjectives—“sinister civitas,” a “monstrous
aggregation of mud huts,” a “grotesque parody of ancient Roman
dwellings”—appear in the book. Nor does the image of the new church
built by Conselheiro, which, according to da Cunha, replicated the form
of Conselheiro’s irrationality. The only photograph of Canudos printed
in Os sertões shows a multitude of destitute men, women, and children
surrounded by standing soldiers. The change in the third photo’s cap-
tion from “400 jagunços prisioneiros” (“400 captured jagunços”) to
“As prisioneiras” (“The female prisoners”) is revealing in its simulta-
neous erasure of the pejorative term jagunço, typically used to describe
the Canudos combatants—and its change in the gender from masculine
to feminine. With this caption, the photograph becomes an image of
affectable sertanejos: their vulnerability not only embodies da Cunha’s
prediction in the “Preliminary Note” that they will vanish with the evo-
lution of Brazilian society, but their imminent execution demonstrates
the irresponsible, criminal, and ultimately unnecessary violence of the
state. Although da Cunha explicitly depicts this violence as unnecessary,
because the affectable sertanejos could (or would) have disappeared by
other means, this excessive brutality and its representation appear in
76 ❘ Chapter 1

Figure 1.17. “400 jagunços prisioneiros” (“400 captured jagunços”). Photo-

graph by Flávio de Barros, 1897. Coleção Canudos, Museu da República, Rio
de Janeiro, Brazil. 01.09. Reproduced by permission of Instituto Brasileiro de
Museus, Museu da República.

Os sertões as necessary for the public’s realization that Brazil needs a

national scientific and political project.
Da Cunha’s relevant passage here is as follows:

There was not an able-bodied man among them, no one able

to carry a weapon. There were nothing but women, ghosts
of women, young girls prematurely aged, the young and old
alike in their ugliness, filth, and state of extreme malnour-
ishment. The children could barely stand on their bowed
legs. They clung to their mothers’ backs or to their withered
breasts. . . . There were few men among them, only invalids,
who had swollen waxy faces, bent over double, wobbling as
they walked. (Backlands, 460)

These ghost-like women and children (and invalid men) are presented
by da Cunha as if already dead. As remnants of the past, they are repre-
sented through a double recourse to the archive: notes from someone’s
 Corpse ❘ 77

journal and a photograph. Testimony and image are brought together to

keep these remnant others as indexical traces, exterior to the narration,
but woven into it. The only photograph of conselheiristas published
in Os sertões—framed in words as an image of powerless, mute, and
affectable subjects who are already dying—presents the army’s actions
not only as cruel, but as mostly futile. It is these affectable sertanejos,
deluded by religious fanaticism and weak, who are the visible other of
the modern subject being forged in da Cunha’s text.
Susan Sontag suggests that captions, especially those created for pho-
tographs that foster specific political agendas, frequently work as the
missing voice of photographs.87 The belief that photographs themselves
do not speak can be related to the very muteness of the other of the im-
age. That da Cunha intends to speak for the image and for the subjects
of the image is clear in a letter dated from 1902 to his friend Francisco
Escobar, in which he presents Os sertões as an “avenging book”: “I am
heartened by the ancient conviction that the future will read it. That is
what I want. I will be an avenger and will have played a great role of
advocate for the poor sertanejos assassinated by a . . . cowardly and
bloody society.”88 As Adriana Campos Johnson has stressed, da Cunha’s
version of the outcome of the military expedition buttresses the per-
ception that none of the Canudos combatants survived, and this letter
shows that he wants to be the voice of the dead conselheiristas, to speak
in their name.
Together, the three re-captioned photographs not only emphasize the
generalizable, unnamed, de-individualized characters who took part in
the conflict, but also configure them as representatives of the main flaws
of a Brazilian past that must be overcome.
The formal entanglement between photography and narrative is even
more crucial to understanding the fourth photograph, which da Cunha
did not print, but which nonetheless has a central place in Os sertões:
the picture of the corpse of Antônio Conselheiro. Before this passage,
da Cunha had depicted Conselheiro as both barbaric and incomprehen-
sible.89 The messianic leader is not rendered mute in the book, but his
words and works appear to be unassimilable. About the new church
that was being built in Canudos, for example, da Cunha says:

The enormous disproportionate facade stood facing the east,

with its mask of grotesque friezes, impossible volutes, its de-
lirium of curves, horrible ogives, and embrasures. It was an
indecipherable, shapeless mass, something like an exhumed
78 ❘ Chapter 1

crypt, as if the builder had tried to capture in stone and lime-

stone the disorder of his own diseased mind. This was his
masterpiece, and he spent days at a time on the high scaf-
folding. (Backlands, 161)

Although he acknowledges that Conselheiro produced written texts,

speeches, and architectural works, da Cunha cannot refer to them ex-
cept as illogical and indecipherable.90 Not mute, but incomprehensible,
the figure of Conselheiro is described via a geological metaphor: he is
an “anticline” that has been “pushed up” by our “deep ethnic strata”
(Backlands, 124). Conselheiro is the sertão itself, its inhospitable earth
and its people. But he is not merely a representative character: he is its
deepest, oldest layer, “like a fossil” (124). Thus, he is the potential force
that could emerge from the earth itself, disrupting the path to progress.
This characterization is reinforced by da Cunha’s verbal description of
Conselheiro’s corpse, which was exhumed, literally extracted from the
earth, his “olhos fundos cheios de terra” (“deep eyes filled with dust”),
at the end of Os sertões.91 The eyes, which, in the Romantic tradition,
are the windows to the soul, in the case of Antônio Conselheiro carry
the trace of the earth from which he emerged.92
This non-Romantic attachment to the surface, and this attentiveness
to the visible are, as Rachel Price has shown, an important aspect of Os
sertões.93 Everything in the text seems to be reduced to the level of per-
ception. Canudos itself is described as “a city that has been shaken and
thrown about by an earthquake” (Backlands, 151). In this ruinous land-
scape, different strata are visible, bringing together past and present:
“It was born old” (151). If Canudos emerges as “a city of ruins” (151),
the settlement was built in an area that already seemed to be “uma vala
comum enorme” (Os sertões, 178), meaning both a moat and a grave,94
as if its birth and death were contemporaneous, and time could be read
in the space itself.95
In an earlier passage of Os sertões, da Cunha describes Conselheiro
as a “highly impressionable” surface that carries the inscriptions of its
surroundings (Backlands, 124). It is not through physiognomy, however,
that Conselheiro’s face reveals the truth of Canudos. Da Cunha empha-
sizes that Conselheiro’s corpse has reached “a condition of advanced
decomposition” and “would not have been recognized by those who
had been closest to him in life” (464) when he is photographed. Con-
selheiro’s face must be disappearing (decomposing) in order to reveal
the sertão itself as a conquerable space. Disappearance is enacted by the
 Corpse ❘ 79

writer’s double gesture, in which he chooses to describe the photograph

in words instead of printing it and he describes the body as decomposed
matter, almost indistinguishable from the earth.
The reference to the photograph of Conselheiros’s corpse appears
in the penultimate chapter of Os sertões. A few paragraphs previously,
da Cunha announces the end of his book by refusing to narrate the last
days of the conflict because “they are impossible to describe” (Back-
lands, 463). After this short section96 on the impossibility of narrating
the cruelty of the final moments of the conflict, the narrator tells us how
soldiers found the place where Conselheiro was buried and carefully
exhumed the body, “a valuable relic and the only prize this war had to
offer. They took care that it did not fall apart. If it had, they would have
had nothing but a disgusting mess of rotting flesh on their hands. They
photographed it and drew up a document certifying its identity” (464).
Os sertões ends with a description of a photographic gesture that
attempts to fix the other, even though the other is already disappear-
ing. But the book does not end there. The narrator tells us that taking
a photograph was not sufficient, so the soldiers decided to cut off and
take his head:

The corpse was decapitated and the horrible face, running

with scars and pus, again faced the victors. Afterward they
took it to the coast, where it was greeted by crowds dancing
in the streets in impromptu carnival celebrations. Let science
have the last words. There, in plain sight, was the evidence
of crime and madness. (Backlands, 464)

Photograph and corpse seem, at first sight, to be aspects of an objec-

tifying and fixing vision, capable of turning the other into an object of
study. But they are not merely objects to be gazed upon. Like Medusa,
decapitated and monstrous, Conselheiro’s face gazes back, exposing the
urban spectator’s own barbarity and backwardness, personified by the
crowd at the carnival celebrations. In the brief last chapter, made up of
one single sentence, da Cunha laments the absence of a science to study
the “madness and crimes” of nations.
In describing Conselheiro’s face and image in words, da Cunha
demonstrates a fear of the other, at the same time as he overcomes it
by engulfing the other into the text of the nation. Despite having told
us that words are not enough to describe the horrors of the war, da
Cunha does not show the image of Conselheiro’s corpse (the image of
80 ❘ Chapter 1

horror), but describes it in words, thus reaffirming the power of words.

Os sertões’s ekphrastic closure fits well with what W. J. T. Mitchell calls
“ekphrastic hope”:97 it performs the hope of overcoming otherness
through the assimilation of Conselheiro into the national text. Finally,
it does so by emphasizing the process—thus imbuing the image with
temporal duration—of decomposition of this body, which will be assim-
ilated by the Brazilian land.
Largely based on this ending, some authors have argued that Os
sertões announces, maybe against its own will, the imminent catastro-
phe of the author’s positivist project.98 Instead, I argue that the gesture
of pointing to the impossibility of reading Conselheiro’s face, or this
final inversion in which the republic turns into its barbaric other, is a
condensed image of da Cunha’s entire book, as it inaugurates a project
of a modern nation in the tropics based on the annihilation of alterity.
Da Cunha’s gesture of engulfing Conselheiro’s image within his text,
making him disappear, goes along with both his attempt to assimilate
the sertanejos through their representation as a strong, homogeneous
mestiço type, and with his representation of sertanejos as affectable,
disappearing subjects. The history of formation of a modern Brazilian
nation in Os sertões means both the assimilation of the (plural, varied)
sertanejos as resilient Brazilian mestiço workers, who will be able to
occupy and transform the tropical land, ranging from the dry back-
lands of Bahia to the wet Amazonian forest; and the creation of an
ever-vanishing affectable other of modernity, whose lives do not count
as much because they are always already dying, like the prisoners in
Barros’s photograph.
In a series of three articles for the Rio de Janeiro newspaper O Paiz
in 1904, which were republished in the book Contrastes e confrontos
under the title “Plano para uma cruzada” (“Plan for a Crusade”), da
Cunha reiterates his call for a well-planned and well-informed inter-
vention in Brazil’s dry hinterlands. Taking as an example the work of
colonial scientists and engineers in other regions, who, according to
him, “have shown that it is possible to modify the earth and transfigure
the climate,” da Cunha suggests that “this marvelous enterprise which
is the reconstruction of the land redeems these invasions and their great
brutalities.”99 Without mentioning Canudos, da Cunha suggests that in
the case of Brazil, transforming the land is something that the urban
elites owe to the sertanejos, who have been pushed out of the sertões by
droughts to “heroically” occupy all the backlands of Brazil, including
the Amazon: “we owe our relative opulence to their misery, and the best
 Corpse ❘ 81

of our glories to their disgrace.”100 These underexamined articles shed

light on da Cunha’s entwining of the scientific and the denunciatory
dimensions of Os sertões. They both decry the state’s past brutality and
redeem this violence through the assimilation of traces of destruction
into a history of progress as a “transfiguration” of the land.
However, as Mitchell suggests, “ekphrastic hope rarely occurs with-
out some admixture of ekphrastic fear.”101 Through his ekphrastic de-
scription of Conselheiro’s image, da Cunha merges the face of madness,
or barbarism, with the fears of a land and people that cannot be entirely
controlled. The last image of the book, the ekphrastic presentation of
Conselheiro’s photograph, is no doubt a critique of state violence, and
a reminder of the crimes committed in the name of modernization. It
is simultaneously an attempt to control the meanings of the traces of
violence, inscribing them in a broader history of national progress. As
in other examples of humanitarian and reformist campaigns at the time,
and even today, da Cunha’s appropriation of the traces of the Canu-
dos massacre does not question the dichotomy between civilization and
barbarism; instead, it calls for an end to “barbarism” through a civi-
lizing project based on other forms of violence and subjugation. It is,
ultimately, an attempt to guarantee that Conselheiro’s image would be
subsumed to this narrative of progress, that it would not threaten the
national text with alternative projects and dreams.
This attempt has partly failed because Conselheiro’s photograph, as
well as other parts of the vast archive of Canudos, such as the prophet’s
manuscripts, oral histories, and testimonies from survivors, have been
mobilized in various ways since then. In 2014, for example, the Museu
da República in Rio de Janeiro held a public exhibition of Barros’s pho-
tographs of the conflict. Associating the fight of the canudenses with
other struggles, such as that of Rio de Janeiro’s favela dwellers against
the constant threat of eviction in the name of a supposedly more “ratio-
nal” urban planning, the museum provided a didactic example of how
the trajectory of these photographs has gone beyond the aims of those
that Flávio de Barros and Euclides da Cunha predicted.102
Chapter 2

Scars
Humanitarianism and the Colonial Point of View

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Amazonian region was a

disputed frontier for state expansion and consolidation, as well as for
incorporation into the fold of global market relations, mainly as an ex-
porter of “raw” or “primary” commodities. These mutually constitutive
processes1 were especially rapid and violent in the unstable Amazonian
territory lying at the borders between Peru, Colombia, and Ecuador, in
the context of the vertiginous growth in demand for Amazonian latex in
the second half of the nineteenth century. From 1870 to 1909, British fi-
nance drove the Amazon rubber industry forward, and the bicycle craze
of the 1890s as well as the popularization of the automobile after 1900
further increased the market demand for rubber, which began to out-
strip the means of supply.2 Given that it was not until 1910 that rubber
plantations in Southeast Asia became economically viable, the rubber
trade at the turn of the century depended heavily on the extraction of
wild Amazonian rubber, which generated enormous wealth for a local
and international elite.
While providing raw material for the most technologically advanced
industries at the time, which produced devices that became symbols of
modern life, the process of rubber extraction was not significantly dif-
ferent from the traditional Indigenous modes of rubber harvesting, and
the system of exchange employed resembled the one that had furthered
the commercial exploitation of the Amazon in colonial times. Incredi-

83
84 ❘ Chapter 2

ble stories of fortunes made and lost, of the enslavement of Indigenous

populations, and of assassinations among rubber tappers circulated in
the metropolitan centers. From 1870 to the 1920s, rubber extraction
in the Amazon catalyzed local, national, and global images of progress
and catastrophe, of virtue and moral decay. One sees this captured in
Werner Herzog’s filmic portrayal of Fitzcarraldo, the opera lover who,
in order to access territory rich in rubber that would provide him with
the money to build an opera house in Iquitos, Peru, decides to trans-
port a steamship over a steep hill. The movie, which is named after its
protagonist and claims to be based on the true story of a nineteenth-
century rubber baron, is about the delirious dream of a civilized man in
the jungle. Along with stories about the deadly conflicts that occurred
throughout the vast Amazonian territory, these rubber legends marked
the growth of the modern Amazon towns of Manaus and Iquitos—the
opera house in Manaus is still upheld as the great symbol of the civiliz-
ing of the jungle.
It was also the Amazonian rubber boom that triggered one of the
first and most organized transnational humanitarian campaigns, led by
the Irishman and British consul Roger Casement from 1910 to 1913.3
This chapter examines Casement’s production and circulation of pho-
tographs of Indigenous bodies to provide visible evidence of the crimes
committed by a British-registered private corporation in the Amazonian
region and to build a consensus on the inadmissibility of such violence.
Instead of attempting to assimilate the traces of violence into a teleolog-
ical narrative of modernization, Casement strives to situate these traces,
mostly scars on the bodies of Amazonian Indigenous subjects, in a long
history and extended geography of colonial exploitation. Ultimately,
Casement suggests that the ability to see the ongoing violence inscribed
in these bodies is itself embedded in this history, and that political re-
form depended on the construction of a public that sees and thinks
not from the interests of capital, but from “a humanitarian or altruistic
standpoint.”4
For years, representations of the wounded bodies of Amazonian In-
digenous workers circulated in Amazonian towns such as Iquitos and
Manaus. It was only in 1909, however, that they grabbed the attention
of international liberal public opinion, following the publication of an
article authored by Sydney Paternoster (under his pseudonym, Scruta-
tor) and based on testimony by the American engineer Walter Harden-
burg in the British watchdog magazine Truth.5 The article accused the
British-registered Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC) of using torture
 Scars ❘ 85

and murder to coerce members of Indigenous communities from the Pu-

tumayo region into tapping rubber and of bringing workers from Bar-
bados to work as foremen. Registered in Britain in 1907, PAC took over
the business of the Peruvian company J. C. Arana y Hermanos (Arana
Brothers), known in the region as the Casa Arana. This company was
owned by Julio César Arana, who later became the manager of PAC and
a member of its board.6 Hardenburg reproduced stories that had circu-
lated in the Peruvian town of Iquitos for many years describing flogging,
castration, dismemberment, death from starvation, and various kinds of
torture. In response to the public outrage and pressure from the Brit-
ish Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’ Protection Society, the PAC’s English
shareholders decided in June 1910 to send a five-man commission to
investigate the company’s commercial activities in the Putumayo region.
The British Foreign Office took this opportunity to send its own inde-
pendent representative, Roger Casement.
Casement, then a British consul in Rio de Janeiro and widely re-
spected among antislavery activists for his participation in the Congo
Reform Campaign, was appointed to investigate the allegations against
the Peruvian Amazon Company. Concerning the stories of abuse that he
set out to investigate, Casement affirmed that they seemed “incredible
and unreal, and a gross exaggeration.”7 It is not that Casement did not
believe the grave accusations. In his diary and correspondence, he stated
without hesitation that the rubber trade relied on a “truly devilish sys-
tem of cruelty” (The Amazon Journal, 248), torture, and the extermi-
nation of local Putumayo populations and that it forced its Barbadian
employees, through a system of debt peonage, into working toward that
end.8 Before departing to the region, Casement not only suggested that
he did not have to witness scenes of torture in order to believe the tes-
timonies circulated by the press, but also expressed his conviction that
he would not be able to visually confirm the allegations. In spite of the
abundance of stories and images of atrocity, Casement confessed, in a
letter written in September 1910 in Iquitos, Peru, while he prepared
for a trip to the barracks of La Chorrera and El Encanto, the main sta-
tions of PAC in the Putumayo basin, that he feared he would “not be
able to do more than lay bare a small part only of what actually takes
place” in the region (42). Later his fears were confirmed: in Putumayo,
he found that there was no paper trail, and the employees of the com-
pany mounted a cover-up during his visit. Thus, he did not frame his
mission as a search for truth, but as a quest to produce proof of such
crimes capable of convincing public opinion to press for justice and for
86 ❘ Chapter 2

convicting the perpetrators of what Casement once termed a “crime

against humanity” (178). The double threat posed by the invisibility
and hypervisibility of violence in the Amazon—the proliferation of sto-
ries and images of atrocity that seemed too excessive to be considered
true—posed another problem for Casement, namely, how to address the
transatlantic urban elite in such a way that they felt partially responsi-
ble for these crimes in order to prompt them to act politically to stop
them. In other words, Casement’s evidence had to transcend the local
context of the “tropical jungle,” so often portrayed as a space of horror
or madness,9 and link the discourse of liberalism with that of colonial
oppression, as well as shed light on the responsibility of the expansion-
ist impulse of financial capital and global supply chains for the enslave-
ment of Indigenous peoples.10
In his effort to produce material evidence that could cross the At-
lantic, Casement intertwined various writing and photographic genres,
from the ethnographic monograph to the travel diary, from the human-
itarian photograph of scarred bodies to the anthropometric and the
picturesque portrait. The evidence shows that Casement shot around
seventeen rolls of film during his trip to the Putumayo region. In addi-
tion to his official report to the Foreign Office,11 Casement also wrote
two diaries, widely known today as the Black and White Diaries, and
many letters to his British counterparts. The so-called White Diaries, or,
in Angus Mitchell’s commented edition, The Amazon Journal of Roger
Casement, comprise his writings from September 23 to December 6,
1910, and were offered by Casement as evidence to the chair of the
Select Committee on Putumayo Atrocities in 1913. The Black Diaries—
written in 1903, 1910, and 1911—contain more fragmentary and hur-
ried notes, many narrating the same events that are recounted in the
White Diaries, and were strictly private.12 The Black Diaries became
well known for containing sexually charged notes revealing that Case-
ment liked to have sex with men. In this chapter, I quote more frequently
from Casement’s Amazon Journal, in which he repeatedly mentions the
act of photographing. In addition, there is some evidence to suspect that
Casement was thinking of the future publication of the White Diaries,
which makes them another important source to understand his concept
of evidence. As Mitchell revealed, the consul did offer a copy of the
White Diaries to Charles Roberts, chairman of the Select Committee’s
enquiry, along with other documents of evidence that he felt might be
relevant to the enquiry: “The diary is a pretty complete record and were
I free to publish it would be such a picture of things out there, written
 Scars ❘ 87

down red hot as would convince anyone.”13 Hence, the diaries should
be read as a particular kind of evidence, a document made to persuade
and educate, more than merely as an aide-mémoire.
Although there is a large amount of scholarly work on Casement’s
writings on the Putumayo region, on the role of his diaries in convey-
ing his anti-imperialist position (Burroughs, Mitchell), on the objectivist
language in which he wrote his official report to the Foreign Office, on
the so-called Blue Book (Taussig), on his voluminous correspondence
with English and Irish colleagues (Casement; O’Callaghan), and on his
pioneering use of hundreds of testimonies from victims (Burroughs),14
little has been said about Casement’s photographs. The apparently in-
consistent nature of this archive, as well as the fact that Casement was
not a professional photographer, might partially explain this lack of
scholarly interest. It is this apparent inconsistency that I explore in this
chapter. By examining all the supposedly dissimilar images gathered in
Casement’s archive together as part of his pedagogy of the gaze, in-
stead of separating them into genres or categories, we can better under-
stand his reflections on the role of the representation of the Indigenous
body within a larger process of humanitarian education and political
mobilization.
We have become accustomed to a history of photography that iden-
tifies the development of its technology with an effort to expand the
“empire of the visible” and attributes to early photographers the belief
that with more photographs there is more light, and the more we see
is directly related to the more we know. The history of photography,
however, is not as filled with confidence in light and vision as it appears.
In the case of early humanitarian visual campaigns, there was not only
a perpetual unraveling of photographic authority, but also a continued
suspicion as to whether an image of distant suffering could mobilize
public opinion. In other words, from the first decades of its invention,
photography has triggered debates on the relations between the repro-
ducibility and circulation of photographic images, ethical knowledge,
and political action. Which images have the power of evidence? How
can photographic images assign moral responsibility and mobilize the
public to act politically? Can words help the public read images, and can
images allow people to see what is only described in written testimonies?
In this chapter, I argue that Casement’s photographs on the Putu-
mayo and his remarks on the role of visual perception in his travel
diaries and correspondence shed light on a crucial concept of visual evi-
dence often eclipsed by typical narratives that focus on the drive of early
88 ❘ Chapter 2

photographers to obtain empirical proof. More specifically, Casement’s

archives provide a unique perspective on the relationship between pho-
tographic technology and late nineteenth-century debates on the role of
experience in the production of ethical knowledge. I suggest that while
Casement’s photographic archive reveals a search for visible traces of
the crimes committed against the Indigenous populations—mostly scars
on the bodies of Indigenous Huitoto and Bora men, women, and chil-
dren—he also affirms that these traces are not visible to everyone. In-
stead, he suggests that in order to see the crime inscribed on the bodies
and nature of the Putumayo, one has to look at them from a certain
“point of view,” a perspective determined by collective historical and
political experiences.
As an Irishman, and victim of British imperialism, Casement thought
himself to be in a privileged position to see the traces of otherwise un-
imaginable horrors. Perception and experience were entangled, creating
a tension within Casement’s own official mission: to write an objective
account and gather evidence that could convict those accused of the
atrocities in a court of law. Trying to come to terms with his ambiguous
position as both colonizer and colonized, as both agent and critic of
British imperialism, Casement developed an aesthetic and moral un-
derstanding of photographic evidence. To him, photography should not
only show traces of an incontestable fact—the fact that a crime had
been committed—but also teach the public how to see the (otherwise
invisible) Indigenous body on which this violence was inscribed. The
use of texts is crucial in Casement’s pedagogy. But in contrast to da
Cunha’s ekphrastic inscription of the corpses of Canudos in a teleolog-
ical narrative of the subject’s disappearance, Casement’s texts—diaries,
annotations, captions, letters—are articulated with photographs in
order to compel the viewer to imagine the bodies, lives, and cultures
of Huitoto and Bora people beyond this specific context of violence
that marked their bodies. Sometimes these texts resemble ethnographic
texts, exploring the cultural idiosyncrasies of a group, and emphasizing
their moral and even aesthetic value. Other times, they try to generalize
one particular trace of violence, such as a scar, inserting it into a geo-
politics of exploitation which has its roots in imperialism and capitalist
exploitation, and for which different actors, including the public, have
different levels of responsibility. The images, too, draw from this pool
of genres. I argue that in his pedagogy of the gaze, Casement nego-
tiates with various writing and photographic genres, from the ethno-
graphic monograph to the travel diary, from the anthropometric to the
 Scars ❘ 89

picturesque, from the humanitarian image of violence to the bourgeois

portrait.
The most surprising of these is a series of hardly classifiable portraits
showing Amazonian young men posing for the camera. Neither exam-
ples of the exploited Indigenous worker nor representatives of an ethnic
group, they appear as individuals, posing in unidentifiable scenarios, of-
ten shirtless, bringing about the questions of beauty and attraction that
both help and complicate our understanding of Casement’s position and
relation to the Amazonian people. While Casement’s Black Diaries, a
collection of private notes about diverse everyday matters, including his
sexual encounters with men, have been the subject of several studies,15
Casement’s not so explicit photographic encounters have remained un-
studied.16 Although the focus of this chapter will be on the circulated
images and texts intended for the public gaze, these portraits bring to
the fore the relationship between point of view, the ability to be moved
by an image, and desire.

In dex ic a l E v i d e nc e

I saw many men, and boys too, covered with scars, and often
drew the attention of the others to this, but they were look-
ing for themselves. Some of the men were deeply graved with
the trade marks of Arana Bros, across their bare buttocks,
and the upper thighs, and one little boy of ten was marked.
I called Bishop and we both verified it, and I tried to photo
him. (The Amazon Journal, 142)

Before departing for La Chorrera, the headquarters of the PAC, Case-

ment spent two weeks in Iquitos, where he gathered evidence against
the company, mainly testimonies from former Barbadian employees.
Among these was Frederick Bishop, who, besides having served at
several different rubber stations in the Putumayo, could also speak
Spanish and “a ‘bit’ of Huitoto” (The Amazon Journal, 103). Bishop
ended up joining the investigative commission as Casement’s servant
and interpreter. More than a servant, however, the Barbadian appears
in the Irishman’s diary as a second narrator, a character who punctu-
ates Casement’s observation of people and places with a story—usually
retelling scenes of torture or murder that he had either witnessed or
heard about.
90 ❘ Chapter 2

In the case of Putumayo—as in other examples of accounts of atroc-

ities, genocide, and torture—the witnesses are usually part of a histori-
cally persecuted group and are often identified as the “other,” the moral
negative of the social body to which the testimony is addressed. This
explains why, although playing a crucial role in Casement’s diary and
in the Blue Book, which includes dozens of transcribed testimonies by
other Barbadian men, Bishop’s testimonies are constantly haunted by
a problem of credibility: “It is evident that men of this class, some of
them illiterate, all of humble calling, many demoralized by long years of
savage indulgence, would sometimes be untruthful from fear or unwor-
thy motive” (Casement, “Correspondence,” 288). What provided the
Barbadian testimonies with their truth value—the fact that they were
provided by those who participated in the criminal events because they
had no other option, because they themselves were survivors of the his-
tory of Atlantic slavery—was simultaneously what threatened to make
their voice less credible.17 In addition to conferring on them the status
of semi-uncivilized and illiterate, Casement worried that their narra-
tives suffered from a downside common to all testimonies of atrocities,
namely, the passage of time, forgetting, and systematic obliteration.
Hence Casement’s insistence that he must confirm the charges in
loco, verifying the testimonies of the Barbadian men with “the evidence
of our own eyes and senses” (“Correspondence,” 216). However, Case-
ment is advised by Bishop from the beginning of the trip that he will
not be able to see any misdeeds. According to Bishop, when traveler
“Captain Whiffen was in the Putumayo all his movements were known
and wherever he was going things were ‘cleared up’ before he arrived”
(The Amazon Journal, 98). In addition, the consul later finds out that
there is no bureaucratic archive, no paper trail in the PAC. Casement
refers both to the unaccounted payroll, accounting statements, bills, and
contracts, and to the missing “photograph of all the female staff of the
establishment, and then their names, capacities, salaries, and cost to the
Company or surrounding Indian population given below each place”
(The Amazon Journal, 193). For Casement, this lack of documenta-
tion is evidence of how the “cruelties and barbarities of the conquest
of Peru” have not ceased with the “coming of the Republican form of
government.” In PAC-controlled territory, subjects are not united by a
“common bond of citizenship” and their activities are not regulated by
law (The Amazon Journal, 503).
The secrecy and invisibility encountered by Casement in the Putu-
mayo region mirror those in other Latin American regions controlled
 Scars ❘ 91

by global capitalist enterprises at the beginning of the twentieth century.

As historian Kevin Coleman has argued in his work on the archives of
the 1928 massacre of banana workers in Colombia, concealment was
an integral part of “the mechanisms through which sovereign violence
constituted a field of vision.”18 What one finds in imperialist enterprises
like the PAC, in Peru, or the United Fruit Company, in Colombia, is
the obliteration not only of human beings, but of the memory of their
obliteration.19 Faced with this absence of documentation, Casement
concluded that the only evidence of any crime committed were the scars
inscribed directly on the bodies of “workers”: “The condition of these
people was itself the best proof,” says Casement, “of the truth and often
of the singular accuracy of the Barbados men’s declarations” (“Corre-
spondence,” 248)
Thus, as with antislavery and humanitarian campaigns elsewhere,
Casement relied largely on the scars left on the bodies of the Indigenous
peoples, produced by lashes and other instruments of torture.20 In his
Blue Book, Casement affirms that he inspected, at every rubber station,
the “buttocks and thighs . . . of the many Indians encountered, and in
the great majority of cases . . . the marks of the lash were more or less
visible. Some of these marks were old, some quite recent, and in more
than one case young men were brought to me with raw scars upon their
hinder parts” (“Correspondence,” 261–62). In his diaries, the consul
consistently repeats the referential gesture of pointing to these singular
marks of violence: “I saw,” “I showed,” “There were,” “I photographed.”
In the absence of bookkeeping, the scars seemed the sole archive of the
heinous crimes committed. Using a forensic gaze, Casement describes
these indexical marks as raw or old, deep or shallow, in order to read
the crimes inscribed in them: “It is proof of lawlessness, and of extreme
lawlessness, for the marks are deep” (The Amazon Journal, 133). In The
Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry calls “analogical verification” this recourse
to the visible, material body, in discourses that aim to transform pain
into a political argument.21
Notably, in his campaign to gather the support of the US government
for the Putumayo case, Casement decided to mail Alfred Mitchell Innes
at the British embassy in Washington a photograph of a Huitoto child,
standing up, with his back turned to the camera and showing marks of
flogging (figure 2.1). The authorship of this photo is contested. While it
is stored at Casement’s archive at the National Library of Ireland, the
historian Jordan Goodman, who uncovered important correspondence
between Casement and the British embassy in Washington,22 suggests
92 ❘ Chapter 2

Figure 2.1. “Young boy with his back to the camera, Putumayo region.” Photo-
graph by Roger Casement, c. 1900–1910. Roger Casement Photographic Col-
lection, National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. CAS26A. Image courtesy
of the National Library of Ireland.

that it was taken by PAC’s English auditor Henry Gielgud. There are
other photographs of scarred bodies in Casement’s photographic ar-
chive, but it was this one that he chose to mail, in 1912, to Washington.
In his letter, Casement asks Innes to show the photo to the president
and describes the subject portrayed as “only one of the hundreds of vic-
 Scars ❘ 93

tims . . .”23 The photograph was subsequently forwarded to Henry Janes

at the Division of Latin American Affairs in the US State Department
and to the Foreign Office in London, with a request (which was denied)
to be published with Casement’s Blue Book (1912), his official report on
his investigation of the atrocities in the Putumayo district.24
Although representative, the photographed child is singularly well
suited to represent the innocent victim; he is not only a child but a thin,
vulnerable one. One can see the young boy’s bones as he stands still. In
the background, a horizontal tree trunk crosses the image, at the exact
height of the boy’s scarred buttocks. The texture of the fallen tree, which
serves as a bench for two men, and the horizontal lines of its bark mir-
ror the texture of the boy’s scars. These are the only horizontal elements
of the image, which has four planes: at the front, the boy; then a tree
stump on the left, followed by the trunk-bench where two men, possi-
bly Barbadians, sit; and, lastly, the blurry forest, the unknown horizon
to which the gaze of the boy—who is otherwise trapped between the
photographer and the Barbadians—can escape. Taken from behind the
boy, who crosses his arms in front of his body, the image has a rather
geometrical composition (forming a cross) that ends up emphasizing
the boy’s tree-like verticality. He stands between the Barbadians and the
photographer and hence, the spectator, but we do not know what he
is gazing at. The stump on the left duplicates his legs. Also vertical are
the two machetes that lie beside the Barbadians. The machetes used by
Barbadians to cut their way through the forest were also, according to
their testimonies, used to “flog” Indigenous rubber tappers.
Hence, more than just the subject photographed, what might have
attracted Casement in this image is the way it frames the scars in the
context of a system of forced labor. Regardless of Casement’s own
comments on the absence of modern law and a bureaucratic archive
in the Putumayo, he insisted on pointing out the specificities of the
law that the PAC inscribed and archived on the bodies of the natives.
If he calls the scars the “mark of Arana,” in a reference to Julio César
Arana—the Peruvian who founded Casa Arana, the company that
would later be registered as the Peruvian Amazon Company—it is be-
cause the bodies are treated as property, much like the trees that are
tapped for rubber. Casement reads these marks in tandem with the
words used by local rubber barons to explain their activities in the re-
gion, pointing out the local use of the term conquistar to refer to their
method of gathering an Indigenous workforce: “An Indian tribe once
‘conquered’ becomes an extensive property of the successful assailant,
and this lawless claim is recognized as a right over a widely extended
94 ❘ Chapter 2

region” (“Correspondence,” 254). If this is so, then the lashes, ma-

chetes, Winchesters, and cepos (leg stocks) were the instruments used
by the “conquerors.”
While describing the system of exploitation of rubber in the Putu-
mayo, Casement explains that the people, rather than the trees, are the
main object of the trader’s quest:

Rubber centers [were] situated in the heart of the forest—

wherever, in fact Indians, and not necessarily rubber trees,
were most numerous. The true attraction from the first to
Colombian or Peruvian “caucheros,” . . . was not so much
the presence of the scattered Hevea braziliensis [sic] trees
throughout this remote forest as the existence of fairly nu-
merous tribes of docile, or at any rate of easily subdued In-
dians. (“Correspondence,” 267)

In his diary, after the commission leaves the station to see rubber-
gathering and returns without having seen a single rubber tree, Case-
ment expresses his rage at the Englishmen’s blindness to the obvious
reality of the Putumayo: “The whites in the station did not care a damn
where the trees were,” he says, adding that it was evident that “the only
system was one of sheer piracy and terrorization, and if you lifted the
lash you stopped the supply of rubber” (The Amazon Journal, 150). Un-
der this system of terror, the question is “which will be exhausted first,
the Indians or the rubber trees” (The Amazon Journal, 167). The system
of exploitation of both people and trees is, for Casement, inseparable,
and shows the irrationality of the so-called rubber trade. Although Case-
ment does not spend much time describing the natural environment in
his diary, the wretched trees, as much as the Bora and Huitoto bodies,
bear interrelated signs of violence, like the “branches and creepers they
[starving Indians] had torn down in their search for food” (“Correspon-
dence,” 267). Casement’s affirmation that the photograph of the scarred
Huitoto child shows “only one of the hundreds of victims” is a way of
including it in an archive of the “marks of Arana.” This is a common
strategy in humanitarian campaigns, which aim to make the singular,
indexical trace—the scar and the photograph—generalizable, revealing
a large-scale phenomenon. This mark of subjugation, of enslavement,
is contrasted with the necklace worn by the child and with the forest,
which is almost out of sight, but is still a powerful and unknown pres-
ence in the background.
 Scars ❘ 95

As Michael Taussig has previously explored, Casement’s search for

objective proof of the PAC’s crimes sought to remedy not only the suspi-
cion of the stories told by the Barbadians, but also a lack of Indigenous
testimonies, which Casement repeatedly explained by alluding to the
fact that he lacked a good interpreter and his diplomatic position pro-
hibited him from directly interrogating non-British subjects.25 In their
article about asylum seekers in contemporary France, the social scien-
tists Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Halluin suggest a similar connection
between the transformation of the body of the victim into “the place
that displays the evidence of truth” and the need for an objective fo-
rensic evaluation to substitute for the narrative of the sufferer.26 The
photographs of scars in the Putumayo, taken one century earlier, also
seem to fulfill a desire to have direct access to “truth” through a double
inscription of the referent onto a surface: the lash’s writing on the body
and the body’s inscription on the photographic film.27
However, one should not fall into the trap of interpreting Casement’s
photographs in terms of this opposition between testimony and visual
trace, of subjective and objective. Although it seems reasonable to af-
firm that scars and photographs, and particularly photographs of scars,
play an important role as objective evidence, as Casement tries to en-
dorse the (too easily contestable) testimonies he collects with a detailed
description of wrongdoings that he is unable to witness personally, a
closer look at his photographic and written archives complicates such
claims.28 In his travel diaries, Casement repeatedly remarks that not ev-
erybody was capable of seeing such obvious marks of torture, much less
to identify the crimes inscribed within these scars. Casement’s concept
of evidence not only contradicts a reading of the body of the other as
an objective language of torture, it also emphasizes the viewer’s position
within this system of exploitation.
The photograph of the scarred Huitoto boy places the “incontrovert-
ible scar” in the context of a complex system of exploitation in which
the question of looking, as well as the photographer himself and the
viewer, are implicated. The positioning of the boy between the Barbadi-
ans’ machetes and the photographer relates to another photograph that
Casement sent to the State Department in Washington, as part of an al-
bum of images and texts aimed at convincing the US government to put
pressure on the Peruvian government to protect the Indigenous people
in the Putumayo region29 (figure 2.2). This photograph is a frontal por-
trait of a squalid man identified solely as “one of the [rubber station] At-
enas Indians,” where most Indigenous people have “been systematically
96 ❘ Chapter 2

starved to death.” In the text that accompanies the photograph sent to

the State Department, Casement notes that the man’s backside had been
cut to pieces. As in many of these captions, as well as diary passages, he
describes the moment in which the photograph was taken: he recounts
that he had tried to photograph his scarred back, but the man got away
from him, not without giving him an expression of anger and hate. “No
wonder,” Casement says, “I was another whiteman, another murderer,
another enslaver, to him.”30 In the photograph of the scarred Huitoto
boy, the child’s upright body is constrained between the machete and
the examining, albeit pious, gaze of the white photographer/viewer. As
I will argue in the next section, it is this gaze, or these multiple gazes,

Figure 2.2. “Indigenous man from the rub-

ber station Atenas.” Photograph by Roger
Casement, c. 1900–1910. Roger Casement
Photographic Collection, National Library
of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. CAS26A. Image
courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.
 Scars ❘ 97

more than the evidence that stands before them, that occupy the center
of Casement’s textual and photographic production in the Putumayo.
In Casement’s politics of looking, not even his own gaze is as fixed
and transparent as it might seem: his identity as a British subject and a
“whiteman,” but also as an Irishman and a humanitarian, affect in dif-
ferent, and sometimes contradictory ways his ability to see and act, as
well as his relationship with the people he encounters.

Poin t of V i e w

Putumayo was not Casement’s first contact with Amazonian popula-

tions. In 1908 he had been nominated British consul in Pará, a state
in northern Brazil traversed by the lower Amazon River. After having
worked in the “nasty” port city of Santos, in the state of São Paulo, and
in Rio de Janeiro where, according to the consul, “every one looks a
half-caste and a hybrid,”31 uncivilized people pretending to be European,
“saddened beyond endurance by the burden which they have assumed
of exotic clothing to support the pose,”32 Casement seemed happy to
be among Amazonian people described by him as “having more of the
‘native’ in them—in colour, mien & manner—more affable, amiable and
gentle . . . they are pleasing to look upon and agreeable to talk with.”33
He will later recognize similar characteristics in the Huitoto people he
meets in the Putumayo: a passive gentleness that contrasts with the vi-
olence of the Peruvian rubber lords, as well as an authentic culture, still
(almost) uncorrupted by Western cultural and economic imperialism.
Soon after arriving in Pará, Casement proposed to go on a journey
up the Madeira River, a southern tributary of the Amazon, to “become
acquainted with the conditions of commerce and industry in the fertile
state of Amazonas, the center of the rubber production of the world.”34
Upon his return, Casement accused the Amazonian economy of “veg-
etable filibustering.”35 The consul remarked that the “rubber estates”
had no clear delimitation, and suggested that the rights to the land in
the Amazon had been acquired by force, resembling the usurpation of
Indigenous lands in colonial times.36
Although the Iquitos-based newspapers La Sanción and La Felpa
had published reports in 1907 accusing rubber traders in the Putumayo
region of crimes against the Indigenous populations that exceeded by
far the violence described by Casement in his 1908 report on the Brazil-
ian rubber business, it was only in 1909, after the article in the London-
98 ❘ Chapter 2

based magazine Truth came out, that the consul was informed of the
Putumayo case. The activities in the Putumayo region had a special
appeal to British public opinion. In 1907, the same year that Iquitos
newspapers denounced the establishment of a regime of terror in the
region, the rubber baron Julio Cesar Arana, owner of the Casa Arana,
attracted British investment to his business and registered the company
in England under the name Peruvian Amazon Rubber Co. The word
“Rubber” was excluded from the name in 1908, in what might have
been an attempt to dissociate the transnational company from the crim-
inal records of the rubber trade.
The article that placed the PAC under scrutiny was based on tes-
timony by Walter Hardenburg, who had traveled with his American
colleague Walter Perkins to the Putumayo that same year, in the middle
of the conflicts between Arana and the Colombian caucheros (rubber
gatherers). Their trip, which began in Colombian territory, was part
of a project to construct a railway that would link the Brazilian town
of Madeira with Mamoré in Bolivia. The Americans, however, never
reached their destination. While hosted in a Colombian rubber station,
they witnessed an attack by the PAC’s employees on the Colombian
caucheros and ended up being detained by the Peruvian rubber traders
and stripped of all their belongings. Although Hardenburg himself had
only witnessed violent acts perpetrated by the PAC’s employees against
Colombian traders, he also reproduced detailed descriptions of the mis-
treatment of Indigenous subjects based on testimonies he collected in
Iquitos, as well as on the articles published by the Iquitos-based investi-
gative journalist Benjamin Saldaña Rocca in 1907.37
In the weeks following the publication of the Truth article, many
British periodicals, such as the Saturday Review, The Spectator, The
Economist, and The Nation, and magazines such as the India Rubber
Journal and the Anti-Slavery Reporter and Aborigines’ Friend, pub-
lished texts on the Putumayo. Given the scandal involving a British-
owned company and British men from Barbados, the British foreign
secretary, Sir Edward Grey, was persuaded to send Sir Roger Casement
as an independent representative to verify the truth of the stories of vio-
lence narrated by Hardenburg. The Irishman was already based in Latin
America and had acquired credibility and support from the Anti-Slavery
and Aborigines’ Protection Society, from British public opinion, and
more importantly, from the Foreign Office. Casement’s travel in 1903
to the upper Congo to investigate stories of abuse related to the rubber
trade there had played a crucial part in the British humanitarian—and
 Scars ❘ 99

pro-free trade—campaign that helped change the Congo’s situation,

and culminated with its reannexation to Belgium in 1908.
Michael Taussig has defined Casement’s Putumayo Blue Book as an
“objectivist fiction,” capable of turning the dramatic narrative pub-
lished in the Truth article (as well as others that circulated at the time)
into a credible document.38 If this is so, Casement had been developing
this style at least since his Congo mission. Government officials had
praised Casement’s Congo report for its dispassionate and unembel-
lished style.39 The report was an important asset in the British campaign
against King Leopold’s brutal regime in the Congo, a campaign that
did not question the principles of colonial rule per se, but allowed the
defense of a more humane, that is, British, version of Empire.
In the Putumayo case, however, British participation in the crimes
was more intricate than in the Congo, for not only had the English
shareholders failed to acknowledge what had been going on for years,
while they profited from the forced labor of the natives, but, in addition,
British subjects from Barbados, employed by the PAC to force Indige-
nous peoples into work, were themselves implicated in the atrocities as
both victims and perpetrators. Thus, the Putumayo presented a valu-
able opportunity for Casement to denounce the violence of the so-called
New Imperialism that commenced in the 1880s, and to connect the
destruction of Amazonian Indigenous communities to the plight of all
colonized peoples, including the Irish.40
Casement’s dedication to the Irish cause and his resentment of Brit-
ish imperialism were certainly the source of numerous contradictions
in his work as a British consul. On the one hand, he maintained a ve-
hement criticism of Iberian colonialism in general, which, in contrast
to the British version, “came not to till the soil, or possess it or found
a great civilized people—but merely serves to grow individually rich
on the forced labor of the Indians whom they captured and have held
for centuries” (The Amazon Journal, 295). The “Black Legend” that
demonized the Spanish Empire provided at the time a powerful ideo-
logical sanction for English involvement in the New World.41 This po-
sition seems to prevail in Casement’s official Putumayo report for the
Foreign Office, which carries few traces of his discomfort with British
imperialism—and this could hardly be otherwise, since the document
was not only produced under the aegis of the Foreign Office but was
edited by its personnel.
On the other hand, Casement keeps a separate document, his Am-
azon Journal, in which he adopts a slightly different position. The
100 ❘ Chapter 2

opposition between a more “civilized” British Empire and a more “bar-

barian” Latin empire does not entirely disappear, but a new opposi-
tion, in which there is no room for a humane imperialism or even for
any kind of legal economic exploitation of the Indigenous workforce,
emerges. In some passages, the problem appears to be the failure of the
Peruvian state to regulate the activities of a transnational corporation
in the region. After narrating the murder of an Indigenous man, Case-
ment asks: “where is the law and authority of Peru in this region that
this British Company has asserted to be in supreme existence here?”
(The Amazon Journal, 134). In other passages, Casement argues that
Indigenous men and women would never “abandon their forest free-
dom voluntarily” to work for rubber if they had not been forced to do
so, thus suggesting that all labor in the Amazon is necessarily imposed
through violence (79). Moreover, in his diary Casement constantly dis-
tinguishes himself (as an Irishman) from his English counterparts (PAC
representatives in the investigative commission), separating colonized
from colonizers and implicating the British Empire in the oppression of
both Amerindians and the Irish people.
In order to build this opposition, Casement frequently notes that
the representatives of the PAC spoke “from the point of view of the
self-interest of a trader—never from anything that could be termed a
humanitarian or altruistic standpoint” (The Amazon Journal, 76). The
consul repeatedly rages at his British colleagues’ lack of empathy and
their blindness, that is, at their inability to see what was very clear to
him: that there was no industry and no labor in the Putumayo, only a
system of slavery and extermination. That is why he feels the need to
constantly correct their use of language: the Indigenous people are not
employees, the “gifts” they receive are not payments, the contract with
the Barbadian men has no validity, because neither Barbadians nor Hui-
totos and Boras have free will.

They say in one breath it is slavery, and then that it is a

“commercial transaction,” that the Indian “owes” money to
the Company. And this in face of all the lashes and scars,
to say nothing of the murders, we have witnessed the last
few days, or have been directly informed of. (The Amazon
Journal, 176)

Faced with this shifting and imprecise language, the narrator of The
Amazon Journal is constantly trying to convince the PAC’s commis-
 Scars ❘ 101

sioners to “fix” their “view” of things. Not in vain, Gielgud, the greatest
example of English blindness given by the consul, is described as some-
one who is not necessarily evil, but weak and inconsistent: “This is very
much the point of view of Gielgud, so far as I can gather, that he has
any fixed point of view at all. His powers of observation are certainly
not acute, and he cannot, so far as I can see, think very clearly” (The
Amazon Journal, 176). Interestingly, Gielgud is the only other person
who appears in Casement’s diary carrying a camera. Even with camera
in hand, he still cannot see what the narrator sees.
Just as words are unstable, so are the marks of violence inscribed on
the bodies of Huitoto and Bora subjects. In his diary, Casement repeat-
edly stresses that even when faced with the most empirical “proof” of
violence, the marks of lashes on naked bodies, his English colleagues
cannot acknowledge them. Hence the constant need to point at these
visible traces: “Indeed the two broad patches on one man’s buttocks
looked like burns. They were the scars of an extra deep cutting of the
lashes. All of us saw them, but I broke silence, and said, at large, ‘Two
very incontrovertible burns, I must say’” (The Amazon Journal, 198).
These images are exposed and yet they have to be made visible. They are
not only, to use Didi-Huberman’s words, snatched from the “real,” but
“from human thought in general, thought from ‘outside.’”42 For Case-
ment, the empirical and the subjective, what goes on in and outside
the human mind cannot be thought of separately, since perception is
affected by moral and historical variables.
In his important study on social democracy and progressivism, the
historian James Kloppenberg argues that some of the most important
writers in Europe and the United States from 1870 to 1920 shared a
belief that experience was at the root of questions of knowledge and
moral responsibility. Kloppenberg studies how European and American
political theorists ranging from Wilhelm Dilthey, Thomas Hill Green,
and William James to John Dewey, and socialists like the Fabians Be-
atrice and Sidney Webb—who not only knew Casement, but also wrote
a letter supporting him when he was tried for treason in Britain in
1916—defended the idea that knowledge “is an experienced relation
of things,”43 entangled in a web of social life, and is always subject to
correction. Challenging both idealism and empiricism, their concepts of
experience preceded the separation between subject and object.
Their emphasis on experience helps explain Roger Casement’s affir-
mation that, before any empirical proof of a wrongdoing, there should
be a predisposition to accept this truth:
102 ❘ Chapter 2

When I said to him at Manaos “Do, please, impress this

point of view on the others” and he answered “But it is fact,
not opinion we want,” I had said “Yes, but much, very much
depends on what point of view a man holds of this sort of
thing. Facts fit in with it, or can be made to.” (The Amazon
Journal, 182–83)

Thus, Casement believed that, if based on experience, this point of view

could change. Here, one can compare Casement to his contemporary,
the American reformer and photographer Lewis Hine, who was known
for his photographs of child labor and immigration. According to histo-
rian Alan Trachtenberg, Hine, who would later be identified as a found-
ing figure of American “documentary photography,” used his camera
not only to produce evidence of inhuman exploitation, but “to teach an
art of social seeing.”44
Hine’s aim had points in common with that of the British Anti-
Slavery Society, with which Casement worked, even though Hine’s
work was located within the American national scope: to appeal to the
consciousness of a liberal public opinion so that it would push for legal
reform. Evidently, Casement did not have the same experience or dedi-
cation to photography as Hine, nor did he develop an aesthetic theory
of humanitarian photography. Still, the Irish consul’s conception of the
ability to see the suffering of others as something learned does parallel
Hine’s “concern with the process of seeing within the larger process
of social ‘betterment’” (Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs,
192). The context of imperialism and Casement’s concept of seeing as
“point of view,” however, have different implications, especially when
considered in relation to Casement’s involvement in the Irish national-
ist movement.
In the quest to foster a critique of the transatlantic rubber industry,
“point of view” emerges as both a spatial and historical concept, refer-
ring to the geopolitical location from which one sees and speaks. It was
from the point of view of a colonized Irish subject that Casement was
able to see what the British could not. In a passage from a letter he sent
in April 1907 to his historian friend Alice Stopford Green, Casement
affirmed that while in the Congo, he had realized that his knowledge
of Irish history helped him to understand what was going on there: “I
knew the Foreign Office would not understand the thing, for I realized
that I was looking at this tragedy with the eyes of another race of people
once hunted themselves.”45
 Scars ❘ 103

This passage, frequently cited by scholars to demonstrate the connec-

tion between Casement’s Irish nationalism and his work in the Congo
and Putumayo, also reveals the importance of “looking” for Casement’s
conception of knowledge, or “understanding.” The question is: How,
based on his privileged (or rather unprivileged) point of view, could
Casement work to teach the European colonizers to see the bodies of
the colonized as human bodies, Indigenous people as subjects of rights,
and Huitotos and Boras as victims of unjust treatment?

The Ethn ogr a p hi c Ga z e

Despite his own depiction of Putumayo as a hellish space, Casement was

aware that descriptions of the region as barbarous or uncivilized con-
stituted duplicity in legitimizing the use of force to convert its “savage”
populations into civilized “laborers.” For example, Rafael Reyes, the pres-
ident of Colombia between 1904 and 1909 (whom Casement cites fre-
quently), affirmed in 1874 that his pioneer voyage to the Putumayo46 had
brought “hundreds of steamers carrying industry and civilization to the
virgin forests where cannibals formerly wandered.”47 Similar discourses
relating the savagery of the jungle to the cannibalism of its inhabitants
are seen in the PAC’s propaganda to protect its monopoly and defend its
activities in the region. In a letter from December 1909, archived with
Casement’s papers at the National Library of Ireland, the rubber baron
César Arana defends himself from the accusations published in Truth,
asserting that some of the PAC’s employees “were sacrificed at the canni-
bal feasts of certain tribes.”48 The British consul not only underlines this
passage, but ironically notes, in its margin: “How naughty!” Casement
thought, even before entering the Putumayo region, that his pedagogical
work consisted in defending the humanity, innocence, and even docility
of the Indigenous population, as well as convincing public opinion of the
barbarity of “‘civilized’ intruders” (“Correspondence,” 227).
This task seemed to be an especially difficult one in the supposedly
“lawless” Putumayo—a border region, disputed by two nations and,
according to Casement, ruled by none. Collecting evidence of the mal-
treatment of the local population was as important as controlling the
narrative that explained it. This is obvious, for example, in one of the
iconic images of the horrors of the Putumayo, the photograph of a
squalid dead body, which was published in Hardenburg’s book The Pu-
tumayo: The Devil’s Paradise (1912).49 The image had been circulated
104 ❘ Chapter 2

in previous years by both Peruvians and Colombians as a proof of the

other’s crimes (figure 2.3).
In her discussion of images of pain, Susan Sontag gives several exam-
ples of how those on different sides of violent conflicts exploit the vol-
atility of photographic images, reminding us that an image that evokes
pain and death is not necessarily capable of attributing political respon-
sibility.50 Both the manager of the PAC, Julio César Arana, and his ac-
cusers, such as Hardenburg, seem to have believed in the importance of
controlling this instability of photographs to mobilize public opinion.
During the first two decades of the twentieth century, Arana commis-
sioned different photographers and filmmakers to portray the peaceful
harmony between “Whites” and “Indians” in the region controlled by his
company, including the Portuguese documentary filmmaker Silvino San-
tos, the Spanish photographer Manuel Rodriguez Lira, and the French-
man Eugène Robuchon. The fate of Robuchon’s papers—which were
partly recovered after the explorer disappeared in the jungle—is a re-
vealing example of how the Putumayo spurred a war of images.51 Some
accused Arana of having killed the ethnologist after he photographed
floggings of Indigenous rubber tappers. The Peruvian rubber baron,

Figure 2.3. “An incident of the Putumayo: Indian woman condemned to death
by hunger on the Upper Putumayo.” Photographer unknown, n.d. Reproduced
from Walter E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil’s Paradise: Travels in the
Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atrocities Committed upon
the Indians Therein, edited by Reginald Enock (London: T. F. Unwin, 1912), 52.
 Scars ❘ 105

however, accused an Indigenous group of the killing and supported the

publication of Robuchon’s found photographs in a book that stressed
the civilizing role played by the PAC.52 In one of Robuchon’s published
photographs, for example, Indigenous women dressed in western clothes
are portrayed as workers (figure 2.4). Taken from a low angle, the photo-
graph edifies and elevates the workers, emphasizing the gesture of build-
ing. They are, as the caption explains, carrying construction materials to
build the civilized, productive space that we see in the background.
The civilized Indigenous workers portrayed by Robuchon contrast
with photographs of “savage” Indigenous subjects that circulated at the
time. In one of these images—a montage—a decapitated head appears
among Indigenous children, insinuating a cannibal feast. In his diary,
Casement noted frequently how the PAC used cannibalism as part of
the propaganda to protect its monopoly in the region. In the context of
the Putumayo image war, if public opinion was to be mobilized, it was
necessary to strictly identify both perpetrator and victim, to properly
attribute responsibility.

Figure 2.4. “Chorrera: Cargando materiales de construcción” (“Chorrerra: Car-

rying construction materials”). Photograph by Eugène Robuchon, n.d. Repro-
duced from Eugène Robuchon, En el Putumayo y sus afluentes (Lima: Imprenta
La industria, 1907), 35.
106 ❘ Chapter 2

This explains why Casement constantly tries to discriminate between

false and true images by describing characters and their physiognomic
traits, judging intentions and “hearts,” and identifying culprits or levels
of culpability. Everyone’s position in this system of exploitation must be
determined, including his own. Casement reminds himself of his own
responsibility in the enslavement of the Huitotos and Boras when he
realizes that his clothes are being washed by unpaid women or that the
house where he stays is the product of Indigenous forced labor:

I said that it was all very well for Tizon to say I was his guest,
or the Company’s guest, I was really the wretched Indians’
guest. They paid for all. The food we eat, and the wine we
drank, the houses we dwelt in, and the launch that conveys
us up river—all came from their emaciated and half-starved,
and well flagellated bodies. (The Amazon Journal, 161–62)

This gesture of recognizing his own role in the multilayered, racialized,

and gendered exploitation of Indigenous work is also what differen-
tiated Casement from the other commissioners. The Irishman usually
describes the culpability of the Englishmen as being based on blind-
ness, omission, and greediness. The PAC’s English shareholders ignored
the accusations that had been circulating in the press against their own
company, and in the meantime they profited from the Indigenous peo-
ple’s work. They averted their gaze because they had an interest in do-
ing so. This strategic characterization of the Englishmen as blind and
selfish, not cruel, could more easily be extended to the public addressed
by Casement’s images and texts, thus constituting political action to
stop the exploitation of Indigenous work as a moral obligation. As the
sociologist Luc Boltanski has argued, connection through omission en-
ables the consolidation of distant responsibility with the public: “the
most distant spectator continues to draw a personal or collective profit
from the suffering of the unfortunate to the extent that he is a member
of a nation whose collective wealth is the result of the exploitation of
poor nations.”53
Then there were the local agents. The Barbadians had been partici-
pants in past crimes, but they were also themselves victims, obligated
by the debt-peonage system and the use of force to flog and even mur-
der Putumayo people. Their guilt is further expiated by their testimony:
they are the brave men who “testified as to the deeds they had wit-
nessed, the illegal acts they had themselves performed under orders of
 Scars ❘ 107

their Chiefs of Section, and the character of the system of ‘trade’ they
were put to enforce over the Indians” (The Amazon Journal, 125). The
“real criminals” are the Peruvian rubber barons who forced their em-
ployees to commit brutal acts against the local Indigenous communities,
or the ambiguously defined “supreme agents or heads who directed this
system of wrong-doing, and enslavement of the Indians, and drew their
profit from it” (126, 128). Even among the PAC’s Peruvian managers,
however, there were different levels of monstrosity, the worst of them
being Normand—the manager of the last station Casement visited—
who is described as a “sickly, pale, lame youth, flushing easily, with a
washed out skin and a profile and nose like Lefroy, the murderer of my
boyhood” (197). On the opposite side of the spectrum are the true vic-
tims: the “docile Indians.”
Comparing himself to Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective cre-
ated by his friend Arthur Conan Doyle (The Amazon Journal, 192),
Casement both produces visible evidence of the crimes committed in
the PAC-controlled region and constantly analyzes people’s reactions
to the things seen as a form of evidence of their implication in such
crimes. It is in this context that he criticizes the English commissioner
Gielgud for taking photographs that are nothing more than clichés:
“The Commission are now ‘inspecting’ outside, and Gielgud taking
happy snapshots of interesting natives with painted faces and sticks in
their noses” (193). Despite this comment, Casement himself took doz-
ens of what could be called “happy snapshots of interesting natives.”
In 1912, after the publication of the Blue Book, some of these images
appeared in a few newspapers (though no authorship was attributed),
including the Daily Mirror and the Illustrated London News. In the
Illustrated London News, images of “natives” were accompanied by
quotations from Casement’s report (figure 2.5). One photo shows, ac-
cording to the caption, a Huitoto chief and his wife “dressed for a
dance.”54 Instead of photos of scarred or underfed Huitotos, we see im-
ages of “ethnographic interest,” portraying men and women in typical
costumes and ritual situations.
Casement would frequently take several shots of the same subject
from different angles. One of these subjects is the “man holding a spear”
(figure 2.6). As with ethnographic photographs seeking to give a de-
tailed picture of a figure in ritual garment, his full body is located at the
center of the frame. The man looks directly into the camera and poses
against palm leaves that occupy the upper third of the image, adorn-
ing his head as a kind of headdress. On his right is the image of an-
Figure 2.5. “30,000 Lives; 4,000 Tons of Rubber: The Putumayo Revelations.”
Illustrated London News, July 20, 1912, p. 101. Copyright © The British Li-
brary Board.
 Scars ❘ 109

other man who also seems to be dressed in a typical garment, but who
is looking in a different direction (maybe at Gielgud’s camera?). This
man is partially cut out of the picture. On his left side, children seem
to accidentally leak into the frame. One of them, dressed in western
clothes, watches (like us) the Huitoto men, while the other, in uniform,
glances at the photographer. The two sides of the photo-ethnographic
encounter become visible through their eyes. At the same time, the ideal
ethnographic object is somehow contaminated. The “civilizing role” of
the company is included in the frame through the contrast between the
boys and the men.
Another photograph of the same encounter is published in the Il-
lustrated London News (figure 2.7). It seems like a photograph made
after (or before) the pose. Now, the Huitoto man does not occupy the
center of the image. The man on his right turns his body to look at the
children, who gaze back at him. But more importantly, we can now see
that the same boy in uniform from the other photograph is carrying a
gun. He is probably one of the muchachos, the young boys kidnapped
and trained to serve the PAC, or, in Casement’s words, “armed and exer-
cised in murdering their own unfortunate countrymen. Boras murdering
Huitotos and vice versa for the pleasure, or supposed profit, of their
masters” (The Amazon Journal, 136). Seen together, these images create
a tension in the ethnographic, or, more broadly, the colonial encounter.
When explaining the role of the muchachos, Casement concludes: “this
is called ‘civilising’ the wild savage Indians!” (136).
In addition to framing the contrast between the ideal native and the
muchacho, this photograph also foregrounds why it was so important
to establish the culpability of the “civilizer” in the horrors of the Putu-
mayo. By employing these young boys in the atrocities, the PAC made
the system of labor exploitation even more perverse and confusing. Are
these boys murderers or victims, Casement asks (The Amazon Journal,
134). Casement’s ethnographic interest in part answers this question.
In his quasi-ethnographic paper “The Putumayo Indians,” published in
1912 in The Contemporary Review, he presents a defense of the In-
digenous communities of the region, portraying them as morally supe-
rior, averse “to bloodshed” (“The Putumayo Indians,” 320), “notably
intelligent” (323), “chaste and exceedingly modest” (325), and “social-
ist by temperament, habit, and possibly, age-long memory of Inca and
pre-Inca precept” (322).55 This defense is a response, on the one hand,
to the long-standing representation of the Putumayo Indigenous peo-
Figure 2.6. “Man holding a spear, surrounded by onlookers.” Photograph by
Roger Casement, c. 1900–1910. Roger Casement Photographic Collection,
National Library of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. CAS18C. Image courtesy of the
National Library of Ireland.
 Scars ❘ 111

Figure 2.7. “‘A mild and inoffensive people’: Huitotos men of the Putumayo
district.” Detail from “30,000 Lives; 4,000 Tons of Rubber: The Putumayo Rev-
elations.” Illustrated London News, July 20, 1912, p. 101. Copyright © The
British Library Board.

ple as dangerous cannibals, an allegation that justified the “civilising”

presence of the PAC in the region. On the other hand, Casement’s eth-
nographic representation of the Bora and Huitoto also contributes to
positing a moral opposition. Contrary to the Peruvians, the Amazonian
Indigenous peoples were averse to bloodshed. But also, contrary to the
British and other imperialist nations (and thus maybe to the reading
112 ❘ Chapter 2

public), they “had no desire to enrich [themselves] at the expense of

[their] neighbor” (322).
It was also through ethnography that Casement built a transatlan-
tic geography and history of colonialism, slavery, and environmental
degradation, within which he sided with the colonized. Later, he would
refer to the Irish peasants of Connemara as “white Indians.” This ex-
pression appeared in a letter Casement sent to the Irish Independent on
May 20, 1913, in response to the newspaper’s coverage of an epidemic
of typhoid and typhus in the region, which Casement called the “Irish
Putumayo.”56 He also compared, in a text written in 1911, soon after
his Putumayo trip, the debt-peonage system used in Latin America with
the Ireland–England relationship:

The hacendado holds the peon by a debt bondage. His palace

in Mexico City, or on the sisal plains of Yucatan, is reared
on the stolen labor, whose bondage is based on a lie. The ha-
cendado keeps the books and debits the slave with the cost
of the lash that scourges him into the fields. Ireland is the
British peon, the great peon of the British Empire.57

This ethnographic portrayal of the Indigenous Putumayo peoples helps

to frame the violent muchacho as a result of capitalist modernity’s “civ-
ilizing” mission. Although they are naturally averse to bloodshed, co-
lonial oppression has despoiled them of these natural characteristics.
Instead of progress, civilization has brought about destruction and
moral degradation. However, the muchacho is not only a corrupted ver-
sion of the “noble Indian.” Once asked about a muchacho he had “pho-
toed,” learning afterwards that he had “killed plenty of men,” Casement
asked: “when later on he ‘revolts,’ who will kill him?” (The Amazon
Journal, 136). Portraying the muchachos through the lenses of the Irish
cause, Casement brings up a different, rebellious, temporality. We do
not have to know that Casement was executed for treason in 1916 for
trying to provide arms to the Irish rebels, in order to understand his
views on a legitimate, rebellious, use of violence. He makes this clear in
a description of a conversation with O’Donnell, a rubber station chief
who showed him on a map where some Huitotos had set fire to Colom-
bian houses, and the “last risings” against his authority had taken place:
“I only said ‘more power to the Indians’ but as he is not an Irishman, in
spite of his name, he did not follow” (229).
 Scars ❘ 113

C olon ia l Icono gr a p h y

I never saw gentler faces, or more agreeable expressions on

any faces than on those of the two young men in their truly
extraordinary garb. I shall get Arédomi painted and clothed
in it at home, and have him photographed and presented to
Dilke and the Anti-Slavery people at a great meeting! That will
be an idea to enlist sympathy. (The Amazon Journal, 449–50)

Alongside the ethnographic arguments in favor of the Amazonian peo-

ple, which should appeal to the public’s intellect, Casement also fell
back on European artistic iconography to appeal to the viewers’ aes-
thetic sensibilities. More than suffering or potentially rebellious bod-
ies, beautiful figures should be used to provoke humane sentiments and
disinterested support from British public opinion. This is why Case-
ment decided to take two young Huitoto men, Omarino and Ricudo,
alias Arédomi, to England, where they were photographed, depicted in
painted portraits, and exhibited in social events, including meetings in
the Foreign Office and with the Anti-Slavery Society.
Lesley Wylie, who identified two photographs of Omarino and
Ricudo at the Cambridge University archive and published the first thor-
ough study of their stay in London, argues that Casement’s exhibition
of these young men reveals his complicity with “what Timothy Mitch-
ell has called the ‘machinery of representation’ dominant in European
imaginings of its racial and cultural Others.”58 In fact, it is reasonable to
affirm that Casement’s practices and discourses were embedded in the
colonial tradition, as is evident in his infantilization of the Indigenous
young men, whom he portrays as docile and obedient, and as needing
the patronage of a European man. The exhibition of “native specimens”
in Europe was not an uncommon colonial practice,59 and Casement’s
own methods of “acquiring the natives”—Omarino was “bought” with
“a shirt and a pair of trousers” (The Amazon Journal, 340), and Ricudo,
a married nineteen-year-old, was won at cards—are revealing of a com-
plicity with the colonialism he criticized. Casement’s plain affirmation
that he “bought” Omarino and Ricudo, however, is not without an
ironic awareness of the commodification of the Indigenous bodies that
he so vehemently criticized: “It is really buying the freedom of a slave,”
Casement says, adding that his intention “is that by getting some of
these unknown Indians to Europe I may get powerful people interested
114 ❘ Chapter 2

in them and so in the fate of the whole race out here in the toils” (342).
My main aim here is not to confirm or contest Casement’s (not so)
hidden complicities with imperialist practices and traditions, but rather
to examine how the circulation, exhibition, and portrayal of Omari-
no’s and Ricudo’s bodies were one more among the numerous facets of
Casement’s concept of evidence.
Notably, the trajectory of Casement’s interest in Omarino begins
with a photographic encounter:

I sent to the store for a case of salmon and distributed tins

galore to men, women, boys and mites . . . They clicked their
tongues and lips with joy poor souls and I photo’d a good
many of them. They are nice bright-looking people—and I
picked one dear little chap out and asked if he would come
with me. He clasped both my hands, backed up to me and
cuddled between my legs and said “yes.” (The Amazon Jour-
nal, 340)

Casement could not only see, as an Irishman, that the Huitoto were
victims of British imperialism, he also seemed especially sensitive to the
formal qualities of their bodies. This is especially the case in his encoun-
ter with Ricudo, which also begins with an image:

I bathed in afternoon and a boy or young man came and sat

on the bank . . . This young man is a muchacho of Sur and
I had photo’d him along with others as they brought rubber
in. I had noticed him looking at me with a sort of steadfast
shyness and as I gave him and others salmon his face flushed.
He now came and eyed me in the same way and when I
came out from my swim he followed me up to the house
and begged me to take him away with me . . . He is a fine
youth, quite strong and shapely with a true Indian face. (The
Amazon Journal, 341)

In both the affectionate cuddle with Omarino and the erotic bathing
scene with Ricudo, photography mediates Casement’s awareness of the
aesthetic qualities of the subjects he photographed, as well as his bodily
interaction with them. He reveals that upon seeing Ricudo he imme-
diately thought that he “would make a fine type for Herbert Ward,”
a sculptor Casement had met in the Congo who had made statues of
 Scars ❘ 115

Congolese chiefs (The Amazon Journal, 342). Ricudo seemed to trans-

late the ideal aesthetic of the Amazonian “type”: “He has the fine, long
strong hair of the Indians, the cartilage of the nose and the nostrils
bored for twigs and a handsome face and shapely body . . . a splendid
shape of bronze” (342).
Casement’s attraction transcended the individual sphere: he could see
Ricudo’s beautiful shape of bronze and wanted to teach others to see the
same. Hence, his idea to “enlist Ward (and France) on the side of these
poor Indians and to do it through their artistic sense” (The Amazon
Journal, 342). But instead of taking the Huitotos to Ward, Casement
took “these splendid bodies” to have them painted by William Rothen-
stein, whom Casement met through the antislavery campaigner E. D.
Morel. In the unfinished painting, the Huitoto young men appear in
traditional clothing, standing against a flat landscape.60 As Wylie has
noted, Ricudo, the older one, wears the same necklace that Casement
had photographed him with before (figure 2.8). While Casement’s pho-
tograph attempts to simulate Ricudo’s natural habitat by portraying
him in typical clothes and locating him in the woods, Rothenstein, who
was an important link between avant-garde artists in London and Paris
in the 1890s, paints the young men removed from any semblance of the
Amazonian landscape.61 Similarly to how he paints portraits of Euro-
pean figures of the time, Omarino and Ricudo appear detached from an
impressionist background. Rothenstein emphasizes what, according to
him, made the Huitotos “rare models,” namely, their colors: “their bod-
ies were a rich golden color, and their dress simple—but a few brilliant
feathers strung together.”62
While sitting at Rothenstein’s studio, Omarino and Ricudo were
interviewed by the Daily News. Meeting at Rothenstein’s studio was
convenient. The journalist could describe how he “found them in native
dress” and appreciate “their brown bodies.”63 Hence, the “interview”
already contained in itself Rothenstein’s painting of the Huitoto boys.64
Through painting, photography, and writing, the image of Ricudo with
his “necklace of tiger teeth” (more likely of jaguar teeth) envisioned by
Casement was being reproduced and circulated.
While Rothenstein’s painting would appeal to the aesthetic sense and
artistic taste of the public, the two Huitotos were subjected, in another
studio, to an ethnographic photo shoot. This time, the young men were
stripped of all props. The photographer John Thomson, seen today as
a founder of the documentary tradition for his series of photographs
of London’s street life, took front and profile portraits of Omarino and
116 ❘ Chapter 2

Figure 2.8. “Ricudo in the woods.” Photograph

by Roger Casement, c. 1900–1910. Roger Case-
ment Photographic Collection, National Library
of Ireland, Dublin, Ireland. CAS23D1. Image
courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

Ricudo against a plain backdrop, as prescribed by the globally dis-

tributed anthropometric photography systems of the time (figures 2.9
and 2.10).65 Instead of presenting a picturesque image of the Indige-
nous body, anthropometric photography involved the use of a strict
methodology that aimed to create homogeneous surfaces, in a project
of assimilating bodies as data in a vast system of comparison. In addi-
tion to putting forward a racial classification and a physiological vision
of culture, such archives also stemmed from a desire for completeness:
the mapping of all human types and cultures. This was the era of “sal-
vage anthropology”66 among ethnographers, who felt that their subjects
were rapidly disappearing from the globe as a result of the expansion
of civilization, and photography was a way of preserving “difference.”
Figure 2.9. “Omarino and Ricudo (front).” Photograph by John Thompson,
c. 1911. Mounted Haddon Collection. P 9301.ACH1. Reproduced by permis-
sion of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.

Figure 2.10. “Omarino and Ricudo (profile).” Photograph by John Thompson,

c. 1911. Mounted Haddon Collection. P 9032.ACH1. Reproduced by permis-
sion of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology.
118 ❘ Chapter 2

In his travels through Ireland, Casement had also manifested an eth-

nographic interest in the recollection and preservation of colonized cul-
tures. In the case of the Putumayo, this anthropological impulse toward
preservation was more evidently influenced by racial theories of the
time. Although not in a systematic way, Casement frequently criticized
the Peruvian “halfbreeds” who were, according to him, morally inferior
to “pure” “Blacks” and “Indians.” In his notes for Casement’s Amazon
Journal, Mitchell suggests that his antithetical physical descriptions of
evil—monstrous perpetrators and timid victims—were influenced by
Cesare Lombroso’s studies of physical traits of criminality (The Ama-
zon Journal, 134). Anthropology and scientific racial theories formed, in
more than one way, a privileged discursive and iconographic field that
combined debates on the negative effects of colonialism, the desire to
save non-Western peoples from extinction, and a “scientifically” based
defense of the “pure” races.
Instead of scarred bodies, Omarino and Ricudo were introduced as
representatives of a threatened human race and as the mirror against
which civilization could see its own flaws. However, admitting that the
world of Putumayo seemed to have no way to return to its idyllic past,
and civilization seemed to be unavoidable, Casement’s plan for these
men was to provide them with the “better” side of civilization. Once
they returned to Peru, Casement left the two men in the care of the
British consul in Iquitos, where, despite Casement’s previous affirma-
tions that any labor would be, for the Amazonian Indigenous people,
forced labor, they could be “useful.” On September 1912, the consul’s
wife wrote to Casement to say that Ricudo “hated work” and had told
her that he “must go away to the woods.”67 Like the child in Casement’s
photograph of scars, trapped between the pious gaze of the photogra-
pher and torturers armed with machetes—each proposing a different
kind of future for the Indigenous body—the forest was still the horizon
into which the Huitotos could escape the imposition of labor.

Portr a its and A f f e c t

Casement’s public campaign was mostly aimed at convincing public

opinion and a network of reformists, humanitarians, philanthropists,
religious authorities, and statesmen to pressure national governments
(US, British, and/or Peruvian) to protect the Putumayo Indigenous peo-
ples, as well as to restrain the activities of the Peruvian Amazon Com-
 Scars ❘ 119

pany, and hold its managers accountable for their crimes. Although
Casement eventually recognized a rebellious potential among the Putu-
mayo Indigenous peoples, these instances were rare and subtle. In con-
trast, Casement affirmed several times that the Indigenous peoples were
helpless, docile, childlike, in need of protection: “If ever there was a
helpless people on the face of this earth it is these naked forest savages,
mere grown up children. Their very arms show the bloodlessness of
their timid minds and gentle characters” (The Amazon Journal, 124). In
the Amazon rainforest, far from any jurisdiction of the Peruvian state,
Casement believed they would continue to be easy prey for the rubber
industry. Given his mistrust of the promises and procedures of the Peru-
vian governmental and juridical apparatus, he argued that it was only
under the vigilant, caring gaze of well-intentioned international actors
that the situation could be mitigated.
Casement made a particular effort to lobby the US government,
while keeping in close contact with the British embassy in Washington.
In 1912, he heard from an informant in the embassy that, for strategic
reasons, the United States was withdrawing from pressuring the govern-
ment of Peru on the Putumayo affair. As the historian Jordan Goodman
first uncovered, Casement responded to this news by sending a series of
photographs, including Ricudo’s portrait (figure 2.8), and handwritten
notes to Washington in the hope that they would convince the North
Americans to pressure the Peruvian government. The entire collection,
held today at the US National Archives, is a remarkable example of the
importance of the articulation of photographs and texts in Casement’s
pedagogy of the gaze.
In an article published in 2010, Goodman reproduces a series of these
photos and text passages from Casement’s mail.68 In a brief introductory
text, the historian suggests that these images are neither atrocity nor eth-
nographic photographs, but “images meant to convey the meaning of
what it means to be human, or, to put it another way, what humanity
is.”69 This, according to Goodman, would be confirmed by the text ac-
companying each photograph, which juxtaposes the meanings of hu-
manity and inhumanity. Goodman does not explain what exactly this
means—what the formal strategies are that would make an image con-
vey the meaning of humanity or how image and text are combined in
order to do so. Still, his framework is suggestive. Casement’s pedagogy
of the gaze aimed at teaching the viewer to see Indigenous bodies in a
complex, multifaceted way. However, I contend that he did this by draw-
ing from the ethnographic and/or atrocity genres, not by negating them.
120 ❘ Chapter 2

The photographic series includes, for example, a photograph of an

emaciated woman and her two children. In his notes, Casement says
that the woman “has been so worked without food that her limbs have
shrunk. The boy, too, is unusually thin—I saw far worse specimens than
these.”70 Similarly to other visual narratives of atrocity, while the body
of an individual victim is presented as proof of the violence inflicted on
her, the victim’s condition must be generalized, or framed as one case
among others. Casement, then, adds that the people in the photo’s back-
ground are Indigenous people, “mostly women, brought in from the
forest for a ‘Dance.’” This gesture of framing the emaciated woman and
children against the ethnographic spectacle organized by the PAC man-
agers to appease the British commissioners goes along with the politics
of looking in Casement’s diaries, in which the visibility of the marks of
exploitation is under constant threat. Instead of negating the knowl-
edge value of the ethnographic image, however, Casement’s pedagogy of
the gaze embraces it. In a sequence of three front-and-back portraits of
women “beaded and adorned for the dance,” Casement highlights “the
pattern of the dyed, or stained ornamentation the Indians delight in—
and renew on every occasion of public or private gatherings.”71
As I have argued throughout this chapter, it is the combination of
different photographic and writing genres familiar to the public that
constitutes Casement’s pedagogical effort to teach the British and North
American political elites how to see the humanity of the bodies scarred
by the rubber trade.
The Washington series is, in fact, diverse, and includes most of the
topics photographed by Casement: from photographs of emaciated and
scarred bodies to images of adorned Huitotos preparing for rituals,
from portraits of workers carrying heavy loads of rubber to individ-
ual and family portraits. Photographing before the advent of modern
photography (and before the culture of the snapshot), Casement resorts
to photographic elements like pose, adornment, and point of view (the
position of the camera) in order to position himself in relation to his dif-
ferent subjects, whether they are ideal “natives,” scarred victims, armed
muchachos, or beautiful bodies.
Similarly, Casement’s texts draw from different traditions. Along
with a single portrait of a Huitoto man (figure 2.11), for example, Case-
ment writes:

The Last of His Tribe

A Huitoto boy at La Chorrera is the sole survivor of one of
the clans. This lad was about 19 years old + did carpenter-
 Scars ❘ 121

ing work around the station. He was a great swimmer—all

the Indian men, women + children swim like fish and their
skins are extraordinarily clean and sweet. They rarely per-
spire even under enormous weights—and there is no odour
from the skin. They are singularly cleanly in their persons
and habits. [written in the margins] and I would add in their
minds until debased + corrupted by the “blancos” + “mesti-
zos” of Peru or Columbia.
I have never met in Africa any primitive people (save per-
haps the West Coast Kruboy) so clean. The Indian skin is of
a delightful hue—a warm rich golden yellow or bronze in
the majority of cases—while the hair is of quite remarkable
luxuriance—straight, shining and purple black.72

Figure 2.11. “The last of his tribe.” Photograph by

Roger Casement, c. 1912. Copy from the US Na-
tional Archives. Record Group 59: General Rec-
ords of the Department of State 1910–29 Central
Decimal Fil. File: 823.5048/30.
122 ❘ Chapter 2

Figure 2.12. Roger Casement’s notes on the photograph “The last of his tribe,”
c. 1912. Copy from “Photographs of Putumayo Indians,” January 26, 1912, US
National Archives. Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of
State 1910–29 Central Decimal File. File: 823.5048/30.

In this “description” of the photograph—as Casement himself calls his

text—he intertwines the use of a common trope of salvage ethnography—
“the last of the tribe”—with an appreciation for the aesthetic value of
Huitoto bodies, and a temporal narrative that questions the civilizing
mission of the white trader: “I would add in their minds until debased
or corrupted by the ‘blancos.’” Moreover, Casement’s vivid description
of the Huitoto hair and skin uses both visual and olfactory senses, high-
lighting the fact that he has been in close proximity to them.
One persistent strategy used by Casement in these texts is very sim-
ilar to that of the diaries: a reconstruction of his encounters with these
subjects, the impressions they made on him, and the stories that help the
viewer imagine both the (specific and systematic) violence inflicted on
them, as well as their lives and their cultures beyond the specific context
of violence that marked their bodies. A great number of these photo-
graphs are frontal portraits of individuals, taken at eye level. In most of
them, they look at the camera, as in figure 2.11 or in the photograph of
Ricudo discussed in the previous section (figure 2.8), which Casement
added to the collection sent to the US embassy. In one of these portraits,
he mentions that the photographed man was a friend of his and had a
witty mind, while in another, he recounts that the chief of a tribe had
told him that his family had been murdered. Each image is framed with
a narrative that often grounds it in the photographic moment and, at
the same time, exceeds it, telling the viewer what happened before or
after the photograph was taken. Together, the photographs and texts in
the series aim to provide ethical knowledge, a knowledge not only of
what there is, but also of what there should be.
Moreover, in emphasizing his encounters with these people, the
photo/text montage both connects the indexical dimension of the image
 Scars ❘ 123

to Casement’s testimonial authority, to his “being there,” and fosters a

kind of proximity that could be called “humanizing.” These photo/text
assemblages are humanizing not because they confer humanity on the
subject photographed, but because they reveal Casement’s affective, em-
bodied presence in the scene. In this sense, Casement’s concept of point
of view is a way of humanizing the viewers themselves, by emphasizing
the relational, social aspect of seeing.
What these images reveal depends not only on social, historical, and
political context, but also on the viewer’s ability to be affected by them
or, in Casement’s words, “on affection as the root principle of con-
tact.”73 This affective dimension helps shed light on other photographs
that are part of Casement’s archive, and which seem detached from the
whole setting of the rubber stations. They are posed portraits of men in
different places, and they don’t seem to follow the iconographic tradi-
tion either of the picturesque or of ethnography. There usually are two
or more photos of the same subject, with slight changes in light and
pose, showing that Casement, and the models who posed, took time
in making them (figures 2.13–2.16). Some of them resemble other por-

Figure 2.13. “Shirtless man.” Photo- Figure 2.14. “Man wearing rolled-up
graph by Roger Casement, c. 1900– trousers and carrying shirt.” Photo-
1910. Roger Casement Photographic graph by Roger Casement, c. 1900–
Collection, National Library of Ire- 1910. Roger Casement Photographic
land, Dublin, Ireland. CAS22A. Image Collection, National Library of Ireland,
courtesy of the National Library of Dublin, Ireland. CAS22B. Image cour-
Ireland. tesy of the National Library of Ireland.
124 ❘ Chapter 2

traits, for instance the bourgeois portraits Casement made of European

men, revealing individual personalities, and playing with shadows and
the revelation of individual character. Others have a particularly sensual
and theatrical aspect. Some are made in isolated scenarios (we cannot
tell where and when they were made) and in them the young men pose,
shirtless, sensually, for Casement’s gaze. They reveal how Casement’s
gaze was charged in part by the eros that one can also see in his Black
Diaries, through which the body of the other is not only the site of in-
scription of a crime, but is desired and desiring.

Figure 2.15. “Bare-chested man lean- Figure 2.16. “Bare-chested man posing
ing against a stone wall.” Photograph in front of stone wall.” Photograph by
by Roger Casement, c. 1900–1910. Roger Casement, c. 1900–1910. Rog-
Roger Casement Photographic Collec- er Casement Photographic Collection,
tion, National Library of Ireland, Dub- National Library of Ireland, Dublin,
lin, Ireland. CAS42D. Image courtesy Ireland. CAS42C. Image courtesy of
of the National Library of Ireland. the National Library of Ireland.
Chapter 3

Debris
The Indigenous Past in an Ethnographer’s Dream

Since the nineteenth century, photographic practices and debates have

aroused suspicions as to the political and moral effects of the prolif-
eration of images of atrocities in the public sphere.1 In 1910 Roger
Casement, among others, suggested that the circulation of images of
wounded Indigenous bodies was not in itself sufficient to prove wrong-
doing or to alter public opinion. Photographic images could lie, conceal,
or incite the wrong responses. But it was not until the advent of modern
photography, and especially with technical developments that allowed
for the popularization of the snapshot in the 1920s and 1930s, that
metaphors linking cameras to the destructive forces of modernization
became common. By turns euphoric and despairing, prey to utopian
optimism as well as deep spiritual disarray, the short period between the
two World Wars remains one of the richest in photographic history. In
the aftermath of the mechanized slaughter of World War I, avant-garde
artists, commercial illustrators, and journalists turned to photography
as if seeking to discover through its mechanisms and materials some-
thing about the soul of contemporary industrial society. While diverse
avant-garde movements embraced the photographic medium as capable
of expressing modern consciousness, a suspicion of the medium as a
mechanized, violent source of knowledge also emerged. The develop-
ment of modern photography and of a modern criticism of photography
during this era paralleled a renewed interest in non-Western traditions

125
126 ❘ Chapter 3

and popular culture, and the institutionalization of the discipline of

ethnology. In this context, metropolitan travelers critically retraced the
steps of previous explorers in order to rediscover the aesthetics of the
“hinterlands” of the “New World.” This retracing was both symbolic
and concrete: first, it involved uncovering and criticizing the role of
European archives in the formation of images of the New World and
counterposing them with new images and new ways of seeing. Second,
travelers had to literally follow in the steps of past explorers who at-
tempted to integrate these vast regions into national territories and
global economies, traveling over the telegraph lines and railroads con-
structed at the turn of the century to modernize extractive economies.
This chapter examines the French couple Claude and Dina Lévi-
Strauss’s 1935–36 and 1938 ethnographic expeditions through the Bra-
zilian state of Mato Grosso into the Amazon basin, following the paths
of the telegraph line constructed by the Comissão de Linhas Telegráfi-
cas Estratégicas de Mato Grosso ao Amazonas (Strategic Telegraph
Commission of Mato Grosso to Amazonas), commonly known as the
Comissão Rondon (Rondon Commission).2 The couple carried a Leica
and a small 8mm movie camera. Their voyages led to one of the most
famous accounts of the plight of the Indigenous populations in central
Brazil, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s book Tristes tropiques (Sad Tropics),3 pub-
lished in 1955. Based on his former wife’s and his own photographs, field
notes, articles, and reflections, the book is simultaneously a melancholic
meditation about time, an epistemological reflection on the impossi-
bility of encountering alterity, and a condemnation of the violence of
the expansion of mechanized civilization. Lévi-Strauss also denounces
modern technologies of representation, especially photography, which
he views both as paradigms of an empiricist form of knowledge and as
agents in the destruction of non-Western communities and primitive
modes of existence. This may explain why most of the three thousand
photographs that Claude Lévi-Strauss (and perhaps also Dina) took in
Brazil have remained unseen and been kept separate from the anthro-
pologist’s main archive, which includes hundreds of field notes, draw-
ings, and letters that can be consulted by any interested researcher at
the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Stored in the home of Lévi-Strauss’s
son,4 what one imagines to be his most ethnographic photographic se-
ries instead is to this day part of a family collection.
The invisibility of those images, as well as the ways in which some
of them have become visible through their reframing and re-captioning
when published in different works, should be understood in the context
 Debris ❘ 127

of Lévi-Strauss’s contribution to what Claude Imbert has referred to as

“a more general reappraisal of what was formerly called data in anthro-
pology,”5 and consequently to the debate about the scientific value and
ethical validity of all photographed materials that exist as remnants of
encounters between modern explorers and ethnographers and Indige-
nous communities.
The beginning of Lévi-Strauss’s career as an anthropologist was
marked by two symbolic journeys: the first was his trip to Brazil in the
1930s, when he was invited to participate, with other French professors,
in the founding of the University of São Paulo. Then a philosophy pro-
fessor, Lévi-Strauss had grown weary, as he affirms in Tristes tropiques,
of the “claustrophobic, Turkish-bath atmosphere in which it [his mind]
was being imprisoned by the practice of philosophical reflection” (59).
He thus saw his invitation to stay in Brazil as an opportunity to turn to
the newly established academic discipline of ethnography.6 While they
were in Brazil, Dina Lévi-Strauss, a philosopher, also turned towards
ethnography, joining the folklore society (the Sociedade de Etnografia
e Foclore) run by Mário de Andrade from his office at the São Paulo
municipal government’s Department of Culture.7 The second symbolic
journey was Claude Lévi-Strauss’s exile in New York City during the
Nazi occupation of France. In New York, where Lévi-Strauss arrived
carrying as “his sole wealth” (Tristes Tropiques, 37) his field documents,
including photographic negatives, he encountered the American anthro-
pological tradition, as well as Roman Jakobson’s concept of structural
linguistics. This second voyage is usually identified as the point of origin
of Lévi-Strauss’s more explicit concerns with the epistemological aspects
of anthropology.8 What followed Lévi-Strauss’s second return to France
was his reformulation of the meaning of the ethnographic encounter,
an effort to abandon the usual temporal order of phenomenology in
which the ethnologist is pictured as a receiver of sense data that can
later be organized as knowledge. Lévi-Strauss suggests instead that the
cognitive process functions within an intermediary realm of signs. This
reconsideration of the ethnographic encounter was, in turn, followed by
Lévi-Strauss’s attempt to rethink his own experiences of ethnographic
contact, about which he has provided several testimonies, starting with
Tristes tropiques. As James Boon suggests, the result of Lévi-Strauss’s
experiment with ethnographic writing in that book resembles a symbol-
ist narrative.9 The narrator describes the desire of a young ethnologist
to encounter alterity, only to find out that this is an impossible dream:
the others he encounters are either too similar (too acculturated, like
128 ❘ Chapter 3

the Kadiwéu) or too different (like the Tupi-Kawahib) to be understood

by the anthropologist, who ends up contemplating his own history
through their opaque eyes. In this symbolist critique of modernization,
Lévi-Strauss avoids revealing the specific historical and political context
that accommodated his presence and made possible his work in Mato
Grosso, such as, for example, the role of the writer Mário de Andrade,
then director of the Department of Culture in São Paulo, with whom his
wife, Dina Lévi-Strauss, worked closely later on. Moreover, differently
from Roger Casement (chapter 2) and Mário de Andrade (chapter 4), in
Lévi-Strauss’s critique of modernization, questions of extractivism and
of labor exploitation are somewhat marginal, and he focuses instead on
a more general process of cultural assimilation and human loss.
A few authors have explored a connection between Lévi-Strauss’s
epistemological concerns and the language of Tristes tropiques.10 Like
these authors, I read Lévi-Strauss’s account of his ethnographic experi-
ence, and more specifically the book Tristes tropiques, as an experiment
with and reflection upon the relationships between language, percep-
tion, and memory. I examine Lévi-Strauss’s use of the figures of debris,
fragments, and ashes in relation to the dual problem of referentiality
and temporality in the context of his attempt to move away from the
previous image of the ethnographer as a gatherer of data. However,
I argue that this epistemological question also has to be examined in
connection with Lévi-Strauss’s catastrophic view of modern history, and
his desire to give a testimony of that. I argue that the debris in Tristes
tropiques has a double character: first, an epistemological one, since an
encounter is always a mis-encounter, and second, a historical one, since
the ruination seems to have been produced by the encounter with civi-
lization itself. In other words, the memoir is constructed as a narrative
about a missed encounter with both the past and the other.
It is in Lévi-Strauss’s reflections on and uses of photography that
his desire to efface the corporeal encounter with the other will prove
to be extremely complicated. In contrast to his use of field notes, Lévi-
Strauss makes conservative use of his archive of around 3,000 Brazil-
ian photographs in Tristes tropiques. It is also in Tristes tropiques that
he expresses for the first time his mistrust and even hostility toward
the photographic medium. Photography figures as the personification
of what appeared to him to have gone wrong with anthropology in its
preoccupation with external facts and visual information, as well as
its participation in the commodification of the exotic. Most import-
ant, and often overlooked, are the passages in the book that contain
 Debris ❘ 129

his descriptions of specific photo-ethnographic encounters. Together

with photographs not included in the book, these passages reveal Lévi-
Strauss’s discomfort with aspects of the phenomenological dimension
of the photographic encounter that he himself does not explicitly ad-
dress in his criticism of the medium. The description of scenes in which
he photographed or refused to photograph Kadiwéu, Bororo, Nam-
bikwara, and Tupi-Karawib people convey a preoccupation with the
sensual, interested, and sometimes misleading performance of the pho-
tographed. Hence, photography appears as a medium unable to contain
excesses not only because its indexicality registers too much detail, but
also because it carries the marks of an embodied contact. I contend that
the ways in which Lévi-Strauss crops, re-captions, and arranges pho-
tographic images with other forms of visual representation in Tristes
tropiques also reveal a fragile attempt to frame out these insurmount-
able phenomenological dimensions of photography. Finally, I contend
that what is also framed out of Lévi-Strauss’s photo/text assemblage is
exactly what Roger Casement tried to foreground, namely, the details
of the political context that made possible his own presence in Mato
Grosso, and more specifically, the role of French and Brazilian state em-
ployees and of other members of the expedition in that context.

C on tac t a nd T e c h no l ogy t hro ug h

the R on don C ommi ssi on T e l e gr a p h L i n e

The Lévi-Strauss couple’s famous ethnographic expedition in Brazil

was, in fact, composed of two different voyages. The first of these took
place during Claude Lévi-Strauss’s summer vacation from the Univer-
sity of São Paulo in 1935–36. In this expedition, Claude and Dina Lévi-
Strauss encountered the Kadiwéu people at the Paraguay border, and
the Bororo people in central Mato Grosso. Their longer and more am-
bitious second voyage, in 1938, resembled a nineteenth-century style
expedition in that it was made up of a large team—including the Bra-
zilian anthropologist Luiz de Castro Faria and the tropical medicine
specialist Dr. Jean Vellard—and was jointly sponsored by the Brazilian
and French governments. This second expedition also mirrored the ex-
pansionist ambitions of old explorations: the so-called Serra do Norte
Expedition ventured further into Brazilian territory, from Cuiabá to the
Madeira River, and led to the homeland of the lesser-known, more iso-
lated Nambikwara and Tupi-Kawahib peoples. It followed the Rondon
130 ❘ Chapter 3

Commission telegraph line, which had been built at the turn of the nine-
teenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century with the
aims of mapping, connecting, and consolidating the vast territory of the
Brazilian interior, modernizing the country’s backlands, and promoting
the “pacific assimilation” of Indigenous groups in the region. According
to Lévi-Strauss, since the Rondon Commission,

no professional anthropologist had ever ventured across it.

It was tempting to follow the telegraph line, or what was left
of it, to try and find out who exactly the Nambikwara were,
as well as the mysterious communities further to the north,
whom no one had seen since Rondon had indicated their
existence. (Tristes Tropiques, 251)

In Tristes tropiques, this path to the “mysterious” Amazonian Indig-

enous communities becomes a reflection of the traveler’s desire to re-
peat the experience of “first contact.” But it does not take long for the
traveler to discover that the path along the telegraph line is in ruins.
The narrator describes how the telegraph line itself “became an archae-
ological relic of a previous technological age” (Tristes Tropiques, 262),
with collapsed poles, rusted wires, and a few indebted employees dying
slowly without sufficient means to leave their posts. These technolog-
ical ruins, remnants of a failed project of modernization, coexist with
the ruins of previous Indigenous modes of life. Lévi-Strauss finds that,
rather than primitive, the Indigenous groups who inhabit these regions
are decimated, assimilated, and impoverished.
In order to examine Lévi-Strauss’s critique of mechanical civiliza-
tion, embodied by the photographic camera, it is important to take
into consideration the centrality of technology in the imaginary of
the Rondon Commission. Actively invested in publicizing the achieve-
ments of the commission and in providing knowledge to an urban
public about the “hinterlands” of the country, Cândido Mariano da
Silva Rondon (who became the founder of Brazil’s Serviço de Proteção
ao Índio, the SPI) not only encouraged various expeditionaries to pho-
tograph the work of the commission—such as the engineer Benjamin
Rondon (his son), Lieutenant João Lyra, the expeditionary Carlos
Lako, and photographers José Louro and Charlotte Rosenbaum, and,
most famous of all, Lieutenant Luiz Thomaz Reis—but he founded
a Photographic and Cinematographic Section within the SPI, coordi-
nated by Reis.
 Debris ❘ 131

Rondon himself also appears in dozens of photographs,11 frequently

posing among Indigenous peoples: in statically posed, staged scenes he
holds their hands, touches their shoulders, and even embraces them,
making literal the idea of contact as touch and togetherness. These im-
ages corresponded to Rondon’s expectation that a pacific, caring, and
even affectionate “first contact” would be the beginning of a successful
process of assimilation of Indigenous communities into the political life
of the nation. In the introduction to the first of three volumes of Índios
do Brasil, the voluminous publication of photographs and film stills
of expeditions led by or related to Rondon between 1890 and 1940,
Rondon points out that some of the Indigenous groups photographed
had suffered violent foreign and colonial invasions for centuries while
others, contacted for the first time by the commission, are “brought to
a friendly coexistence with us, in the sertão, by humanitarian means.”12
Rondon’s defense of a “humanitarian,” nonviolent approach to the
“Indian question”13 was praised at the time by prominent figures al-
ready discussed in this book, such as Roger Casement and Euclides da
Cunha,14 and had a lasting legacy on Brazil’s indigenist policies.15 Like
da Cunha, Rondon, who was of Indigenous Bororo, Terena, and Guará
descent, condemned the history of colonial violence against Indigenous
populations as a history of barbaric acts—a history in which civiliza-
tion itself had betrayed modern civilized values—while simultaneously
defending the state’s promotion of a pacific coexistence between Indig-
enous communities and truly civilized institutions.
Technologies of communication—telegraph lines, but also photog-
raphy and film—played a central role in Rondon’s defense of “friendly
coexistence” with Indigenous populations and his advocacy of “human-
itarian processes” of modernization and integration of the “hinterlands”
of the country. In the case of photography, the prolific production of
the commission showcased their efforts to promote national integration
by bringing Indigenous lands into the field of visibility of the nation.
Through these images, “Brazilians” (meaning mostly urban citizens)
would get to know “Brazil.” Moreover, photography, and specifically
the photographic camera, also embodied modernization and the arrival
of technological modernity in the “hinterlands.” This theme emerges
in a series of images that reveal the curious gaze of the Indigenous
subjects at modern technical apparatuses, whether they are watches,
phonographs, or the camera itself. In “General Rondon explicando o
funcionamento de um relógio aos índios Caianã” (“General Rondon
explaining how a clock works to the Caianã Indians,” figure 3.1), a
Figure 3.1. “General Rondon explicando o funcionamento de um relógio aos
índios Caianã” (“General Rondon explaining to the Caianã Indians how a clock
works”). Photograph by Benjamin Rondon, n.d. Reproduced from Cândido
Mariano da Silva Rondon, Índios do Brasil vol. 2 (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho
Nacional de Proteção aos Índios, Ministério da Agricultura, 1946–53), 338.
 Debris ❘ 133

Tiriyó man and woman join Rondon in gazing attentively at a clock

that the general holds in his hands. The vertical framing, often used in
portraiture, isolates them from the background, highlighting both the
contrast and proximity of the unnamed Tiriyó (identified as Caianã) to
the body of Rondon, who appears as a trusted and kind instructor, a
father figure. In the background, an Indigenous man partially hidden by
Rondon’s body holds what looks like a machete without posing much
of a risk to the intimate, peaceful scene in the foreground. On the con-
trary, the figure reinforces Rondon’s defense of pacific approaches to
Indigenous groups, and his strong opposition to fear-based discourses
that used self-defense as a justification for perpetrating violent attacks
on them.
Other photographs bring to the fore not only Indigenous peoples’
first contact with technology, but the technological mediation of contact
itself. In the carefully composed photograph “Rondon tomava notas
sobre a ethnographia, emquanto os Kepi-kiri-uats ouviam as nossas
músicas. Ao lado, vasos indígenas que foram trazidos para o Museu
Nacional” (“Rondon taking ethnographic notes while the Kepkiriwáts
listen to our music. At their side, Indigenous pots that were brought to
the Museu Nacional,” figure 3.2), we find a complex set of technological
mediations. The caption indicates that the Kepkiriwáts were listening
to music, which is also suggested in the composition of the photograph
and the disposition of their bodies, gathered on the right side of the
frame and mostly turned towards the phonograph, which stands on the
left. Thus described, the scene seems to illustrate the encounter between
the Kepkiriwáts and Western music. Nevertheless, what we can in fact
see in this photograph is that some of the Kepkiriwáts are actively look-
ing at the phonograph, while others are looking directly at the camera,
turning modern machinery into objects of the gaze. To complete this
scene of technologically mediated contact, Rondon stands behind the
sitting Indigenous group like a supervisor during a school activity, writ-
ing down his ethnographic observations.
The photograph, which is composed and captioned as a representa-
tion of Rondon’s ethnographic activities, ends up presenting an inver-
sion of roles. While the Kepkiriwáts observe the artifacts of Western
culture, listen to music, and watch the photographer, Rondon is ab-
sorbed in his own cultural activity. Looking downward at his writing
pad and pen, he cannot see anything except the images in his mind
as he writes. This representation of the ethnographer in the process of
writing reminds us that the photographer is also “not seeing” in the act
134 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.2. “Rondon tomava notas sobre a ethnographia, emquanto os Kepi-

kiri-uats ouviam as nossas músicas. Ao lado, vasos indígenas que foram trazidos
para o Museu” (“Rondon taking ethnographic notes while the Kepkiriwáts lis-
ten to our music. At their side, Indigenous pots that were brought to the Nation-
al Museum”). Photograph by Emanuel Silvestre do Amarante, Mato Grosso,
Brazil, 1912. Reproduced from the album Comissão Rondon, Linhas Telegráfi-
cas estratégicas de Mato Grosso ao Amazonas, Photographias de construcção,
expedições e explorações desde 1900 a 1922, vol. 1, 157. BRMI CRIcA1.452.
Reproduced by permission of Acervo Museu do Índio/FUNAI—Brazil.

of recording. Lieutenant Amarante probably has his eyes glued to the

camera’s viewer when the shutter opens, exposing the film to light. The
photographer is thus incapable of seeing the exact scene that is fixed
by the photographic film.16 Did he see that the older man on the right
raised his finger to his mouth (what does this gesture mean?), or that
the little boy behind the pot stood up, creating the impression that he
is coming out of the pot? While the Kepkiriwáts observe (and listen to)
Western cultural practices and objects, Amarante and Rondon are both
absorbed in their respective technologies of inscription, aiming to create
delayed representations of a scene they saw before they looked away
from it in order to write or photograph. This photograph suggests that
photography and ethnography are not only about the vision of the eth-
nographer, but also about his not seeing and his being seen.17 It reminds
us that ethnography is, thus, about delay, memory, and the formation
 Debris ❘ 135

of archives. This temporality is emphasized by the use of the past im-

perfect in the caption—“tomava notas” and “ouviam música,” which in
English correspond to something like “was taking photos” and “were
listening to music.” Behind Rondon, facing the camera, a door leads to
the dark internal space of a household. Shaped in an uncannily similar
way to Rondon’s hat, the interior of the house is as dark as the inside
of the photographic camera. This internal space reminds us once again
of the unknowns and unseens of ethnographic recording. Or maybe this
photograph represents a supposed contrast between modern and primi-
tive temporalities, a suggestion that Indigenous peoples are not capable
of creating documents or archives, that they live immersed in a contin-
uous present, “without history,” to use Euclides da Cunha’s words.18 In
this respect, it is telling that Rondon’s dogs lie peacefully (and passively)
among the Kepkiriwáts, as if to imply that animals are also capable of
seeing and listening to music, but not of producing durable and trans-
portable recordings of images and sound.
With regard to Rondon’s emphasis on coexistence, it is important to
note that this scene brings both Western and Indigenous material culture
to the fore: the phonograph, the notebook, the rifle, and the Indigenous
house, the pots, a musical instrument. Through the purposeful addition
of Western artifacts to the frame and the staging of the fascination of
Indigenous subjects with modern technology, this image challenges the
typical nineteenth-century ethnographic appeal to photographic imme-
diacy or transparency—the idea that the camera is capable of capturing
a purely primitive subject without much interference. I am not suggest-
ing that this photograph is an example of the participant observer par-
adigm of ethnography that was born, with Malinowski’s work, in the
1910s, a paradigm that would shatter the nineteenth-century emphasis
on ethnography as the collection of raw data by reinserting the experi-
ence of the I-ethnographer into the frame. Rondon was not an ethnog-
rapher, and his “ethnographic” materials should not be understood in
the framework of the discipline of ethnography, but as part of a political
and national project that involved imparting knowledge about Brazil’s
Indigenous population and territory to the country’s political elite, thus
guaranteeing the survival of this population and promoting their in-
tegration into the Brazilian nation. In this sense, photography might
best be understood as an interventionist practice, a tool for both repre-
sentation and transformation. Contact with and through technological
apparatuses is the end, not just the means, of the iconography of the
Rondon Commission.
136 ❘ Chapter 3

This staging of technology as part of a national narrative of progress,

expansion, and assimilation is related to but ultimately different from
the one that appears in Flávio de Barros’s photographs of the Canudos
Campaign. As I argued in chapter 1, in framing the massacre of Canudos
as a war, Barros’s photographs also serve the narrative of assimilation
of the territory where the (then ruinous) village sits. They also exhibit
modern technology, in this case the army’s modern weaponry, as a sign
of the process of modernization in the region. This is represented as a
forceful, violent assimilation, however. Interestingly, among the Western
artifacts that appear in Rondon’s photograph, there is also a modern
weapon: a rifle. It is relevant that this rifle stands among pots destined
to be turned into museum objects, while Rondon’s main instrument
is a pen, given his insistence on the pacific assimilation of Indigenous
peoples, exemplified by his famous motto: “To die if necessary; to kill
never.”19 This motto is highlighted in the introduction to the first vol-
ume of Índios do Brasil, where this photograph is reproduced, followed
by a list of Indigenous groups that had supposedly never been contacted
before, including the Kepkiriwáts. Interestingly, the reproduction of this
image in Índios do Brasil crops the left side of the frame, including the
rifle, out.20 Rondon conceived of assimilation “through humanitarian
means” as a long, slow process, and he defended the right of Indigenous
peoples to retain their cultural practices in the meantime.21
The visibility of technological mediation in the photographs taken by
the Rondon Commission is not surprising when we remember that the
construction of telegraph lines, a technology of communication, was the
primary purpose of the commission and the symbol of the integration
and consolidation of a national territory. This emphasis on coexistence
within the space of the nation is the focus of yet another photograph
showing the contact between Indigenous people and technology,
“Marco de Fronteira do Brasil no rio Tiquié. Índios Tuiúca e Tucano
interessam-se vivamente pela máquina cinematográfica do Major Reis”
(“Brazil’s Boundary Marker at the Tiquié River. Tuyuka and Tukano
Indians’ lively interest in Major Reis’s cinematographic machine,” figure
3.3), by Charlotte Rosenbaum. Major Reis, who became the head of
the Photographic and Cinematographic Section of the SPI, and his film
camera appear in this photograph surrounded by young Tuyucas e Tu-
kanos. Even though their body postures suggest some spontaneity, the
positioning of the group in a semicircle, allowing the film camera, which
is the center of attention, to appear in the photograph, makes it evident
that the scene is staged. The boundary marker, to their left, emphasizes
 Debris ❘ 137

Figure 3.3. “Marco de Fronteira do Brasil no rio Tiquié. Índios Tuiúca e Tucano
interessam-se vivamente pela máquina cinematográfica do Major Reis” (“Bra-
zil’s Boundary Marker at the Tiquié River. Tuyuka and Tukano Indians’ lively
interest in Major Reis’s cinematographic machine”). Photograph by Charlotte
Rosenbaum, n.d. Reproduced from Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, Índios
do Brasil, vol. 3 (Rio de Janeiro: Conselho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios,
Ministério da Agricultura, 1946–53), 244.

the coexistence of technology and Indigenous communities within the

territory of the nation. Whereas the Rondon Commission aimed at both
consolidating and integrating national territory, the role of the camera
complements that of the telegraph line in creating an imaginary of pa-
cific national unity.
Contact with technology acquires the force of a rupture in the nar-
rative of the Rondon Commission: when the photographic gaze reflects
the Indigenous subjects’ astonished gaze at the camera, modernity is
not just represented, it is also embodied as an irresistible desire. Thus, in
contrast with weapons, technologies of representation and communica-
tion symbolize, in the imagery of the Rondon Commission, the higher
values of modernity and the irresistible impulse toward modernization.
138 ❘ Chapter 3

In this sense, the photographic moment itself—or the “micro-event of

photography,” in the words of anthropologist Christopher Pinney22—
supposedly coincides with the inauguration of modernity in the back-
lands, which, although it comes late, is believed to be irreversible. It is as
if in each of these photographs, an urban public is invited to witness the
first moment in the steady process of the pacific assimilation defended
by Rondon.
In Tristes tropiques, the ethnographer’s ultimately impossible desire
to replicate the “first contact,” and his sad discovery that the “primitive”
cultures he expected to encounter in the tropics had been destroyed by
the expansion of “civilization” brought about in central Brazil and the
Amazon basin by the construction of Rondon’s telegraph line, can ap-
pear at first to merely invert the values encountered in the written and
photographic narratives of the Rondon Commission: contact still has
the force of a historical rupture, but for Lévi-Strauss this means the
tragic destruction of human diversity.23
The role of photography in the West’s destructive expansionist en-
deavor, as Lévi-Strauss affirms in the opening pages of Tristes tropiques,
is to invest the “primitives” with “nobility at the very time when it is
completing their destruction” (41). Caught in the “trap of our mecha-
nistic civilization,” Indigenous peoples are replaced by “albums in full
color” (41). Like Rondon, Lévi-Strauss also depicts scenes of Indigenous
encounters with modern technology. The most famous of these is Tristes
tropiques’ chapter “The Writing Lesson,” an account of the introduc-
tion of writing to an illiterate society. This scene is enacted in the en-
counter between the anthropologist and the Nambikwara, described by
Lévi-Strauss not only as the most dispossessed people of all those he en-
countered during his fieldwork in Brazil, but the one that seemed closest
to “a society reduced to its simplest expression” (317). The scene goes
as follows: one day, while writing in his notebook, Lévi-Strauss observes
the Nambikwara drawing wavy lines on pieces of paper, mimicking
what they see him do with writing implements. The chief of the “tribe,”
however, had further ambitions, since “he was the only one who had
grasped the purpose of writing” (296). After scribbling lines on paper,
the chief attempted to read to his fellow Nambikwara, “pretending to
hesitate as he checked on it the list of objects I was to give in exchange
for the presents he offered me” (296). This farce, which went on for two
hours, is interpreted by Lévi-Strauss as an attempt by the chief to act as
an intermediary agent for the exchange of goods and demonstrate his
alliance with the white man, by which he could show that he “shared
 Debris ❘ 139

his [the white man’s] secrets” (296). Thus, what the chief Nambikwara
grasped, according to Lévi-Strauss, was not how to write, but the fact
that writing itself is a source of power, a secret that creates social differ-
ence between the groups.24 This scene exemplifies Lévi-Strauss’s formal
and historical criticism of modern technologies of representation, their
connection to modern individualism, and their exploitative, possessive
relation to the represented.
In a series of radio interviews with Georges Charbonnier recorded
in October–December 1959 and broadcast four years after the publica-
tion of Tristes tropiques, we find the basic principles of Lévi-Strauss’s
critique of modern modes of representation.25 These come up during a
conversation about modern art, the first public exposition of his views
on the topic. Asked by Charbonnier about the difference between prim-
itive and modern art, Lévi-Strauss begins by naming two aspects that
separate them. The first is the individualization of artistic production.
He explains that this individualization is not so much a conception of
the artist as a unique or skilled creator—for this figure can also be found
in some primitive societies—but above all the attitude of the public,
which ceases to refer to the totality of the group but instead to individ-
ual “amateurs” (Lévi-Strauss and Charbonnier, Conversations, 59–60).
The second aspect, intrinsically related to the first, is the evolution of
art’s increasingly “figurative or representative” character (60). Whereas
in primitive societies, artists don’t aim to “reproduce” the model, but to
“signify it” (61),26 in modern forms of art—which, according to Lévi-
Strauss, could be found in Greece after the fifth century b.c.e. and in
Italy from the Quattrocento on (60)—there prevails a tendency to re-
produce the world and thus to “possess”27 it through its representation.
Lévi-Strauss warns that this figurative tendency should not be under-
stood as a result of the progress of knowledge, technique, or technolo-
gies of representation, or as the ultimate achievement of a long-pursued
perfection.28 He challenges the temptations of an evolutionist history by
shifting the question away from technical development to the concept
of the referent. As he explains it, the point is not that primitives lack
the technique to represent reality, but that reality, for them, is not a
reserve of things standing by, waiting to be represented. On the con-
trary, an object in the primitive world—a world charged with the su-
pernatural—is “by definition non-representable, since no facsimile or
model for it can be provided” and because “the model is always wide
of the representation” (84). This is what in French he calls an “excès
d’objet.”29 In contrast, the art of mechanical civilization originates from
140 ❘ Chapter 3

the assurance “of being able not only to communicate with the being,
but also to possess it through the medium of the effigy” (64). Moreover,
if “this avid and ambitious desire to take possession of the object for
the benefit of the owner or even of the spectator” (64) is related to the
loss of a collective process of signification and the individualization of
production, it is also related to the emergence of social disparities. The
“possessiveness with regard to the object” (64) corresponds to a kind
of possessiveness of certain individuals over others. Here, the analysis
gains both sociological contours and a clear historical argument; this
double possessiveness is made evident, according to Lévi-Strauss, by the
fact that the appearance of writing and of caste or class distinctions are
concomitant. Thus, although not the result of a progressive development
in the means of representation, this shift, responsible for the weakening
of modern art’s source of signification, is nonetheless indelibly linked to
the appearance of technologies of representation: “since writing taught
men that signs could be used not only to signify the external world but
also to apprehend it, to gain possession of it” (63).
Read as a parable of the Western history of representation, Tristes
tropiques’ chapter “The Writing Lesson” configures the introduction of
writing among the Nambikwara as a condensed, abrupt, and violent
corruption of “primitive” mode of knowledge. Even though Lévi-Strauss
consistently denies evolutionist approaches to cultural difference, in
“The Writing Lesson” Western modernity appears as an attractive and
therefore dangerous muse that will end up engulfing all other modes
of human existence. Ultimately, Tristes tropiques’ postwar melancholic
and catastrophic approach to history predicts that Western society will
end up destroying itself.
I will return to Tristes tropiques’ catastrophic view of history, but
first let me turn to some of Lévi-Strauss’s texts on Western art, such as
his collection of essays entitled Listen, Look, Read and the short essay
“To a Young Painter,”30 in order to further explore the anthropologist’s
ideas about visual representation and, in particular, photography.31 This
is important because Lévi-Strauss’s critique of art is not unrelated to his
epistemological discussions. Art is evaluated as a way of knowing,32 and
good art is that which—like primitive art—does not seek knowledge
through the representation of an external world as it is. Such a stance
is made very clear in his complimentary essay on the German painter
Anita Albus: “The primary role of art is to sift and arrange the profuse
information that the outer world is constantly sending out to assail the
sensory organs.”33 In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss argues that what
 Debris ❘ 141

distinguishes works of art as objects of knowledge is the fact that they

function as reductions in scale or properties (23) of their models.34 By
renouncing certain dimensions of the object—size, volume, color, smell,
tactile impressions, or the temporal dimension—“they are therefore not
just projections or passive homologues of the object: they constitute real
experiments with it” (24). This “thoughtful selection” is followed by a
“method of construction” (24).
Hence art’s double bind: it exists simultaneously at the level of the
sensory, because it requires an attempt to grasp “nature,” and at the
level of the intellect, because this attempt takes the form of the ordering
and selection of sense data.35 In order to understand why Lévi-Strauss’s
thoughts on art are relevant for a reading of his ethnographic writing
and photography, it is important to note that the primary criterion for
his aesthetic judgment is whether a work fulfills or not such a cogni-
tive function.36 When discussing the work of the French painter Nicolas
Poussin in Listen, Look, Read, for example, he calls the art-making pro-
cess a “recomposition” (32–33), and his essay about Albus stresses that
the artist “takes the liberty of placing them [objects of nature] in un-
foreseen arrangements that enrich our knowledge of things by making
us perceive new relationships among them.”37 Such a characterization
of the cognitive process of art is not far from the anthropologist’s more
general theory of knowledge, in which nature often appears as a “store-
house of sensible qualities from which the mind draws some elements to
be transformed into signs.”38 The same claim can be found with regard
to Lévi-Strauss’s approach to myths. Based on the idea that knowledge
begins in the sensible world, Lévi-Strauss refutes the break between art,
myth, and science: “The work of the painter, the poet or the musician,
like the myths and symbols of the savage, ought to be seen by us, if
not as a superior form of knowledge, at least as the most fundamental
and the only really common one to us all; science thought is merely the
sharp point” (Tristes Tropiques, 123). As James Boon has suggested,
while Lévi-Strauss views art as an experiment with sensory information
and native myth as “the ordering or classification of man in nature,”
he sees his own analytic procedures as more akin to “the ordering of
those classifications.”39 The work of the anthropologist—or that of the
artist—is thus not just a question of an a posteriori rearrangement on
the surface of raw data, but something that should function beyond the
separation between objective and subjective, in the intermediary realm
of signs. Such a cognitive theory of art, and its relationship to Lévi-
Strauss’s more general theory of knowledge, mark the way he reflects
142 ❘ Chapter 3

upon technologies of representation, such as writing and photography.

We begin to understand his attack on forms of representation that seem
to him to exemplify the desire to apprehend the object as it is, in its natu-
ral, unmediated reality. This becomes clear in Lévi-Strauss’s comparison
between two forms of realism, trompe l’oeil painting and photography:
“With trompe l’oeil one does not represent, one reconstructs. This re-
quires knowledge (even of what is not shown) together with reflection”
(Look, Listen, Read, 29). While with trompe l’oeil the artist “grasps and
displays what was not perceived,” photography, “as the term snapshot
suggests,” thoughtlessly “seizes this moment [of beauty] and exhibits
it” (30). In this defense of trompe l’oeil technique—which at first seems
to contradict his distinction between signifying and figurative art—the
difference between representation and reconstruction is accompanied
by the counterposing of two conceptions of the referent. For photogra-
phy, the referent would be the totality of the external world, the surface
of objects that are out there, while in the case of trompe l’oeil images,
the referent is neither subjective nor entirely objective, but that which is
discovered through the mediated process of cognition.
If writing inaugurates for the anthropologist the representative
power of inscription, it is photography that better exemplifies the desire
to possess the world through its representation. Beginning with Tristes
tropiques, written in the 1950s, all the way through to Look, Listen,
Read, published in 1993, Lévi-Strauss’s direct references to photogra-
phy consistently portray it as the opposite of a process of cognition.
For him, photography is thoughtless: “Photographic realism does not
distinguish accidents from the nature of things, but places them both
on the same level. There is certainly a process of reproduction, but the
part played by the intellect is minimal” (Look, Listen, Read, 29). The
photographic apparatus—“the physical and mechanical constraints of
the camera, the chemical constraints of the sensitive film, the subjects
possible, the angle of view, and the lighting—“restricts the “freedom”
of the photographer to process the data that they receive (“To a Young
Painter,” 249). In sum, a photograph is unmediated, unprocessed; it is,
in Elizabeth Edwards’s terms, “raw data.”40 And if because of that it
fails to be a work of art, it also fails, as Lévi-Strauss already argues in
Tristes tropiques, to be a source of anthropological knowledge.

Nowadays, being an explorer is a trade, which consists not,

as one might think, in discovering hitherto unknown facts
after years of study, but in covering a great many miles and
 Debris ❘ 143

assembling lantern-slides or motion pictures, preferably in

colour, so as to fill a hall with an audience for several days in
succession. For this audience, platitudes and commonplaces
seem to have been miraculously transmuted into revelations
by the sole fact that their author, instead of doing his plagia-
rizing at home, has supposedly sanctified it by covering some
twenty thousand miles. (Tristes Tropiques, 17–18)

I will leave aside for a moment other important aspects of this passage,
such as his description of traveling as the process of going abroad and
coming back, which sanctifies the images, turning them into revelations.
What I would like to remark on now is how Lévi-Strauss emphasizes the
illusion-making aspect of photography, “preferably in colour,” dissoci-
ating its mimetic power from any capacity to provide valuable knowl-
edge. Equally noteworthy is the opposition between surface and depth,
instantaneity and durability, expressed in the way he distinguishes the
exploration of images that are mere “platitudes” from facts that are un-
earthed through time, “after years of study.” If knowledge is a question
of mediation and time, photography—especially modern, instantaneous
color photography—is, for Lévi-Strauss, its enemy. It transforms non-
Western cultures into images to be consumed.
It is evident how photographic technology, thus conceived, would be
a problem for Lévi-Strauss’s reformulation of ethnographic knowledge,
which is marked by his attempt to replace the duality between sense data
and language with another syntactical organization; the photographic
technique would be incompatible with a process of cognition that func-
tions beyond the opposition between subject and object, between the
mental and the corporeal. Additionally, through photographic technique’s
objectification of the world, it would partake in the desire to consume
the other; hence its central role in the commercialization of the “exotic.”
These two enemies personified by photographic technology—from the
point of view of an anthropological narrative based on the gathering of
objective data, separating observer and observed, and the mass market-
ing of travel books and “exotic” photography—constitute the two major
obstacles encountered by the narrator of Tristes tropiques in writing an
ethnographic memoir. The actual photographs and the ways in which
Lévi-Strauss narrates his photographic encounters with specific Indig-
enous groups in Brazil, however, exhibit a far more complex dynamic.
To conclude this assessment of Lévi-Strauss’s criticism of photo-
graphic representation and its relationship to the demise of ethnogra-
144 ❘ Chapter 3

phy as a process of collecting raw data, it is important to remember

that such criticism is itself not unrelated to the larger context of anthro-
pology. In fact, scholars in the field of visual anthropology have widely
documented how, in the first decades of the twentieth century, photog-
raphy started fading away from anthropological papers and mono-
graphs, migrating to other sites or at least acquiring different functions.
This process has also been widely interpreted, especially in the case of
British and American anthropology, with which Lévi-Strauss had be-
come acquainted before his trip to Brazil. The anthropologist Roslyn
Poignant calls attention to the fact that, with the growth in importance
of the field-worker and a call for more intensive field-based approaches,
“the avalanche of ethnographic facts could no longer be accommodated
within the theoretical frame of the discipline.”41 Pinney calls the emer-
gence of the field-worker as the central validator of the ethnographic
enterprise part of a shift toward a “re-Platonizing” tendency in anthro-
pology, the “gradual displacement onto an invisible internalized world
of meaning . . . such as concern with social structures.”42 Marcus Banks
and Jay Ruby add that, together with “the development of long-term
fieldwork, with its Malinowskian emphasis on ‘the imponderabilia of
everyday life,’ and the subsequent rise of interest in the comparative
study of abstract institutions such as ‘kinship,’ ‘the economy,’ . . . the
costs and difficulties of publishing photographs in books and journals
contributed to a decline in the perceived value of the photomechanical
image.”43
Moreover, the fact that photographs of “others” were firmly posi-
tioned within the travel genre caused documentary photography and
photojournalism to be seen as compromising the discipline’s use of
photography for anthropological purposes. The newly trained ethnog-
rapher was reinvented, therefore, not only in opposition to both the
armchair anthropologist and the amateur traveler or colonial admin-
istrator, but also to the newly emerging market of travel memoirs.44 In
his study of French ethnography, Vincent Debaene argues that whereas
other sciences, during their period of consolidation, “had to fight against
rhetorical abuses and the lack of seriousness on the part of would-be
connoisseurs, anthropology was faced with an entirely new opponent:
the sensational.”45 Not in vain, Lévi-Strauss opens Tristes tropiques
with a critique of this mass “phenomenon,” positing it simultaneously
as the context in which and against which he is writing: “Amazonia,
Tibet and Africa fill the book-shops in the form of travelogues, accounts
of expeditions and collections of photographs, in all of which the desire
 Debris ❘ 145

to impress is so dominant as to make it impossible for the reader to

assess the value of the evidence put before him” (18).
However, although photographs were losing their place in ethno-
graphic monographs, they did not disappear completely. In Poignant’s
reading of Malinowski’s photographs, she suggests that they now en-
tered the terrain “between the brute and material information and the
ethnographers’ final version,”46 when coordinated with the use of field
notes. They could help the anthropologist remember a certain detail of
a painting or artifact that might acquire importance within the more
elaborated and comprehensive narrative of the anthropologist. This can
be a possible historical explanation for the migration of images from
the anthropological archives to private archives (which is the case with
Lévi-Strauss’s collection) or to universities.
In a second hypothesis, examined by Pinney,47 photographs may have
migrated from appearing on the pages of the monograph to inhering in
its language. Anthropology may have absorbed the idiom of photogra-
phy to the point of rendering the latter redundant. The indexical “being
there” of photography is transposed onto the figure of the anthropolo-
gist, who is exposed for a period of time to this contact with the other.
The ethnographer/anthropologist would, like a strip of film, receive this
information in a negative form, and reveal it, after processing, in the
positive form of a monograph. In this case, it is the body of the anthro-
pologist that is capable of undergoing a transformation. Although he
went into the field furnished with a Leica and an “oval-shaped min-
iature 8mm filming camera,” Lévi-Strauss would later declare, in Sau-
dades do Brasil, that he “hardly ever used” the movie camera, “feeling
guilty if I kept my eye glued to the viewfinder instead of observing and
trying to understand what was going on around me.”48
The metaphor of the “strip of film” is not, however, the prevalent one
in Lévi-Strauss’s narrative, written twenty years after his ethnographic
voyage. Instead, he focuses on the delusions and violence of the phe-
nomenological “being there” that frames the ethnographic contact, and
his prevalent metaphors in Tristes tropiques emphasize the failed en-
counter with “remnants” and “shadows” of the dreamed “primitives.”
Lévi-Strauss’s use of his field notes evince an attempt to emphasize the
mediation of time and subjectivity in his narrative of the (already medi-
ated) encounter with Indigenous peoples in Brazil: portraying the eth-
nographer as an archeologist and a bricoleur, the narrator emphasizes
all that was already lost when he was there, and what has been lost
since he left Brazil. Because he saw photography as a type of mechan-
146 ❘ Chapter 3

ical reproduction too close to the uncoded world of surfaces and as

part of the process of disguising the destruction caused by mechanical
civilization, Lévi-Strauss seems reluctant to explore many of the critical
and modernist approaches to modern photography with which he was
certainly familiar.49

Memory, Loss, a nd t he A rc h i va l F rag m e n t

I hate travelling and explorers. Yet here I am proposing to

tell the story of my expeditions. . . . It is now fifteen years
since I left Brazil for the last time and all during this period
I have often planned to undertake the present work, but on
each occasion a sort of shame and repugnance prevented me
making a start. Why, I asked myself, should I give a detailed
account of so many trivial circumstances and insignificant
happenings? (Tristes Tropiques, 16–17)

Much has been said about the opening of Tristes tropiques, in which
Lévi-Strauss disparages travel narratives “in the form of travelogues,
accounts of expeditions and collections of photographs” (17).50 The de-
nunciation of tourists, adventurers, and reporters is, however, an older
trope. In an insightful suggestion, Debaene argues that the specificity
of Lévi-Strauss’s “fond farewell to savages and explorations”51 lies in
the fact that it opposes not only the sensationalist subjectivism of the
amateur adventurer’s tales but also the “insipid details” or “insignificant
events” found in ethnographic monographs, which were usually subject
to the chronological and contingent order of the field diary.52 Unlike
most travel accounts, though, Lévi-Strauss starts out backwards, con-
fusing departures and returns, beginnings and ends. His ethnographic
narrative—especially in the first four chapters—is, in the first place,
constructed as remembrance, not as reportage. Instead of a chronolog-
ical progression, or a diary, his narration brings together apparently
incongruous events, periods, and places. While the chapter about the
first time Lévi-Strauss crossed the Atlantic on his way to Brazil ends up
focusing on the description of his escape in 1941 from occupied France,
the memory of a large hotel in Goiania takes the narrator to his experi-
ence in Karachi, in Pakistan.
In this remembrance, the narrator presents his past self as a lonely
traveler in search of the exotic, following the path of the great adven-
 Debris ❘ 147

turers of colonial history. The presence of the other participants in the

expeditions—among them his wife Dina Lévi-Strauss, the tropical med-
icine specialist Dr. Jean Vellard, and the Brazilian anthropologist Luiz
de Castro Faria—is barely mentioned in the subjective account of his
long-awaited encounter with Brazilian Indigenous groups. The drivers,
herders, missionaries, and canoeists also appear only fleetingly. Dina Lévi-
Strauss’s absence from the narrative is remarkable, since the author relies
on some of her notes and on texts they coauthored, to recount parts of
the expedition. Her presence is mentioned only one time throughout the
entire book, when the narrator says that his wife, “who had taken part in
all my expeditions so far, her specialty being the study of material culture
and skills” (Tristes Tropiques, 301), was the first to catch an eye disease
that affected the Nambikwara, along with the whole crew, which forced
her to leave the field before the end of the expedition. Also mentioned a
single time is Luiz de Castro Faria, the Brazilian anthropologist whose
presence was imposed on Lévi-Strauss by the Museu Nacional in Rio de
Janeiro because the Brazilian state required the presence of a Brazilian
participant in any international mission in the country.53
Castro Faria’s papers, held today at the Museu de Anstronomia e
Ciencias Afins (Museum of Astronomy and Related Sciences, in Rio
de Janeiro), detail the difficult process of obtaining authorization for
Lévi-Strauss’s second expedition from Brazil’s Serviço de Proteção ao
Índio (The Indian Protection Service)—the federal agency founded in
1910 under the directorship of General Cândido Rondon. The avant-
garde writer Mário de Andrade, who was the director of São Paulo’s
Department of Culture at the time, played a key role in the negotiations.
Andrade was interested in the dissemination of a scientific approach
to ethnography in Brazil, and worked closely with Dina Lévi-Strauss
in founding the Sociedade de Etnografia e Folclore (Society of Ethnog-
raphy and Folklore) in São Paulo. By ignoring the role of his Brazilian
counterparts in Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss also ignores his position
in the cultural and political context and the historical framework of the
relationship between Indigenous groups and the Brazilian state, which
played an important role in the history and politics of contact in the
region. In Tristes tropiques the narrator is portrayed as a solitary ad-
venturer, and his experience of contact, placed in the context of a long
colonial history, is somewhat isolated from the present political context.
Tristes tropiques begins with the young Lévi-Strauss’s search for a
pure form of alterity, which he will discover to be an impossible enter-
prise. The issue addressed by the author is not only the impossibility of
148 ❘ Chapter 3

narrating something that happened many years before his writing about
it, when he was involved in his fieldwork in Brazil; it is also the question
of searching for the simplest form of life “as a return to an earlier era of
humankind, to our own point of origin.”54 The traveler is described as
akin to a young Indigenous man in a puberty rite who leaves his own
society in search of a revelation, but, in this case, brings back nothing
but a “handful of ashes” (Tristes Tropiques, 41).
The narrator’s insistence on colonial nostalgia also plays out, and is
deliberately staged by an almost naive Lévi-Strauss at the beginning of
the book: when crossing the same mid-ocean doldrums, the “last mysti-
cal barrier” (Tristes Tropiques, 74) between two worlds that had caused
Columbus to stray from the route that would have led him to Brazil,
Lévi-Strauss relives this exceptional moment when “everything would be
called into question” (74). It is thus through the eyes of the first travelers
that Lévi-Strauss crosses this imaginary line past which nothing will be
left as it once was, where the indirect reflection of the sun rays reverses
“the normal relationship of luminosity between air and water” (73): “it
was more or less in the area where we were now sailing that Columbus
encountered mermaids” (76). Likewise, it is with Jean de Léry’s book in
his pocket that he enters Rio de Janeiro for the first time: “I walked up
the Avenida Rio-Branco, once a site occupied by Tupinamba villages, but
in my pocket I carried Jean de Léry, the anthropologist’s breviary” (81).
Like Roger Casement, who affirms that he sees the Indigenous peoples
of the Putumayo through Irish (and thus colonized) eyes, Lévi-Strauss
carries with him the transatlantic colonial archive. It is as a memory,
with his own body bearing the traces of all the encounters between Euro-
pean men and Indigenous people of the land we now call Brazil, that the
anthropologist is able to recognize, in Rio Branco Avenue, the memory
of the Tupinambá, even as the Paris-inspired modernist urban project in
downtown Rio de Janeiro effaced any visible traces of them.
But over and over, Lévi-Strauss remembers that repetition is impos-
sible: “What they saw then, no Western eye will ever see again” (Tristes
Tropiques, 326). That is why he can do no more than try to “re-create”
(43) what the first travelers supposedly saw in all its splendor, through
fragments and broken pieces. Shadows, ghosts, fragments, ashes, ru-
ins, and debris are strongly present in Lévi-Strauss’s narrative, which
often evokes the fetish of a primeval and original reality that preceded
or is exterior to the realities of contact. In the words of Carol Jacobs,
the temporal structure of Tristes tropiques’ narrative aims at exposing
the “fundamental unknowability of the anthropologist’s scientific ob-
 Debris ❘ 149

ject either as past or as other.”55 However, in denying the possibility

of encountering the dreamed object of his search, the anthropologist
still encounters something: “Dreams, ‘the god of the savages,’ as the old
missionaries used to say, have always slipped through my fingers like
quicksilver. But a few shining particles may have remained stuck, here
and there” (42). These fragments are the raw material for both the eth-
nologist, who is described as an “archaeologist of space, seeking in vain
to re-create a lost local colour with the help of fragments and debris”
(43), and the writer, who uses his own archive to provide an account of
the ethnographic encounter.
Time, which engenders loss and forgetting, provides at the same time
the condition of possibility for writing and understanding. According to
the narrator, giving an account of the experience of contact is possible
only because time has passed.56 After “twenty years of forgetfulness”
(Tristes Tropiques, 44), the writer undergoes a reorganizing experience.
Through the disappearance of certain events and the concatenation of
others, patterns begin to appear and a meaningful structure that sur-
passes his subjective will takes shape:

I have constantly reproached myself for not seeing as much

as I should. For a long time I was paralysed by this dilemma,
but I have the feeling that the cloudy liquid is now beginning
to settle. Evanescent forms are becoming clearer, and con-
fusion is being slowly dispelled. What has happened is that
time has passed. Forgetfulness, by rolling my memories along
in its tide, has done more than merely wear them down or
consign them to oblivion. . . . Sharp edges have been blunted
and whole sections have collapsed: periods and places col-
lide, are juxtaposed or are inverted, like strata displaced by
the tremors on the crust of an ageing planet. Some insignifi-
cant detail belonging to the distant past may now stand out
like a peak, while whole layers of my past have disappeared
without trace. Events without any apparent connection, and
originating from incongruous periods and places, slide one
over the other and suddenly crystallize into a sort of edifice
which seems to have been conceived by an architect wiser
than my personal history. (Tristes Tropiques, 44)

In the moment of writing, he realizes that past debris and fragments

have been relocated and transformed, echoing Proust’s description of
150 ❘ Chapter 3

the moment of awakening, that peculiar stage between sleep and aware-
ness in which everything revolves around the individual—the furniture,
the countries, the years—before again becoming immobile.57 As a reader
of Proust and Freud, Lévi-Strauss suggests that forgetting plays an im-
portant role in memory. This passage also illustrates his positive theory
of knowledge, in the sense that the empirical encounter with alterity
(with the past or the primitive) is replaced by the encounter with an ed-
ifice “conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history.” What
makes understanding possible for the structuralist anthropologist is a
cognitive function that governs both the moment of perception and the
work of memory, and a structure that is found in “incongruous periods
and places.”
Lévi-Strauss’s spatial, geological description of the relationship be-
tween present and past, which, as he himself affirmed, is related to his
interest in psychoanalysis (Tristes Tropiques, 55–57), also reveals the
way in which the author uses his material archive to avoid turning
the narrative into a chronologically ordered diary. An analysis of the
Lévi-Strauss archive at the Bibliothèque Nationale reveals that Tristes
tropiques was constructed in great part from collages and montages of
previous lectures, papers, unpublished manuscripts, and field writings.58
In some cases, the transcription of a previous text remains heterogeneous
within the narrative. Visible thresholds keep the fragments at once inside
and outside the narrative, suturing past and present without completely
blurring the fractures between them.
One of the most obvious of these archival fragments appears in chap-
ter 7, “Sunset.” The passage is a word-for-word transcription—in the
form of a citation—of a few pages Lévi-Strauss wrote in the boat during
his first voyage to Brazil. “The state of grace” of the young soon-to-be
anthropologist is depicted through his attempt to capture a sunset in
writing. As in photography, the written record takes on the temporality
of the instant: “Notebook in hand, I jotted down second by second the
expressions which would perhaps enable me to fix those evanescent
and ever-renewed forms” (Tristes Tropiques, 62). The sunset, the object
that he tries in vain to “fix,” is described as simultaneously unique and
already a reproduction, not only because, as anyone knows, it repeats
itself daily in procedures “always identical but unpredictable” (67), but
also, according to the author, because it is a repetition of the day that
comes to an end. Lévi-Strauss describes the twilight as “a complete per-
formance with a beginning, a middle and an end . . . a sort of small-scale
image of the battles, triumphs and defeats which have succeeded each
 Debris ❘ 151

other during twelve hours in tangible form; but also at a slower speed”
(63). Therefore, the object of the anthropologist’s gaze is already a non-
mimetic repetition, an image of a different nature, like memory: “Re-
membering is one of man’s great pleasures, but not in so far as memory
operates literally, since few individuals would agree to relive the fatigues
and sufferings that they nevertheless delight in recalling. Memory is life
itself, but of a different quality” (63). The sunset is also an illusion, a
spectacle of changing lights and shadows that ends in the dark negative
of a “photographic plate of night” which “slowly revealed a seascape
above the sea” (68).
Debaene argues that this piece of writing stands exterior to the nar-
ration as a product of an older self, a naïf anthropologist worried about
external appearances, as opposed to the Proustian writing that abounds
in Tristes tropiques. In contrast, I suggest that Lévi-Strauss finds in this
written piece the precise model for his representation of the ethno-
graphic encounter. Described as a memory, the fact of the sunset is a
model for the ethnographic phenomenon that challenges the typical eth-
nographer as data-gatherer. First, the description of the sunset echoes
the Proustian description of memory as a picture that fixes in a moment
what were previously images in constant transformation. Second, it re-
sembles the ethnographic subject itself: as I will detail in the next sec-
tion, in part 6 of Tristes tropiques Lévi-Strauss describes his encounter
with the Bororo using the same metaphors he uses in this passage. As
he approaches their land, he describes the landscape as a plateau that
resembles this description of a sea landscape, where “the traditional
roles of the sky and the earth are reversed” (209). In an interview in
the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss affirmed that he saw in the Bororos “a sort of
present tense which is a constantly revitalized past and preserved as it
was dreamt in myth and belief.”59 Lastly, in The Naked Man (1971), the
fourth volume of the Mythologiques, Lévi-Strauss will allude once more
to this moment when he crossed the Atlantic for the first time and tried
to register the sunset, suggesting it was a moment of premonition about
his future findings about myths: “[A] complex edifice which also glows
with a thousand iridescent colors as it builds up before the analyst’s
gaze, slowly expands in its full extent, then crumbles and fades away in
the distance” (693–94).
Most importantly, the passage about the sunset is an allegory for
the series of mediations that Lévi-Strauss enacts in his description of the
ethnographic encounter, especially the idea that the object of anthropol-
ogy is already to some extent an image, because it is already mediated,
152 ❘ Chapter 3

a repetition “like memory itself.” What remains puzzling is his use of a

photographic metaphor in the sunset passage to talk about repetition,
difference, and memory. It is clear that the writing in this passage illus-
trates how the effort to fix an exterior image will always be mediated by
selective perception and memory. What about the mention of the “pho-
tographic plate of night”? This expression points to a nonhuman seizing
of movement that reveals an image. This seizure, however, is nothing
like the possessive realism that Lévi-Strauss attributes to photography
in other passages of Tristes tropiques; rather, it points to the idea of
a negative that generates infinite copies that are “always identical but
unpredictable.” It points to the development of an image that was not
consciously projected, but which reveals an experience of past struggles.
It is almost as if the photographic plate of night refers to the Freudian
unconscious that was so crucial for Lévi-Strauss’s own theoretical de-
velopment, as well as for theories of photography deriving from Freud’s
concept of the unconscious,60 which Lévi-Strauss seems to otherwise
disregard in his writing.
In no other passage of Tristes tropiques will photography appear on
the side of the symbolic, capable of participating in that intermediary
realm of signs that allows the anthropologist to make sense of the en-
coded world he encounters. On the contrary, emphasis falls on the unpre-
dictable excesses captured by the photographic camera. As Christopher
Pinney suggests, photography’s “analogue modality and unavoidable
capture of contingency made it too vast (‘crammed’ and ‘exorbitant,’ to
recall Barthes) and too blank an object for a structuralism wedded to a
linguistic binarism.”61 In the next section, I examine how the dangers of
the photographic encounter are depicted in Tristes tropiques through
photography and text.

The C en ter , t h e P i c t ur e , a nd t he O t h e r

Although more directly thematized in the beginning and final chapters

of the book, the narrative of failure also figures in its middle chap-
ters (chapters 5 to 8), which nonetheless follow a more chronological
order, recounting the narrator’s successive encounters with Indigenous
groups in the backlands of Brazil. By following this structure that sep-
arates center and borders, Tristes tropiques seems to fit into Michel
de Certeau’s depiction of travel narratives’ “rhetoric of distance.”62 In
his essay “Montaigne’s ‘Of Cannibals,’” de Certeau suggests that travel
 Debris ❘ 153

narratives are composed of two dimensions—a meta-discursive history

and a descriptive depiction—that empower each other. According to de
Certeau, the descriptive dimension of travel narratives, the ethnological
“picture” which he describes as an “ahistorical image,” emerges at the
center of the usual accounts of the outward journey and of the return,
establishing simultaneously the “strangeness” of the other and the au-
thority of the text (Heterologies, 69). In depicting a structure that sepa-
rates center and borders, de Certeau characterizes the Center, which he
also calls the “picture,” as a double exteriority—it is both the other of
the narration and the body of the other.63
As if confirming Lévi-Strauss’s own assertions about the photo-
graphic medium as somehow restrictive of subjective reorganization,
the photographs included in Tristes tropiques do not exhibit the unfore-
seen correspondences that occur in remembrance. The photographic
images emerge at the center of the text, in the sense that they mirror the
chapters that narrate the anthropologist’s encounter with Indigenous
communities.64 These photographs are divided into four series, which,
mirroring the chapters, are named after the four main groups the expe-
ditionaries encountered in Brazil: the Kadiwéu, Bororo, Nambikwara,
and Tupi-Kawahib. None of the photographs that Lévi-Strauss took in
the city of São Paulo or in Cuiabá, or in India or Pakistan, are shown. As
his ordering of the photographs follows the chronological order of the
voyage, it does not evince any effort to liberate them from the partic-
ularity of each encounter. To use de Certeau’s vocabulary, the selection
and arrangement of photographs in Tristes tropiques follows both the
chronological, descriptive dimension of the Center and its focus on the
body of the other.
Whereas most of the images reproduced are portraits of Indigenous
people, the few landscapes included are used to establish the setting
where the ethnographic encounter takes place. The photographic series
begins with one such landscape, captioned “Virgin forest in Parana”
(figure 3.4). The photograph shows two men on horseback, wearing
hats, surrounded by an enormous dense forest. The image evokes those
made by nineteenth-century explorers, in which heroic men appear
small in relation to the wild and sublime nature around them. As if
the image itself were not enough to establish this photograph within
the genre of travel books, the caption utilizes the trope of the “virgin
forest,” the unconquered territory of the tropics. Following this image,
the second photograph, “The Pantanal” (figure 3.5), shows the back of
another man on a horse—an old trope of the expansion of Western
Figure 3.4. “Forêt vierge au Parana” (“Virgin forest in Parana”). Photograph
by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1936. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes
Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu
Lévi-Strauss.
 Debris ❘ 155

Figure 3.5. “Le Pantanal” (“The Pantanal”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss,

1936. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Com-
panhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

civilization—with the Pantanal wetlands ahead of him. Viewed in se-

quence, these photos suggest that the explorer is advancing into the
territory, prevailing over the distance. In the third photo, we can see
three Indigenous houses, which the title identifies as “Nalike, capital of
the Kadiwéu country” (figure 3.6). Finally, the explorer arrives at an iso-
lated village. Even though the first two photographs were taken during
two different trips, when arranged in sequence the three images narrate
a chronological voyage and the arrival at Nalike. The point of view is
initially distant, gradually closing in until it frames the painted face of a
Kadiwéu woman (figures 3.7 and 3.8). The arrangement is not casual: a
similar structure that conjoins chronology with gradual approximation
is repeated in the ethnographer’s encounters with the Bororo and the
Tupi-Kawahib.
Also appropriating the structure of travel narratives, as described
by de Certeau, Lévi-Strauss’s photographic portraits of Indigenous sub-
jects, which comprise the majority of the photographs in the book, are
framed in such a way that the Indigenous body appears at the center
of the picture. When comparing other enlargements of some of these
photos with the published version, one finds that the background and
Figure 3.6. “Nalike, capitale du pays Caduveo” (“Nalike, capital of the Kad-
iwéu country”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1936. Reproduced from
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996).
Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

Figure 3.7. “Femmes Caduveo au visage peint” (“Kadiwéu woman with paint-
ed face”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1936. Reproduced from Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copy-
right © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
 Debris ❘ 157

possible “disturbances” of the centrality of the body are cropped out

(figures 3.8 and 3.9). A copy of the image of the “Kadiwéu woman with
painted face” held at the Museé du Quai Branly, for example, shows that
Tristes tropiques’ print cropped out the presence of Dina Lévi-Strauss
on the lower right side of the frame, lying in a hammock (figure 3.9). In
other instances, the cropped-out element is less significant but confirms
a pattern of centralizing the Indigenous body in the frame. One way
of reading the cropping of these photographs relates to Lévi-Strauss’s
critique of the rawness of the photographic image, its inability to select
and process sensory information. If the “physical, chemical, and me-
chanical constraints of the camera give him a very restricted freedom”
in sifting and arranging “the profuse information that the outer world is

Figure 3.8. “Femmes Caduveo au visage peint” (“Kadiwéu woman with paint-
ed face”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1936. Reproduced from Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copy-
right © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
158 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.9. “‘Kadiwéu woman with painted face’ and Dina Lévi-Strauss in the
background.” Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1936. PF0024508. Copy-
right © Musée du Quai-Branly.

constantly sending out to assail sensory organs” (“To a Young Painter,”

249), cropping is a way to omit at least some of this data.
Another way to read this cropping and the centralization of the
Indigenous body in the frame brings us back to the tradition of eth-
nographic photography, against which Lévi-Strauss himself warns his
reader. In the first part of Tristes tropiques, which de Certeau would
call the meta-discursive border of the book, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes
the falsification of travel photography, which makes tribes already dec-
imated by diseases look exuberant, and assimilated groups look like
isolated primitives by glossing over signs of their contact with white
men, “but the existence of the latter can be deduced by a practiced eye
from small details in the illustrations, since the photographer has not
always been able to avoid including the rusty petrol cans in which this
virgin people does its cooking” (39). In this passage, photography’s
rawness, its indexical nature, is responsible for an excess of informa-
tion that can reveal the vestiges of previous contacts and betray the
false exoticism that the adventurer wants to sell. This is exactly the case
with the two prints of the Kadiwéu woman with painted face (figures
3.8 and 3.9).
 Debris ❘ 159

Although these two readings seem at first glance to contradict one

another, when taken together they point to a connection between pho-
tography’s indexical excess and the corporeal encounter. If the indexical
excess of photographic images helps expose the adventurer’s falsifica-
tions, it does so by emphasizing the contingencies of the traces of the
corporeal presence of the ethnographer/photographer in the field. Lévi-
Strauss refrains from emphasizing the corporeal dimension of ethno-
graphic contact in several ways. For example, although he is ostensibly
constructing a subjective narrative, he does not publish any photographs
of himself in the field. In this, he differs from the use of photographs in
ethnographic accounts that stress the presence of the ethnographer in
the field, such as Malinowski’s photographs on the Trobriand Islands in
the 1910s. In addition, the book includes very few images revealing the
presence of any of the expeditionaries in Indigenous villages: There are
only three images of their trips by horse and boat and a single photo
in which one can see parts of their camping setup. In this last photo-
graph, the tent is seen from afar, obscured by trees. This scarcity of
images of the expeditionaries contrasts with the photographs left out
of the book, which portray, for example, Dina and Claude Lévi-Strauss
having a meal, or the classic scene of the exchange of gifts, which had
been readily publicized in the photographs of the Rondon Commission.
The lack of emphasis on the corporeal dimension of the encounter also
contrasts with the photographs taken by Luiz de Castro Faria, which
frame the broader daily life of the expedition, including many of the
workers that made it possible. Among them, there are photographs of
Dina Lévi-Strauss taking notes while laborers fixed their broken truck
and of Claude Lévi-Strauss photographing a Nambikwara who poses
with his bow and arrow. There are images of the expeditionaries talking
to employees of the telegraph stations, which, as Castro Faria’s archives
reveal, were not only ruinous and obsolete, but served as an important
source of information for the expedition. Castro Faria also registered in
photographs his visit to an old, decadent rubber station which used to
be one of the most important in the region. After describing briefly the
exploitative system of the rubber trade, and its precarious, unlucrative
status in the 1930s, he explains that some of the seringueiros ended
up becoming farmers, forming small groups of “laborious, stable com-
munities around the telegraph stations,”65 where the Nambikwara also
circulated.
One could say that in his selection, arrangement, and cropping of
photographs, Lévi-Strauss does not differ from the exoticizing tenden-
160 ❘ Chapter 3

cies of the travel books he criticizes. It is important, however, to take

a closer look at the chapters that accompany these images in order to
understand whether and how the encounters that are pictured are de-
scribed in writing. Do these chapters follow de Certeau’s suggestion that
the center of travel narratives is marked by the descriptive dimension,
confirming a double exteriority of the Indigenous body? Or do they
play with that structure in order to subvert it? And if so, is this effort
successful? How do the written descriptions of Indigenous groups inter-
act with the photographs? Some scholars have argued that Lévi-Strauss
experiments with a symbolist style of writing only at the beginning and
end of the book: while the borders of the book follow a fragmentary
and non-chronological temporal logic—that of remembrance—the cen-
tral chapters focus, in chronological order, and “at ease in matter-of-fact
reportage,”66 on a series of figures of otherness. I argue that, more than
forgetting the epistemological impasses present in the beginning and end
chapters, however, these middle chapters seem to stage the central trial
for the ethnographer as writer: in them, he attempts to affirm the pos-
sibility of acquiring knowledge from an experience of loss, expressing
the meaning “conceived by an architect wiser than my personal history,”
while at the same time that he continues to represent what he sees as only
traces, remnants, and shadows of societies. In other words, he attempts
to read in these debris and shadows the memory of symbolic worlds.
A closer look at these chapters shows that each of them teaches the
narrator a lesson about ethnography and anthropology, about loss
brought about by the experience of contact, and about knowledge that
can only be acquired as a result of this contact.

Fragments of Symbolic Worlds and

the Danger of the Performative Primitive
Lévi-Strauss’s first ethnographic encounter is with the Kaingang, in
Paraná, during a quick trip about which he said, in a letter to Marcel
Mauss on November 10, 1935, that it had “unfortunately, a more tour-
istic than ethnographic interest . . . the cultural, and above all physical,
decay is terrifying.”67 As if to confirm that this was not a true ethno-
graphic experience, the Kaingang do not have a section of the book
dedicated to them. Instead, this encounter is narrated in a chapter called
“Paraná” in part 4, which is titled “Kadiwéu.” As opposed to what
Lévi-Strauss wrote in his letter to Mauss, in Tristes tropiques the trip
is presented as having some ethnographic interest in the sense that it
 Debris ❘ 161

provided a useful lesson on the true state of Indigenous communities

in the twentieth century. The narrator tells us how, having first become
victims of violent contact, and then subjected to governmental efforts
of assimilation through the SPI, the group had finally been left to their
own devices. Neither primitive nor civilized, they bore traces of both
worlds: “I wondered about the provenance of the beautifully polished
stone pestles which I found in native houses, mixed up with enamelled
tin plates, cheap spoons and even—occasionally—the skeletal remains
of a sewing-machine . . . the old techniques, too, are preserved as half-
conscious memories” (Tristes Tropiques, 155). Overall, the lesson he
takes from this rehearsal of an ethnographic experience is that although
external appearances might be misleading, there is always something to
learn even from those whose “decay is terrifying,” for there is always a
memory, a vestige of what they once were (154–55). Lévi-Strauss did
not publish any photo of the Kaingang in Tristes tropiques (although
he did publish them forty years later, in Saudades do Brasil). He did
not show photographs of what he describes as the beautifully polished
stone pestles among enameled tin plates, of the men and women wear-
ing ragged shirts and cotton dresses (156) and sleeping in the open next
to the unused houses built by the Brazilian government, or of the “anti-
quated guns and pistols once distributed by the government . . . hanging
in the deserted houses” (155). Instead, using pictorial representation to
isolate the object of ethnographic interest, he printed an illustration of
their pottery along with the text.
After this initiation, Lévi-Strauss made the two trips—the first in
1935–36 and the second in 1938—that represent his “true” fieldwork
experiences, and these are illustrated by photographs. As Debaene re-
marks, although these trips were separated in time by more than a year,
what happened in between is not emphasized, and they are portrayed as
one symbolic journey or itinerary in which the traveler goes deeper into
the territory in search of an untouched primitive society.68 In the first trip
Lévi-Strauss established contact with two Indigenous communities—
the Kadiwéu, along the Paraguayan border, and the “better-known but
still promising” Bororo, in the central Mato Grosso—and these are de-
scribed by Lévi-Strauss as his most fruitful experiences in anthropolog-
ical analysis.69
According to Lévi-Strauss, the Kadiwéu in many respects had fallen
into a similar state of cultural and material destitution as the Kaingang,
plagued by alcoholism and reduced to the impoverished life of Brazil-
ian peasant ranchers. They are described as “ragged peasants” (Tristes
162 ❘ Chapter 3

Tropiques, 177), but also as the “last survivors” of “the great warlike
tribes who formerly controlled the area” (165). Although far removed
from “the prosperity that Guido Boggiani had found there forty years
before” (173), however, some elements of their material culture had sur-
vived. Lévi-Strauss brought many of the Kadiwéu’s decorated ceramics
to the recently founded Musée de L’Homme and was especially intrigued
by the enigmatic nature of the symbolism at work in Kadiwéu body
painting (10), of which he took many photographs. Aside from photo-
graphing painted Kadiwéu bodies and faces, Lévi-Strauss collected more
than four hundred drawings made by the Kadiwéu themselves on sheets
of paper. In Tristes tropiques he published two photographic portraits of
Kadiwéu women, followed by a drawing made by the ethnologist and
painter Guido Boggiani of a Kadiwéu woman with a painted face (figure
3.10), and painting motifs drawn by Kadiwéu women on sheets of paper
given to them by Lévi-Strauss (figure 3.11). The sequence concludes with
a portrait of a young Kadiwéu woman dressed for a puberty ritual.
Whereas the Kadiwéu designs provided an excellent subject for struc-
turalist analysis, which Lévi-Strauss had already discussed in a 1944
article,70 these motifs were also a perfect example of the archeological
temporality that characterizes Tristes tropiques: they were remnants of
an evanescent art form whose long history could only be proved by
comparison with images made by Boggiani in the nineteenth century.71
Lévi-Strauss offers an interpretation of the Kadiwéu designs in Tristes
tropiques after narrating how he started photographing a few Kadi-
wéu women but soon decided to put aside his camera. According to the
narrator, his initial intention was to collect all of the many Kadiwéu
painting designs by photographing the women’s faces, “but the finan-
cial demands of the ladies of the tribe would soon have exhausted my
resources” (186), so he started to ask the women to draw the patterns
on paper instead. Asked to draw one of her designs, a Kadiwéu woman
begins by tracing the outline of a face. Intriguingly, she represents it
with a deep declivity in the middle of the forehead. Lévi-Strauss sees this
as evidence that this Kadiwéu painter conceived of the human face as
made up of two conjoined profiles. The observation leads him to con-
clude that the designs are not simply placed on the face but are rather
interrelated to it in complex ways. On the one hand, the designs and
the face are opposed in the sense that the designs modify the structure
of the face and distort it in a quasi-sadistic manner. On the other hand,
it is only by being painted that the face acquires its specifically human
dignity and spiritual significance. Lévi-Strauss relates an anecdote told
by the eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary Sanchez Labrador. When
 Debris ❘ 163

asked why they painted themselves, the Kadiwéu are alleged to have re-
plied that unpainted human beings are “stupid,” indistinguishable from
mere animals. Boris Wiseman argues that at the heart of Lévi-Strauss’s
interpretation is a theory of personhood as a mask, in the sense that the
designs “make” their faces, which the Kadiwéu believe are predestined
to receive them; unpainted, human beings remain incomplete.72
In addition to his graphic analysis of the paintings, in discussing the
duality of nature/culture, Lévi-Strauss interprets the splitting of the face
in Kadiwéu art as the expression of an ideology that is common in cer-
tain rigidly stratified societies in which the display of rank and position
is all-important. His understanding stems from comparison: like other
local groups such as the Guana and the Bororo, the Kadiwéu had a
rigid three-caste system that largely limited social cohesion within the
group. However, these other societies found a solution to counterbal-
ance the threat of inbreeding and increasing gradation in hierarchies:
the societies were further divided into moieties that cut across the class
systems. A man from one moiety had to marry a woman from another.
“It is fair to say, then, that the asymmetry of the classes was, in a sense,
counterbalanced by the symmetry of the moieties” (Tristes Tropiques,
196), writes Lévi-Strauss, and he goes on to posit that due to their fa-
natical devotion to hierarchy, etiquette, and nobility, the Mbaya, from
whom the Kadiwéu were descended, did not adopt the same solution.
Instead, they dreamed of it and translated the problem into art: their
paintings, with their symmetric and asymmetric patterns, mirror the
combination of caste and moieties found in the Bororo social system.
In sum, Lévi-Strauss interprets the Kadiwéu designs as a representation
of institutions that the Kadiwéu lacked, “as the phantasm of a society
ardently and insatiably seeking a means of expressing symbolically the
institutions it might have, if its interests and superstitions did not stand
in the way” (198). Surprisingly, the most similar artistic expression to
that of Kadiwéu art is, according to Lévi-Strauss, the design of Western
card games, which he analyzes through a reading of Lewis Carroll’s
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (179–80).
This long detour to describe Lévi-Strauss’s interpretation of Kadiwéu
art as the recomposition of the face, which is both unique and part of
a larger human “repertoire,”73 can help us understand the set of intri-
cate concepts that underpin his critique of photography. In contrast to
the Kadiwéu art form, which for Lévi-Strauss was the expression of a
collective need and functioned as a transformation of the physical body
into culture, he considers photographs to be contingent and unique in
their adherence to the unprocessed physical world.
164 ❘ Chapter 3

Let us now take a closer look at the images published in this chapter.
As I mentioned earlier, the photographs in Tristes tropiques are orga-
nized into four chapters, which correspond exactly to the four middle
parts of the book, titled after the Kadiwéu, Bororo, Nambikwara, and
Tupi-Kawahib peoples. These four photographic sequences are printed
on glossy paper, separate from the text, at the end of the book. The draw-
ings, in contrast, are usually reproduced within the text. In the case of
the Kadiwéu, however, drawings are printed both within the text and in
the photographic sequence. More specifically, the two photographic por-
traits of Kadiwéu women are followed by an 1895 drawing of a Kadiwéu
woman with a painted face made by Guido Boggiani (figure 3.10) and
three drawings made by Kadiwéu women themselves in 1895 and 1935

Figure 3.10. “La cognata di Giuansigno”

(“Juancito’s sister-in-law”). Drawing by Guido
Boggiani, c. 1895. Reproduced from Guido Bog-
giani, Viaggi d’un artista nell’America Meridio-
nale: I Caduvei, Mbaya o Guaicurú (Rome: Er-
manno Loescher, 1895), 154.
 Debris ❘ 165

(figure 3.11). Why publish these drawings along with the photographs?
One interpretation is that the inclusion of Boggiani’s drawing allows
Lévi-Strauss to confirm the persistence of Kadiwéu motifs throughout
the decades, hence taking part in what Luciana Martins describes as the
transformation of Kadiwéu ephemeral art into archeological vestige.74
The drawings made by Kadiwéu women are an important part of the
analytic and narrative dimensions of the chapter, since it is through his
perception that the drawings ignore the contours of the human face
that Lévi-Strauss comes up with his theory of the deformation of the
face. Moreover, it is possible that the repetition of images of the Kadi-
wéu motifs in varied media and made by different subjects acts in the
book to shift the focus away from the individual woman whose face

Figure 3.11. “Peinture de visage: Dessin origi-

nal d’une femme Caduveo” (“Facial painting:
An original drawing by a Kadiwéu woman”),
c. 1895. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). Copyright
© Monique Lévi-Strauss.
166 ❘ Chapter 3

is represented and also away from any singular experience of contact,

directing it toward the Kadiwéu pattern instead. The main argument
espoused in one of the longest commentaries on Lévi-Strauss’s photo-
graphs in Tristes tropiques, Jay Prosser’s Light in the Dark Room, is
that the assemblage of photographs along with other “encoded forms,”
such as drawing, diagrams, or writing, is a sign of Lévi-Strauss’s attempt
to “transubstantiate” the photographic referent into code.75
To these interpretations I will add another, which attempts to clarify
the phenomenology of the kind of ethnographic contact that is rejected
by Lévi-Strauss and which, at the same time, complicates this division
between body and code. This division can be foreseen in Lévi-Strauss’s
interpretation of Kadiwéu art, in which, as Wiseman argues, the trans-
formed body is the artwork. In this respect, far from being composed of
purely abstract designs, Kadiwéu art exists only on the living bodies that
provide a “figurative” element to it. However, these living bodies do not
cease to pose problems for Lévi-Strauss. Having been assimilated and
thus having forgotten the practices and meanings of their social and sym-
bolic worlds, the Kadiwéu performed a false spectacle of primitiveness for
the anthropologist, whose actual interest resided only in paintings that
had survived the decadence of the Kadiwéu mode of life. Lévi-Strauss
manifested a certain skepticism, for example, towards the fact that in the
puberty ritual of a Kadiwéu girl, she was dressed in traditional clothing,
had her face and body painted, and had “all the necklaces that they could
lay hands on” (Tristes Tropiques, 176) strung around her neck.
Interestingly, the camera appears in this chapter as a privileged trig-
ger for these false spectacles:

Young anthropologists are taught that natives are afraid of

having their image caught in a photograph, and that it is
proper to overcome this fear and compensate them for the
risk they think they are taking by making them a present in
money or in kind. The Kadiweu had perfected the system: not
only did they insist on being paid before allowing themselves
to be photographed; they forced me to photograph them so
that I should have to pay. Hardly a day went by but a woman
came to me in some extraordinary get-up and obliged me,
whether I wanted to or not, to pay her photographic homage,
accompanied by a few milreis. Being anxious not to waste my
film, I often just went through the motions and handed over
the money. (Tristes Tropiques, 176)
 Debris ❘ 167

The Kadiwéu women, according to Lévi-Strauss, not only requested

money to be photographed, but performed primitiveness in front of the
camera. In response to the Kadiwéu women’s performance, Lévi-Strauss
refuses to photograph them. But by refusing to waste his film, the eth-
nologist seems to adhere to the idea that photography can be an instru-
ment to generate objective documents of an authentic anthropological
object, which is precisely the reason why he dislikes photography in the
first place. Not only does he refuse to take a photograph, but he goes a
step further and pretends to take them. Similar to the Kadiwéu women,
who want a reward for posing as “native,” the ethnologist wants his
investment in photography to be rewarded in the form of ethnographic
value. In order not to waste his film, he performs his role as an ethnog-
rapher, by pretending he is photographing. Only by acting out their own
roles can each side gain something from the encounter. Even though
it is presented as an anecdote, the episode is metonymic. Does it not,
after all, speak about all photography and about every ethnographic
encounter?
The photo-ethnographic encounter here could serve as a lesson on
the notion of ethnographic contact itself: it allows for a critique of the
ethnographer’s search for the authentic Indigenous subject. Instead of
a critique based on a discourse of loss, it builds on the evolving inter-
action between the actors in an encounter. The Kadiwéu women hope
that by acting as anthropological objects, they will get something valu-
able in return, so they pose. They become an ethnographic image before
the “click” of the camera. This performative character of the photo-
ethnographic contact is not unrelated to its indexical aspect; rather, it
is intrinsic to it. To use Roland Barthes’s words in Camera Lucida, if
photography “always carries its referent with itself,”76 always attesting
to a presence, this referent cannot be thought of as separate from the
photographic event itself. By dissociating “indexicality” from “objec-
tivity,” Barthes challenges the temporal understanding of photographic
representation as a gathering of data, in which there is, first, an external
referent that is later transformed into an image.

In front of the lens, I am at the same time: the one I think I

am, the one I want others to think I am, the one the photog-
rapher thinks I am, and the one he makes use of to exhibit
his art. In other words, a strange action: I do not stop imitat-
ing myself, and because of this, each time I am (or let myself
be) photographed, I invariably suffer from a sensation of in-
168 ❘ Chapter 3

authenticity, sometimes of imposture (comparable to certain

nightmares). (Camera Lucida, 13)

Thus, Lévi-Strauss discredits photography for being both uncoded and

falsifying, both empirical and spectacular. The flip side of his denial of
photography’s appeal to objectivity is the potential falsity of the photo-
ethnographic encounter. The photographic image is not only a trap for
knowledge—for one should resist seeking in the individual body the
answers to anthropology’s questions—it is also susceptible to the cor-
rupting power of the camera, as well as to the dangers of the seductive
performative games played by the Kadiwéu. Aside from the positivist
risk of staying at the level of the description of “insipid details” or the
danger of succumbing to the illusion of exoticism and the seduction of
images, another risk inherent in the photo-ethnographic contact is the
performative native, who threatens observation by reinventing herself
for the eyes of the anthropologist.
This mix of danger and seduction is present in the story of the en-
counter between the Kadiwéu and Guido Boggiani, an Italian painter,
photographer, and ethnologist who traveled through the interiors of
Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay at the end of the nineteenth century and
suffered a tragic death. Although Lévi-Strauss cites Boggiani several
times, he does not publish his photographs or mention the story of his
death. Boggiani was killed in 1902 by Kadiwéu individuals who, ac-
cording to legend, believed that his use of a photographic camera was
responsible for the plagues that had fallen upon their people.77
In Tristes tropiques, the fear of being seduced and betrayed by the
posing Kadiwéu, who demand to be paid for the recording of their im-
age, is strongly present. Being painted on the body, and intrinsic to the
composition of the face, the Kadiwéu designs become a sort of phe-
nomenological trap for the photographer. In an attempt to overcome
this threat, reclaim his role as an ethnologist, and recover his lost ob-
ject, Lévi-Strauss concludes the passage about the photographic perfor-
mance of the Kadiwéu by restoring the rightful position of each player
in the game of representation:

However, it would have been bad anthropological practice

to resist this behaviour, or even to consider it as a proof
of decadence or money mindedness. It represented the re-
emergence, in a transposed form, of certain specific features
of Indian society: the independence and authority of women
 Debris ❘ 169

of high birth, ostentatious behaviour in front of strangers,

and the insistence on homage from ordinary mortals. The
attire might be freakish and improvised, but the behaviour
which prompted it was no less significant because of that; it
was my business to see how it fitted into the framework of
traditional institutions. (Tristes Tropiques, 176–77)

Again, what matters to the ethnographer is to find in the present day

traces of the past, or, rather, of a persistent expression of a symbolic world.
While the Kadiwéu’s body paintings were an enigma, being at the
same time remnants of the past and a window that opened onto a sys-
tem of social relations that no longer existed, the second group con-
tacted by the Lévi-Strauss couple, the Bororo, presented a complete
spectacle, “a society which is still alive and faithful to its traditions”
(Tristes Tropiques, 215). Lévi-Strauss subjects the Bororo to a detailed
anthropological analysis that engages in both universalization and com-
parison. “Intensive ceremonial activity both day and night,” and the
display of “fantastic adornments”78 provide the perfect setting for eth-
nographic work.
In the foreword to the third volume of the Enciclopédia Bororo, Lévi-
Strauss explains how “that brief encounter marked [his] entire career”:

The Bororo offered me not only the contemplation of a won-

derful spectacle. The entirety of my theoretical thinking, as it
has developed in the last thirty years, maintains the core of
what I seemed to have understood amongst them: how a hu-
man society can attempt to unify in a vast system—both so-
cial and logical—the whole of the relations among their own
members and those relations they keep, as a group, with the
natural species and the world that surrounds them.

This mention of a “wonderful spectacle” is remarkable in the context of

Tristes tropiques’ critique of exoticism. If there is any passage in which
epistemological impasses are suspended, it is in Lévi-Strauss’s descrip-
tion of the Bororo. In an interview in the 1960s, Lévi-Strauss affirmed
that he saw in the Bororo “a society that had abolished time, and after
all what greater nostalgia could we have than to abolish time and then
to live in a sort of present tense which is a constantly revitalized past
and preserved as it was dreamt in myth and belief.”79 This seems to
translate well into what Johannes Fabian calls anthropology’s “denial
170 ❘ Chapter 3

of coevalness,”80 that is, the denial that anthropologist and interlocutor

exist in the same present. Not surprisingly, Lévi-Strauss’s description of
the Bororo has been widely criticized. Clifford Geertz claims that Lévi-
Strauss reproduces exactly what he denounces,81 while in Photography
and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil, Luciana Mar-
tins argues that Lévi-Strauss “turn[s] a blind eye to the Bororo’s recent
history”82 and obliterates a certain logic in the self-representation of a
group that was studied by a series of travelers from Nicolas-Antoine
Taunay, Hercules Florence, and Marc Ferrez to Karl von den Steinen
and the documentarist Aloha Baker, among others.
Luciana Martins uses as an example the photograph “The author’s
best informant, in ceremonial dress” (figure 3.12), one of the most fa-
mous photographs taken by Lévi-Strauss, which also appeared in an
article of his on the social organization of the Bororo in the Journal de
la Societé des Américanistes in 1936.83 The image was used on the front
cover of many editions of Tristes tropiques and was later republished
in Saudades do Brasil. Martins carefully delineates the many roles that
Roberto Ipureu, the “ideal informant” photographed by Lévi-Strauss,
had performed for travelers, as an informant for the German-Brazilian
anthropologist Herbert Baldus in 1935, and as an actor in Aloha Bak-

Figure 3.12. “Le meilleur informateur de l’auteur, en tenue de cérémonie” (“The

author’s best informant, in ceremonial dress”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-
Strauss, 1936. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
 Debris ❘ 171

er’s film A vida de uma aldeia Bororo. The “performativity” of Ipureu,

highlighted by Martins, is not without relation to the Bororo’s histori-
cally resilient way of dealing with contact, which, as Sylvia Caiuby No-
vaes points out, was also a strategy to preserve their own traditions.84
If we read closely the entirety of part 6 of Tristes tropiques, which
is dedicated to the Bororo, we find that Lévi-Strauss does not entirely
ignore the Bororo’s performativity, but he treats it differently from that
of the Kadiwéu. The part’s first chapter narrates the path that leads the
anthropologist to the Bororo village. Titled “Gold and Diamonds,” the
chapter describes the city of Cuiabá, historically marked by gold fe-
ver, in which even today one can find “grains of gold dust everywhere”
(Tristes Tropiques, 205). His description of adults and children who
still search for these “tiny brilliant particles” (205) echoes the passage
in which, faced with the loss of the dreamed object of anthropology, the
narrator nonetheless affirms that “dreams, ‘the god of the savages,’ as
the old missionaries used to say, have always slipped through my fingers
like quicksilver. But a few shining particles may have remained stuck,
here and there” (42). The anthropologist in this chapter is partly an
archeologist and partly a twentieth-century gold prospector who will
eventually find what he is searching for.
A few pages into the chapter, Lévi-Strauss recounts his journey
through the central Brazilian plateau, a landscape described as dream-
like and so vast that on the second day of travel one had the impression
of repeating the same path as the day before, so that “perception and
memory are fused in a kind of obsessive immobility” (Tristes Tropiques,
209). As if to make sure that the attentive reader is able to relate this
passage to the anthropologist’s description of his crossing of the At-
lantic for the first time—that moment in which he daydreams of over-
coming loss, of a correspondence between past and present as well as
between the sensory and the symbolic—the narrator describes how in
this “territory—one of the oldest in the world,” the “traditional roles of
the sky and the earth are reversed” (209). In echoing the earlier diary
description of the spectacle of twilight, the narrator sets the stage for
his encounter with the “wonderful spectacle” provided by the Bororo.
Loss, however, is a constant presence. Throughout the plateau, Lévi-
Strauss encounters impoverished gold miners and phantom Brazilian
communities decimated by disease. The dream of encountering the past
only returns when he sees the first Bororos painted from head to toe with
urucum. Lévi-Strauss then arrives at Kejara, a Bororo village described
as “one of the last not to have been much affected by the activities of the
172 ❘ Chapter 3

Salesian Fathers,” who “had both carried out excellent anthropological

research . . . and at the same time pursued the systematic obliteration
of native culture” (Tristes Tropiques, 216). An ambiguity arises as to
whether the reader should understand the Kejaras as untouched natives
or as wily survivors. Lévi-Strauss wonders whether the chief of the Ke-
jara, for example, really doesn’t speak Portuguese or (in a recognition
of the chief’s agency) is just pretending not to know the language. The
chief also refuses to communicate with Lévi-Strauss “except through the
members of his council” (216). But in Kejara there lives “a native” (215)
who speaks Portuguese and becomes Lévi-Strauss’s interpreter and best
informant. The narrator explains that Roberto Ipureu had been a pupil
in a mission and was even sent to Rome, where he met the pope. Having
been forced upon his return from Rome to be wedded in a Christian
marriage ceremony, Ipureu had decided to reconvert to “the old Bororo
ideal”; he “settled in Kejara where, for the last ten or fifteen years, he
had been living an exemplary savage life” (216).
Although it is not my intention here to rescue Lévi-Strauss from ac-
cusations that he is exoticizing and de-historicizing the Bororo, it is
important to recognize how he does this. In this respect, I cannot avoid
pointing out that he suggests that Ipureu chose to be a “savage” in the
same way that the chief might be just choosing to not speak Portuguese.
The major difference he finds in comparing the Kadiwéu women’s per-
formance to that of the Bororo, however, is that the Bororo deliver what
the anthropologist is seeking. Their “wonderful spectacle” is based on
memory and tradition; hence, the anthropologist accepts it and only
fleetingly considers the historical development of the ritual presented to
him or the effect of his own presence on their behavior.
As opposed to the chapter on the Kadiwéu, the photographs in the
Bororo chapter show them performing a number of different activities,
dances, and rituals. There are eight photographs in total. The first is a
photograph of the village from a distance, with, as the captions point
out, the men’s house at the center, followed by a “Bororo couple” and
“the author’s best informant, in ceremonial dress” (figure 3.12). The
referents identified by the captions are all exemplary types. The next
photograph shows Bororo men in the “men’s house,” which, since it
is central to the Bororo’s social organization and ritual preparations,
is subjected to a long explanation in Lévi-Strauss’s text. In all of the
images showing Bororo dances and rituals, they usually do not look
into the camera and the frame does not isolate them as if they were
posing, but rather as if caught in the midst of their everyday activities
 Debris ❘ 173

(figure 3.13). It is as if the ethnographer were the privileged spectator

of a spectacle not performed for him. An exception can be found in
the photograph “Bringing out the mariddo,” in which a child appears
to find the photographer a more interesting spectacle than the Bororo
ritual (figure 3.14).
Years later, Lévi-Strauss explained to a documentary crew that the
lesson he learned among the Bororo was a lesson on structuralism:

I have the feeling now when I try to reconstitute my intel-

lectual history—it’s very difficult because I have a terrible
memory—I have the feeling that I was always what later
became known as a “structuralist” even when I was a child.
But meeting the Bororo who were the great theoreticians of
structuralism—that was a godsend for me!85

The Bororo were not only teachers of structuralism, they also provided
Lévi-Strauss with the elaborate garments that he took back to the Musée
de l’Homme, as well as his most impressive photographs of primitive
spectacles. The images and objects he collected during this expedition
were crucial in legitimating his reputation as an anthropologist: “One

Figure 3.13. “Danse funèbre” (“Funeral dance”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-

Strauss, c. 1936. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
174 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.14. “La sortie du mariddo” (“Bringing out the mariddo”). Photograph
by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1936. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes
Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu
Lévi-Strauss.

year after my visit to the Bororo, all the required conditions for turn-
ing me into a fully fledged anthropologist had been fulfilled” (Tristes
Tropiques, 249). For the anthropologist, the Bororo were gold.

History and Otherness

Following the relative success of their encounters with the Kadiwéu
and the Bororo and their instructive lessons on anthropology, and after
publishing a much-praised article on the Bororo and organizing an ex-
hibition of their collections of artifacts and photos, the Lévi-Strausses
departed for what they planned as a much longer voyage into the deep
backlands of Brazil, where they hoped to find the Nambikwara and
the Tupi-Kawahib. The so-called Serra do Norte expedition of 1938
would start where the previous one had ended, following the telegraph
line constructed by the Rondon Commission. The Lévi-Strausses were
joined by Luiz de Castro Faria and the French doctor and naturalist
Jean Vellard. The outcome of this second voyage, however, was much
more somber than the previous one, and its lessons bring us back to
the narrative of failure. Together, the Nambikwara and the last group
they visit, the Tupi-Kawahib, teach the young anthropologist a double
 Debris ❘ 175

lesson: one cannot know the object of anthropology either as past or as

other. Pure exteriority is, ultimately, incomprehensible.
The Nambikwara represent the narrator’s best hope of encounter-
ing “the infancy of the human species” (Tristes Tropiques, 274): “I had
been looking for a society reduced to its simplest expression. That of
the Nambikwara was so truly simple that all I could find in it was in-
dividual human beings” (318). In addition to being primitive, however,
they had also been decimated, infected with diseases, and left in a state
of complete destitution. Lévi-Strauss notes that they slept on the ground
and, on cold nights, on the warm ashes, which accumulated on their
skin (292). The description of the Nambikwara takes us back to the
beginning of Tristes tropiques, when the narrator asks himself if he is
the only one to recognize that he had returned from his ethnographic
voyage with nothing but a “handful of ashes” (41).

The visitor camping with the Indians in the bush for the first
time, is filled with anguish and pity at the sight of human
beings so totally bereft; some relentless cataclysm seems to
have crushed them against the ground in a hostile land, leav-
ing them naked and shivering by their flickering fires. . . .
But the wretchedness is shot through with whisperings and
chuckles. The couples embrace as if seeking to recapture a
lost unity, and their caresses continue uninterrupted as he
goes by. (Tristes Tropiques, 293)

The language Lévi-Strauss uses to describe the Nambikwara, with its

proliferation of adjectives, is saturated with emotion. Ethnographer and
primitive nearly reach a point where the distance required to see pat-
terns and similarities is eliminated. The Nambikwara, for Lévi-Strauss,
remained a sad expression of human precariousness and presented “the
most truthful and moving expression of human love” (Tristes Tropiques,
293).86 The number of published photographs of the Nambikwara in
the book, 28 in total, is significantly higher than that of any other group
(6 for the Kadiwéu, 8 for the Bororo, and 16 for the Tupi-Kawahib).
Whereas in the chapter about the Kadiwéu, frontal portraits showing
their painted faces prevail, as if it were possible to abstract the indi-
vidual body, and the photographs of Bororos focus on ritual garments
and spectacles, the images of Nambikwaras suggest the ethnographer’s
intimate contact with individual lives: a mother and a child embrace in
their sleep, a girl smiles at the photographer, three young people em-
brace on the ground (figures 3.15 and 3.16).
176 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.15. “Sourire nambikwara” (“A Nambik-

wara smile”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
c. 1938. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia das Le-
tras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

In sequence these close shots, however, begin to show a pattern, which

is highlighted by the captions: “a woman breastfeeding,” “the siesta,”
“conjugal play,” “way of carrying a baby.” It seems like it is in their body
language that Lévi-Strauss searches for meaning.87 If in the case of the
Kadiwéu, the unavoidable Indigenous body poses a danger in its (cor-
rupted) photographic performativity, in the case of the Nambikwara, the
sensuous performative is the subject of the photographic series.
In the chapter’s narrative, Lévi-Strauss describes the Nambikwara,
who fulfill his desire to encounter the origins of humankind, as happy,
kind, and childlike, innocent victims of the advance of civilization, and
also extremely seductive:
 Debris ❘ 177

Figure 3.16. “Tendres ébats” (“Tender fights”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-

Strauss, c. 1938. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

It was difficult, for instance, to remain indifferent to the sight

of one or more pretty girls sprawling stark naked in the sand
and laughing mockingly as they wriggled at my feet. When
I went bathing in the river, I was often embarrassed by a
concerted attack on the part of half-a-dozen or so females—
young or old—whose one idea was to appropriate my soap,
of which they were extremely fond. (Tristes Tropiques, 286)

In the photographs the bodies of the Nambikwaras touch each other,

and the gaze of the camera almost touches their skin, suggesting an af-
fective or erotic contact. However, eroticism presents its own dangers:
the photographs that expose most clearly this erotic contact and its
effect on the anthropologist are left out of Tristes tropiques. A photo-
graph published only in Saudades do Brasil (1994), for example, shows
the breast of an Indigenous girl right in its center, her body inclined
in the direction of the camera, while her head is outside of the frame
(figure 3.17). The photograph presents us not so much with an object
but with the gaze that falls upon it, a gaze that gets so close to its ob-
ject that it risks becoming tactile. Almost abolishing the distance that
178 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.17. “. . . gaies le plus souvent . . .” (“Mostly happy”). Photograph by

Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938. In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil (Paris:
Plon, 1994), 144. Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

separates the camera and the photographed, this image points to the
danger of a sensuous contact that threatens to obscure vision itself. The
image reminds us that photography, simultaneously optical and chemi-
cal, bodily triggered and optically framed, represents both contact and
distance, touch and vision, much like the ethnographic contact itself.
It also speaks of the desire and fascination involved in the experience
of contact, the desire for the other and the desire, in Michael Taussig’s
words, to “become Other.”88
In another photograph published only in Saudades do Brasil, the
river-bathing scene described in the text of Tristes tropiques is incor-
porated as its theme (figure 3.18). The photo might have been taken by
someone else, or by Lévi-Strauss using a self-timing mechanism. Lévi-
Strauss is shown having a bath among Nambikwara children, his white
torso turned to the camera, contrasting with the dark bodies around
him. His white body glows, as does his white towel in the upper-left
corner of the photo. The image enacts the desire both to merge into
the other and to remain separate. In Lévi-Strauss’s bath, the white man
appears vulnerable and exotic in his nudity.
Lévi-Strauss did not publish these images in Tristes tropiques. More-
over, he captioned the photographs he did print with “useful” infor-
 Debris ❘ 179

Figure 3.18. “On se baigne le matin au réveil et à d’autres moments de

la journée, ici en compagnie de l’ethnologue” (“Bathing happens in the
morning and in other times of the day. Here, a bath with the ethnologist”).
Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938. In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Sau-
dades do Brasil (Paris: Plon, 1994), 126. Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-
Strauss.

mation about typical costumes, activities, family relations, and body

postures. Regardless of the chapter’s narrative of failure, the photo-
graphs were printed in a way that tried to recapture their value for
future anthropological analysis.
When he visits the Tupi-Kawahib, the ethnographer is presented with
the “thrilling prospect of being the first white man to visit a particular
native community” (Tristes Tropiques, 325–26): “After an enchanting
trip up-river, I had certainly found my savages. Alas! They were only too
savage. . . . They were as close to me as a reflection in a mirror; I could
touch them, but I could not understand them” (333). In the selection of
180 ❘ Chapter 3

images of the Tupi-Kawahib, almost all of the portraits have a blurred

background and are cropped so as to center their subjects in the middle.
In most of them, the subjects do not gaze back at the viewer; they are
absorbed in their own activities or thoughts, as if no reciprocity were
possible (figures 3.19 and 3.20).
The encounter with the Mundé, a Tupi-Kawahib group, “never be-
fore mentioned in any anthropological study” (Tristes Tropiques, 331),
talks about the impossibility of encountering absolute alterity: “I could
make no use of it, since I was incapable of even grasping what it con-
sisted of” (333). If the Kadiwéu are archeological debris, the Bororo are
gold, the Nambikwara are ashes, and the Mundé are mirrors: “Perhaps,
then, this was what travelling was, an exploration of the deserts of my

Figure 3.19. “Portrait de Taperahi, le chef Tupi-Kawahib” (“Portrait of Taper-

ahi, the Tupi-Kawahib chief”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938.
Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos (São Paulo: Companhia
das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
Figure 3.20. “Kunhatsin, femme principale de Taperahi, portant son enfant”
(“Kunhatsin, Taperahi’s main wife, carrying her child”). Photograph by Claude
Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938. Reproduced from Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Trópicos
(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1996). Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
182 ❘ Chapter 3

mind rather than of those surrounding me?” (378). Throughout his sec-
ond journey for fieldwork, which was briefer than Lévi-Strauss had ex-
pected due to illnesses and accidents, the anthropologist, who had faced
the mirror of the Mundé’s inscrutable eyes, finds himself immersed in
images and sounds from his own culture:

On the plateau of the western Mato Grosso, I had been

haunted for weeks, not by the things that lay all around me
and that I would never see again, but by a hackneyed melody,
weakened still further by the deficiencies of my memory—the
melody of Chopin’s Etude no. 3, opus 10, which, by a bit-
terly ironical twist of which I was well aware, now seemed to
epitomize all I had left behind. (Tristes Tropiques, 376–77)

In the last pages of Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss returns to the episte-

mological question he discusses in the beginning, offering a solution to
its impasses through a reading of Rousseau, whom he calls “the most
anthropological of the philosophes” (390). Lévi-Strauss reminds us that
far from idealizing the state of nature, Rousseau conceived “origin”
merely as a necessary hypothesis. Like his predecessor, Lévi-Strauss ar-
gues that the knowledge of humanity’s beginnings is not a knowledge
of “man” outside society—for such a creature would, by definition, not
be a “man”—but of a common state in which all possible societies are
contained. Responding to accusations of being both an apolitical rel-
ativist and a naive primitivist, he turns to Rousseau to argue that the
state of nature is not historically or geographically located, but rather
that it represents the human potential for creating social orders. Thus,
returning to a primitive state is what, in us, would allow for the creation
of an alternative society. This political stance, however, is accompanied
by historical pessimism: by creating a monoculture, modern man is de-
stroying what makes possible the recognition of this common ground,
which is, in turn, what allows for the existence of diversity itself. By fol-
lowing the Rondon telegraph line into the depths of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss
was confronted by the destructive, failed project of modernization, of
which Indigenous peoples and their cultures were the victims.

Saudades do Brasil
In order to explore Lévi-Strauss’s selection of photographs in Tristes
tropiques, it is important to think about what he omitted. He did not in-
 Debris ❘ 183

clude, for example, an image of a Kadiwéu boy with a face painted just
“for fun,” since traditionally only the women were painted (Saudades
do Brasil, 73), or the photograph of a girl carrying her sibling, show-
ing, much like Luiz de Castro Faria’s images, that the Nambikwaras
lived around the Rondon telegraph lines: the viewer can see the barbed-
wired fence behind the children, as well as a shed. Another photograph
which, instead of focusing on a Bororo ceremony, frames the audience
of Bororo people, several of whom are distracted by the camera, turns
the technology itself (as well as the anthropologist and the viewer) into
the spectacle to be looked at. Also excluded are all photographs of other
places and times, such as an image of a boy in the Germanic south
of Brazil giving the Nazi salute, and images of peasants, mixed-race
Brazilians, and urban environments. Lévi-Strauss also excludes all self-
portraits, all blurred images, ruins, and failures of representation that
he addresses in writing, not to mention thousands of other photographs
to which we don’t have access. In Tristes tropiques, which is a book
about the encounter with the past, Lévi-Strauss did not seem to believe
in photography’s capacity to take part in the interrelationships of mon-
tage and correspondence that characterize remembrance, associations
extensively explored by the 1930s avant garde.
It was only in 1994, sixty years after his ethnographic expeditions,
that Lévi-Strauss published a book of photographs. This book, Sau-
dades do Brasil (Nostalgia for Brazil), was coauthored with his son
Matthieu Lévi-Strauss, who was responsible for the enlargement of
each of the 176 images in it.89 The text, written by Claude Lévi-Strauss,
presents Saudades do Brasil as a subjective book, in opposition to the
objectifying vision of photography that he criticized. The prologue has
a biographical tone; we are told that Lévi-Strauss learned how to pho-
tograph from his father, a portrait painter who routinely photographed
his subjects to “guide him in the placement of their principal features”
(Saudades do Brasil, 22). Claude’s parents would visit him in São Paulo
in 1935, where father and son would go out to take photographs to-
gether, competing “to see who could obtain the sharpest images” (22).
They shopped for photographic supplies in São Paulo, acquiring a
twin-lens reflex Voigtlander and a Hugo-Meyer F1.5 with a 75mm lens,
which turned to be “practically unusable because of its weight” (22).
Two Leicas, by contrast, made Claude Lévi-Strauss “marvel how such a
small format . . . could produce such precise details” (22).
The captions that accompany the images in the book are also sub-
jective: a photograph of a Tupi-Kawahib woman captioned in Tristes
184 ❘ Chapter 3

tropiques as “Kunhatsin, Taperahi’s main wife, carrying her child,” is

recaptioned in Saudades do Brasil as “Of his four wives, Kunhatsin was
the most beautiful” (figure 3.20). On a picture of a Nambikwara girl,
he changes the previous caption published in Tristes tropiques from “A
Nambikwara smile” to “Mocking, provocative” (figure 3.15). “A Nam-
bikwara smile” is an anthropological description of a referent, while
the second subtitle tells us much more about the person who wrote it.
Moreover, if the indefinite article generalizes it—“a” Nambikwara smile
is perennial, or rather outside of time; it could be part of a collection,
such as an arrow or a bowl—the verb in the gerund points to the time
in which the photograph was taken, the present of the photographic en-
counter. This photograph is the last of a sequence of five images of Nam-
bikwara women. The first has the appearance of a candid photograph:
the photographer, standing behind what appears to be some palm leaves,
photographs a happy conversation between two Nambikwara who seem
unaware of or indifferent to the presence of the camera (figure 3.21). The
caption mentions the attractiveness of the young Nambikwara women.

Figure 3.21. “L’attrait qu’exerçaient les Nambikwara, non obstant leur répu-
tation détestable, tenait en bonne partie à la présence parmi eux de très jeunes
femmes, gracieuses malgré une taille parfois peu fine” (“The Nambikwara al-
lure, notwithstanding their bad reputation, was due to the presence among them
of very young and gracious women, despite their not always graceful figure”).
Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938. In Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades
do Brasil (Paris: Plon, 1994), 142. Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.
 Debris ❘ 185

It is also among the Nambikwara that the episode of the writing

lesson takes place. Among the most primitive people, writing is intro-
duced in its crudest form as pure domination. Pinney calls attention to
the fact that just after the writing lesson episode, Lévi-Strauss’s party
left the campsite in a hurry.90 Still disconcerted by the farce he had wit-
nessed and of which he was the instrument, Lévi-Strauss lost track of
the others. He decided to fire shots in order to get his colleagues’ at-
tention and ended up scaring his mule, which ran away. As in a com-
edy film in which we know how the sequence of actions will progress,
the anthropologist divested himself of his “weapons and photographic
equipment and laid them all at the foot of a tree, carefully noting its po-
sition” (Tristes Tropiques, 297), and then ran off to recapture his mule.
When he did gain control over the animal, he could not find his equip-
ment. After hours alone, unarmed and terrified, he was finally rescued
by two Nambikwara, for whom recovering his equipment was “child’s
play” (297). He slept poorly that night, reflecting on the episode of the
writing lesson. At the end of a long digression on the negative histor-
ical consequences of writing, the text returns to the narrative: “While
we were still at Utiarity, an epidemic of putrid ophthalmia had broken
out among the natives. The infection, which was gonorrheal in origin,
spread to the whole community, causing terrible pain and temporary
blindness which could become permanent” (300).
Pinney interprets this sequence as a kind of “mythic punishment for
the transgression of the “natural order of speech.”91 Disease and writing
mirror each other, bringing to the fore the fragility of the primitive state,
which can cease to exist at any time due to contact with civilization. In
an image published in Saudades do Brasil but not in Tristes tropiques,
we see two women on the ground with their eyes closed and their hands
covering their faces in a gesture of pain (figure 3.22). We can also see a
child’s back, for the child is facing the sad spectacle of blindness. No one
looks at the camera, which becomes an invisible eye gazing at the blind-
ness of the other. In this episode the photographic apparatus, which ex-
ists side-by-side with the technology of writing, performs Lévi-Strauss’s
own fear: it registers and substitutes for the subjects it has helped to
destroy.
Sixty years after his voyage, Lévi-Strauss declared that he decided to
publish these 176 images because the world they portray “does not exist
anymore” (Saudades do Brasil, 9). Rather than offering faithful substi-
tutions for the “Indians”—for photographic technology has no ability
“to bring them back” (9)—they are presented here as the remnants of an
186 ❘ Chapter 3

Figure 3.22. “Une épidémie d’ophtalmie purulente, très douloureuse, frappa

les Indiens pendant notre séjour. Plusieurs membres de l’expédition furent con-
taminés. On assistait à des scènes désolantes” (“An epidemic of very painful,
suppurating eye inflammation struck the Indians while we were there. Several
members of the expedition were contaminated. We witnessed some distressing
scenes”). Photograph by Claude Lévi-Strauss, c. 1938. In Claude Lévi-Strauss,
Saudades do Brasil (Paris: Plon, 1994), 128. Copyright © Matthieu Lévi-Strauss.

extinct world, as its absence and presence, its death and survival. This
absence appears in the book’s title, “Saudades,” which is a subjective
way of talking about the past. Lévi-Strauss was eighty-six when Sauda-
des do Brasil was published, and the works that stemmed from his first
encounter had changed the path of European thought. From Saudades
do Brasil, pregnant with emotion, in which the images now emerge with
little constraint, we can learn something more about the fears and joys,
the dangers and eroticism, of both contact and photography.
Saudades do Brasil also includes photographs that talk about the
broader everyday life of the expedition and its dependence on local la-
bor. Before the photographs of the Bororo, Saudades shows a photo-
graph of men slaughtering a cow that they would consume, and another
man bathing a horse. An image of Cuiabá’s port shows a horse quietly
feeding in the foreground. In the background are some kids looking at
the river, and almost indistinguishable people, some on boats, others on
the banks, maybe workers, maybe family members of those who leave.
The photographs of the streets of Cuiabá reveal nineteenth-century
 Debris ❘ 187

houses, from the time of the boom in rubber extraction. Throughout the
entire book, there are several images of means of transportation: boats,
trucks, horses, and the expedition’s voluminous luggage. There are some
photographs of peasants and rubber gatherers, as well as of a Bolivian
market, and the city of Salvador, both of which Lévi-Strauss saw on his
way back to São Paulo. The idea that this multilayered world does not
exist anymore is both a necessarily true statement—for a photograph
is always an image of the past—and one way of temporalizing these
images (curated in part by Lévi-Strauss’s son) which emphasizes Lévi-
Strauss’s narrative of loss. Then, in 1994, this narrative emerges from
the point of view of the subjective, affectionate traveler.
The last image of the book, however, points to another kind of tem-
porality. The photograph, taken by the North American anthropologist
David Allison in Peru, shows three young Indigenous Cashinaua boys
reading Tristes tropiques. According to the caption, they are “contem-
plating some of these images,” looking at what we just saw. This is the
only photograph in Saudades do Brasil not taken in Brazil. The boys,
wearing western clothes and looking at the book, contrast with the
scene of blindness. The image also escapes the overly subjective tone of
the book and its melancholic tone. It is traversed by various temporal-
ities and geographies: Lévi-Strauss’s experience of contact, the moment
he encounters his memories anew in writing Tristes tropiques, Allison’s
encounter with communities in Peru, and the Cashinaua boys’ encoun-
ter with the images in Tristes tropiques. Thus, the image also speaks
of multilayered temporalities. First, it speaks of the present and future
of Indigenous communities, in affirming their survival in spite of Lévi-
Strauss’s pessimism. Second, it speaks of all the encounters with these
images (the ones which escaped from the archive) in a world where
circulation and contact will continue to happen. Ultimately, though, this
last image, produced by a fellow anthropologist, reminds us of the ab-
sence of images produced by Indigenous peoples in Saudades do Brasil,
a book published in 1994—that is, after Indigenous media projects had
started to reclaim protagonism in the production of technological im-
ages of themselves.
Chapter 4

Shadows
The Amazonian Worker and the Modernist Traveler

On May 7, 1927, Mário de Andrade, an exponent of Brazilian mod-

ernism, left São Paulo to begin a voyage across the Amazonian region.
He carried a Kodak camera, which he called a codaquinha, and was
determined to write a modernist book. Traveling fifteen years after the
decline of the Amazonian rubber boom, Andrade witnessed the effects
of extractive capitalism in the region and described in his diary his own
role in these transformations. He was not the only writer to do so at
that time, but in contrast to other travelers who expressed guilt for
their complicit part in the process of modernization that disenfran-
chised local communities—one of the most famous being Claude Lévi-
Strauss—the narrative in Andrade’s written and photographic diaries
is not one of mourning or loss. In this chapter, I contend that Andrade
experiments with a mode of registering time through a combination
of photography and text in order to convey multilayered and hetero-
geneous temporalities of modernity within the geopolitical context of
extractive capitalism. Instead of highlighting progress or catastrophe,
his photographic practice emphasizes instability and change, preventing
the photographed subjects from being fixed in any specific temporal
coordinate, as either remnants of the past or as seeds of the future. He
does this by focusing on the very concrete (and thus often unexpected)
encounters and inherently unequal “frictions”—to use anthropologist
Anna Tsing’s term1—between tourists, commodities, money, machines,

189
190 ❘ Chapter 4

laborers, languages, and modes of life in the Amazonian region. Finally,

while Andrade recognizes his complicity as a traveler with the destruc-
tive process of modernization, he also develops a phenomenology of
looking, writing, and photographing that does not deny but, rather,
highlights his own embodied engagement in these transformations.
The first entry in O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), the
title given by Andrade to a manuscript version of his Amazonian diary,
sets the tone for the modernist book he never published; after complain-
ing that he forgot the “enormous cane” which he bought out of some
“vague fear of Indians,” he predicts that the trip ahead will not be any
kind of adventure.2 He eventually returns home for the cane, explaining
that in addition to a logical consciousness, each person also has a po-
etic consciousness and that his own poetic consciousness was shaped by
memories of adventure books he had read. A number of scholars have
pointed out that O turista aprendiz is full of passages such as this one,
which both emphasizes the writer’s subjective gaze and suggests that this
gaze is mediated by other images and narratives of adventure and explo-
ration.3 Scholarly works that concentrate on Andrade’s photographs in
the Amazon follow similar lines, examining the ways in which he both
reproduces and destabilizes the gaze of the modern explorer.4 While the
emphasis on the mediated gaze likens Andrade’s diaries to Lévi-Strauss’s
travel memoir,5 in which the French anthropologist recounts arriving in
Rio de Janeiro with Jean de Léry’s book in his pocket, Andrade’s criti-
cism of both the objectivism and exoticism of travel narratives leads him
to the opposite aesthetic and political pedagogy: Andrade’s modernist
gaze is a radical affirmation of the embodied experience of travel.
Throughout his diary, Andrade highlights his excess of “gozo” (en-
joyment) in what he sees: “a violent sensorial life, which intoxicates” (O
turista aprendiz, 188). This “sensuality of contact” (188) is so extreme
that it hinders thought. This is not to say that the embodied gaze rests on
the side of immediacy. In a passage about a stunning sunset in Manaus,
he suggests that the gaze itself can be blurred by pleasure: “When the
pleasure was so intense that I didn’t think myself capable of any more
pleasure, I found my eyes filled with tears” (137). Whereas Lévi-Strauss
uses the sunset as a model for the object of the ethnographic encounter,
a spectacle that is always unique and already a reproduction, Andrade
emphasizes the effect that the twilight has on his body. Following the
rhetoric of tears in Saint Augustine and Nietzsche, Derrida notes that
tears are a form of “revelatory apocalyptic blindness.”6 By veiling sight,
tears reveal what is proper to the eyes, that they are made to weep, “to
address prayer, love, joy or sadness.”7 In a similar vein, the phenomenol-
 Shadows ❘ 191

ogy of looking brings about for Andrade both an interruption of sight

and a reminder of the traveler’s affectability.
In the case of Andrade’s photographic practice, emphasis on the em-
bodied presence of the traveler is developed through the visibility of
technological mediation. Instead of a window opening onto the world,
the camera makes its way into his images as a limiting or framing de-
vice. Often examined by scholars interested in Andrade’s photographic
modernism,8 the first image in his Amazonian series, captioned as
“Abrolhos” and “Paisagem vista de escotilha” (“Abrolhos,” “Landscape
seen from a porthole,” figure 4.1), is a perfect example of Andrade’s em-
phasis on the limited and mediated character of the traveler’s gaze. The
photograph is taken through a porthole from within the ship Pedro I—

Figure 4.1. “Abrolhos”; “Paisagem vista de es-

cotilha” (“Abrolhos”; “Landscape seen from a
porthole”). Photograph by Mário de Andrade,
May 13, 1927. Reproduced by Arquivo IEB-USP,
Fundo Mário de Andrade, código de referência:
MA-F-0142.
192 ❘ Chapter 4

named after the first emperor of post-independence Brazil—the mode of

transportation that allows Andrade to travel from Rio de Janeiro to the
mouth of the Amazon River and provides him with the opportunity to
occupy the traditional point of view of the colonizer; and consequently
the photograph is limited by the boat’s structure. The porthole reminds
the viewer that what enables looking also limits the gaze on the ship.
More than a comment on framing and the constructed nature of the
landscape, however, the materiality of photographic technology also be-
comes visible through the speckles of light that make their way into the
dark areas of the image. It is as if the lens itself, exposed to the “excess
of light” of the tropics, were covered with tears (O turista aprendiz,
188). The photograph’s caption is another reminder of the relationships
between the camera and the traveler’s eyes: Abrolhos, the name of the
uninhabited, idyllic archipelago in the south of Bahia along which the
boat passes without stopping, can be read as Abr’olhos, an alert for the
viewers to open their eyes, as if this would allow them to see better.9
Andrade’s emphasis on embodied mediation takes many forms. His
photographs are frequently blurred or contain internal frames. His sub-
jects are sometimes too close to the camera, and are thus partially ob-
scured by his own shadow; at other times, the camera is too distant,
and is separated from its subjects by props and objects. In a handful of
images that Andrade decides to enlarge, the subjects gaze at the pho-
tographer. In a photograph of four boys facing the camera, for exam-
ple, the caption emphasizes the subject of their gaze, the photographer:
“. . . o homem que tirou fotografia da gente . . .” (“. . . the man who
photographed us . . .”). Some of these strategies are consistent, as many
have suggested, with the aesthetics of European photographic modern-
ism, whose developments Andrade followed through magazines such
as L’Esprit Nouveau and Der Querschnitt.10 The combination of texts
and images in Andrade’s diaries, however, suggests that his emphasis on
embodied mediation is part of a broader preoccupation with the ethical
and political implications of seeing and photographing a post-rubber
boom Amazonian space. Andrade’s pedagogy of the gaze shows how
the body of the traveler, the structure that allows him to travel, and
the materiality of the camera are entangled in a broader transatlantic
extractive industry.
If in the photograph of Abrolhos, taken from within the royally
named ship Pedro I on its way up to the Amazon, the traveler plays
with the expectations of the colonial gaze, a photograph taken on the
way back to Rio de Janeiro shifts the focus to the urban traveler’s im-
plications in the infrastructures of modern supply chains (figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2. “Almoço da 3a classe, Baependi—ao largo”; “Em terceira
voracidade” (“Third class lunch, Baependi—off the coast”; “In third vo-
racity”). Photograph by Mário de Andrade, August 6, 1927. Reproduced
by permission of Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de Andrade, código de
referência: MA-F-0596.
194 ❘ Chapter 4

Instead of looking outwards, at an idyllic archipelago, the photograph,

captioned “Almoço da 3a classe, Baependi—ao largo” and “Em terceira
voracidade” (“Third class lunch, Baependi—off the coast”; “In third
voracity”) frames the “third class” from above, embodying the unequal
interactions between travelers and workers, and the entangled routes
of tourism and extractivism. The image shows a group of men standing
and eating with spoons, while another man, to their right, in a relaxed
posture, steps forward, barefoot. The high camera angle creates a geo-
metric pattern, contrasting the round plates and hats with the diago-
nal lines of piled-up lumber. At the same time, it emphasizes both the
photographer’s location on the boat and his positioning within a class
structure. More than that, as the pile of lumber suggests, the uneven
encounter between the photographer and the workers is sustained by
the flow of extractive goods from the north to the south of the country.
As Andrade emphasizes in his diary, the Baependi was a cargo ship.
In his diary entry for August 6, when this photograph was taken, he re-
counts dialogues among the workers who transported cargo from barges
to the Baependi, which stood off the coast. In the diary, he mentions a
beautiful black worker, Chico Chagas, and his barge “called Liberty. It
is called Liberty,” (O turista aprendiz, 199) he repeats. From the upper
level of the boat, without, as he emphasizes in the diary, being able to
disembark, Andrade looked at the laborers’ movements and decided to
photograph them on their break, their “free time.” As a commentary on
freedom and work, the image challenges the fantasies of independence
of the traveler and photographer, whose freedom to move and photo-
graph depends on the work of others. In this combination of text and
image, Andrade teaches viewers to see the structures that both sustain
and restrict their own power of looking.
If Andrade’s embodied phenomenology of looking emphasizes me-
diation instead of immediacy, this mediation unfolds through the pro-
cesses of enlarging and, especially, captioning his images. Andrade’s
photographic archive consists of 530 photographs taken during his Am-
azonian trip, most of which were printed in a 3.7 cm × 6.1 cm format. A
few of the photographs are further enlarged (the most common enlarge-
ments are sized around 12.5 cm × 17.5 cm, with some variations). The
enlarged prints also reveal his experimentation with color (specifically
sepia), contrast, and tonality. On the reverse side of each print, Andrade
transcribes in pencil information he had previously jotted down in a
notebook, including date, time, place, luminosity, aperture size, and so
on. In addition to the more technical information, as Telê Ancona Lopez
 Shadows ❘ 195

has noted,11 Andrade adds creative captions in a lighter handwriting,

which suggests that the two types of captions were inscribed at different
times. The creative captions serve as commentaries on the images; many
of them are humorous, self-referential, anecdotal, and exclamatory, and
comprise the parallel text of a fragmentary diary that dialogues with
both O turista aprendiz and the photographic sequence. The temporal
dimension of this multilayered dialogue is the object of my analysis
here.
The written diary O turista aprendiz is also the result of a series of
mediations. More than once, Andrade transcribed and edited the notes
he had initially jotted down on pieces of paper. His archives contain
different versions of these notes, and evidence of this process of rewrit-
ing can also be seen in the final version of the manuscript, for which
he made a cover and wrote a preface in 1943. In this last manuscript,
we find, for example, two different narratives of the same day, indi-
cating his unfinished work of editing. Through Andrade’s mediations
and transformations, both the written and photographic diaries fail to
achieve stability and, consequently, to stabilize the Amazonian space
and people encountered by the traveler-photographer. Andrade’s pro-
cess of rewriting was not exclusive to his diary,12 but in the case of O
turista aprendiz this instability persisted until Andrade’s death, and the
work was edited and published for the first time in 1976 by Telê Porto
Ancona Lopez.
Another important aspect of the temporal dimension of the photo-
graphic diaries that contributes to destabilizing the Amazonian subject
is how Andrade captions his photographs in ways that often refer to
traces of what is not seen in the image or to what has been transformed
or will be transformed in the future. Time refers not only to the tem-
porality of multiple mediations, but also to the multilayered time of
modernity and the “uneven modernization”13 of the Amazon brought
on by the exploitation of labor and various extractive industries. If the
main figure in Lévi-Strauss’s account is the lost primitive subject, An-
drade focuses on the figures of exploited laborers, particularly rubber
tappers, loggers, and the nearly six thousand migrant workers who died
during the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway.
This recognition of traces of the labor that transforms the landscape
of the Amazon, however, does not acquire for Andrade a temporality
of loss. For example, at the same time that he relates the extractive
economy to the deadly effects of malaria in the region, Andrade views
malaria as a mode of being and engaging with the world that resists
196 ❘ Chapter 4

the productive temporality of capitalism. He learns that the maleiteiros

(those infected with malaria) have a particularly disinterested way of
looking at the world, as if having no desire or interested focus at all.
Contrary to the maleiteiros themselves, however, Andrade is deeply in-
terested in them, constantly identifying maleita faces and confessing a
desire to experience a state of being in which one does not desire any-
thing at all. This desire for the maleiteiros’ non-desire exemplifies the
contradictions sustained by Andrade’s politics and aesthetics of looking
in the context of Amazonian capitalist exploitation.
Recent studies of Andrade’s diaries and photographs have played
an important role in highlighting his critical dialogue with both the
archive of imperialist exploration and the vocabulary of European
vanguards. While André Botelho14 insightfully insists on Andrade’s at-
tentiveness to diversity and inequality—an element often overlooked
by traditional approaches to the poet’s work focused on the question
of national identity—Luciana Martins analyzes his photographs and
writings in the context of his proposal for a “critical nationalism,”15
which would later form the basis for his work in preserving Brazil’s
cultural patrimony. Analyzing Andrade’s photographs, Esther Gabara
suggests that his landscapes “foreground rather than erase the power
relations implicit in the view, and insert modernist landscapes directly
into the field of human life, politics, and ethics,”16 and that his shadowy
portraits reveal the photographer’s own anxiety about his identity that
lies somewhere between the European and the Indigenous. By arguing
that Andrade makes modernist images “err”—in the double sense of
both “errant” and “erroneous”—Gabara posits that instead of defining
the nation, Andrade sets the borders that define it into motion. More re-
cently, the film scholar Keiji Kunigami has built on Gabara’s suggestion
regarding the presence of movement in Andrade’s photographs, arguing
that the poet intuited a critical version of the modern cinematic specta-
tor standing on the peripheries of capitalism.17 The political dimension
of Andrade’s photographs resides, for Kunigami, in their affirmation of
this modern cinematic spectator’s immobility before moving images, an
immobile politics of “just looking.” In dialogue with these scholars, I
discuss in this chapter the ethical and political dimension of Andrade’s
photographic aesthetic: from his attentiveness to workers and power
relations to his criticisms of ways of looking, and the emotions related
to them (i.e., joy, pleasure, guilt, pain). While I agree with Gabara and
Kunigami that there is a dimension of movement and instability in An-
 Shadows ❘ 197

drade’s photographs, I am interested in the ways in which he highlights

the traces of multiple temporalities inscribed in the still image. Through
a reading of Andrade’s combination of photographs and text, as well as
his few writings on photography, I argue that he understands photog-
raphy as an immobile image that is nonetheless unlimited, opening up
beyond the frame, capable of registering time in different ways. In the
case of his Amazonian diaries, this quality unfolds in the development
of a pedagogy of the gaze that guides the viewer through a multilayered
reading of the marks of colonial and modern modes of human and en-
vironmental exploitation, of the shadows of labor and resistance to la-
bor, and the footprints left by tourists and commodities, extractive and
photographic machines; it is here that Andrade seeks ethical knowledge
about an Amazonian modernity through photographic images. It is not
irrelevant that his trip is not contained within the territory (and history)
of the Brazilian nation, but crosses borders into both Peru and Bolivia.
I conclude this chapter by examining Andrade’s seldom-discussed
indecisiveness with regard to the publication of his travel account and
his later return to the manuscript in 1942. Much like Lévi-Strauss, An-
drade fell prey to an uneasiness, or at least an uncertainty, with regard
to the value of his written and photographic Amazonian travel account,
seeing in them an excessive “personalism.”18 He decided to retype the
manuscript in 1942 and wrote a preface for the work in 1943, two years
before his death. These were years of profound political disenchantment
with an ongoing world war, the dictatorial regime of the Estado Novo
in Brazil, and Andrade’s personal disappointment over his dismissal
from his job as director of the Department of Culture of São Paulo, an
event with a plot full of bitter accusations and betrayals. Andrade, who
had dedicated much of his time in the 1930s to preserving and democ-
ratizing culture in Brazil, and was a man who believed in and worked
for the state, came to the bitter conclusion that he had been fighting
against ghosts. In his famous 1942 speech “O Movimento Modernista”
(“The Modernist Movement”),19 he criticizes the first generation of the
Brazilian modernist movement and his own work for its elitism and its
alienation from the people and the political present. Why does Andrade
decide to revisit O turista aprendiz in the same year as the speech? I will
explore how some of his uneasiness with the political dimension of his
work, as expressed in the 1942 speech—the problem of looking versus
participating—finds echoes in the pedagogy of the gaze he develops in
his Amazonian diaries.
198 ❘ Chapter 4

Sha dows of B ut t e r f l i e s a nd De ad W o rke rs

Mário de Andrade left São Paulo on May 7, 1927, carrying a Kodak

camera and planning to write a modernist book. After spending four
days in Rio de Janeiro meeting with other writers and friends, he em-
barked on the Pedro I, the boat that would take him and his travel
companions—the modernist art patron and member of the coffee aris-
tocracy Olívia Guedes Penteado, her niece Margarida Guedes Nogueira
(“Mag”), the modernist painter Tarsila do Amaral’s daughter Dulce do
Amaral Pinto (“Dolur”), and a servant (whom Andrade barely men-
tions in his description of the group)—up the northeastern coast of
Brazil to the city of Belém.20 From Belém, the travelers sailed up the Am-
azon River and eventually reached Iquitos, Peru, and then went back to
Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas. From Manaus
they headed to Porto Velho, a city on the border with the state of Mato
Grosso that served as the base of operations for the construction of
the Madeira-Mamoré Railway between 1907 and 1912. On July 12,
two months after they left Rio de Janeiro, the group from São Paulo
took a Madeira-Mamoré Railway train to the border with Bolivia. It is
in Andrade’s written and photographic accounts of this train trip that
the intrinsic connection between an embodied phenomenology of look-
ing and the question of the incorporation of the Amazonian space into
global market relations appears most clearly.
Andrade’s first diary entry about the Madeira-Mamoré rail line be-
gins by establishing a scene marked by both death and beauty, with its
picturesque houses and butterflies:

Since 6 am, eating dusty stretches of land, in this former re-

gion of death, where each crosstie is the body of a dead man.
This Madeira-Mamoré. . . . We go to Guajará-Mirim, São
Carlos, Santo Antônio, Jaci Paraná, Abunã. Lunch. Beautiful
Casitas caboclas [Indigenous huts]21 of lovely architectural
creation. As we move forward, whirlwinds form in the void
left by the train that has passed, attracting flocks of agitated
butterflies. (O turista aprendiz, 158)

Death is initially situated in the past: this is the ex-região da morte

(former region of death), writes Andrade, referring to the thousands of
national and foreign workers of over fifty ethnicities who died during
the construction of the railway. The high death rates warranted an al-
 Shadows ❘ 199

most constant influx of replacement workers. In this passage, Andrade

cites a proverb circulating at the time according to which the number of
dead workers was equal to the number of crossties used in the railway
tracks. And the Madeira-Mamoré line had plenty of crossties: 364 ki-
lometers of them, laid by workers across a region of wetlands, constant
rain, mudslides, and tropical disease. The proverb allows Andrade to
equate the celebrated monumentality of the railway with a cemetery of
equal vastness.
In order to understand Andrade’s portrayal of the Madeira-Mamoré
Railway, it is important to go back in time. The first attempt to build
the Madeira-Mamoré line occurred in 1878 during an expedition led by
the American engineer, explorer, soldier, and investor Col. George Earl
Church. In 1870, Church acquired from the Brazilian and Bolivian gov-
ernments the right to lay rail tracks that would allow traders to avoid
the falls of the Madeira River, one of the largest tributaries of the Am-
azon. This was, according to an 1878 article in the New York Herald,
“the first time in the history of this country that an expedition has been
sent from the United States, equipped with American money, materials,
and brains, for the execution of a great public work in a foreign coun-
try.”22 The engineering expedition, which comprised “the ablest body of
men in this profession ever united,” was soon discontinued, however,
due in large part to high mortality rates and poor working conditions
that led to workers’ rebellions and desertions.23
Haunted by the failure of this first expedition, the second attempt to
build the railway, led by a US corporation, the Brazil Railway Company,
between 1907 and 1912, was a widely publicized display of techno-
logical and human power. In the words of Francisco Foot-Hardman:
“Madeira-Mamoré was the privileged spectacle of capitalist civilization
in the jungle.”24 As part of its effort to document and publicize the en-
gineering enterprise, the Brazil Railway Company hired the American
photographer Dana Merrill. Some of Merrill’s photographs were pub-
lished in articles and accounts written by journalists and company em-
ployees in the 1910s and 1920s, mostly emphasizing the triumphant
and audacious enterprise,25 while others were organized in albums by
Merrill that have remained in private archives until recently.26
Several of Merrill’s photographs emphasize the advance of the rail-
way into the jungle, many of them privileging a linear perspective that
leads the gaze forward: from the point of view of a train, the track’s
parallel lines direct the viewer’s gaze at a vanishing point on the hori-
zon (figure 4.3).27 Other photos show the obstacles encountered by this
200 ❘ Chapter 4

Figure 4.3. “Looking toward Camp 16,” Rondonia, Brazil. Photograph by Dana
Merrill, 1909–1912. Views of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira e Mamore Amazo-
nas & Matto Grosso, Brazil S.A. Collection. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Di-
vision of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York
Public Library.

forward movement of modern technology, such as enormous mudslides

which destroyed large sections of the track (figure 4.4). Along with
these large-scale views of already built sections of the railway, Merrill
also paid close attention to the placing of the crossties. A sequence he
crafted in an album held today at the New York Public Library, for
example, shows the different stages in the construction of a section of
track near the Apunã River (figure 4.5). Photographing with a large
format early twentieth-century camera that depended on the use of a
tripod due to long exposure times (ideally suited for photographing
posing subjects),28 Merrill imbued these photographs with a sense of
time as advancement in his use of sequencing and captioning. Arranged
side by side, the photos captioned “Before ties and rails are laid” and
“After a load of dirt is put in” create a before-and-after sequencing ef-
fect, while the flooded tracks in the latter photo give an idea of both the
steps and the difficulties involved in laying tracks across the Amazonian
 Shadows ❘ 201

Figure 4.4. “Mudslide,” Rondonia, Brazil. Photograph by Dana Merrill, 1909–

1912. Views of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira e Mamore Amazonas & Matto
Grosso, Brazil S.A. Collection. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art,
Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library.

wetlands. In a third photograph on the same page showing workers

laying tracks over a bed of tree branches, movement is suggested by
the blurred figure walking on the tracks. In the handwritten caption,
“Road building through a swamp,” the use of the verb in the gerund
form emphasizes the actual process of construction, while the preposi-
tion “through” marks once again the idea of movement through space.
For this image, the photographer positions the camera at the lower right
edge of the tracks, allowing us to see the specific role of one of the work-
ers, who is shown tightening a bolt, in this process.
Combining small-scale photographs of workers with monumental
images that appeal to an aesthetic of the sublime, Merrill represents
the construction of the railway as both a heroic attempt to subdue the
forces of nature and the result of the everyday labor of thousands of
men. In contrast, by transforming each crosstie into an epitaph for an
anonymous dead worker, the proverb cited by Andrade suggests the
tight link between resource extraction and labor exploitation, and be-
tween environmental and human destruction.
And in contrast with some of Merrill’s photographs, Andrade’s diary
passage regarding the relationship between nature and the railway is
202 ❘ Chapter 4

Figure 4.5. “Album assemblage,” Rondonia, Brazil. Photographs by Dana Mer-

rill, 1909–1912. Views of the Estrada de Ferro Madeira e Mamore Amazonas &
Matto Grosso, Brazil S.A. Collection. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division
of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public
Library.

not akin to the sublime at all. The flocks of agitated butterflies that
surge from the void left by the passing train are a subtle image of non-
human life’s resilience. In contrast to an image of Nature as what stands
out there, separate from Man, as either an obstacle or a resource for
the expansion of technological modernity, Andrade’s butterflies live and
move in interaction with technology, coexisting within this multispecies
zone in the aftermath of destruction. They also break with the spatial
organization of the gaze that appears in Merrill’s photographs and in
the linear form of the railway itself. Instead of leading the gaze forward,
Andrade turns his attention to an ephemeral phenomenon that follows
the passing of the train. The butterflies are not ahead of the train, as is
part of a territory to be gained, nor are they along the railway as part
of the landscape to be viewed; they appear fleetingly behind the train,
attracted by the turmoil caused by its movement. Thus, in reframing the
interaction between non-human nature and technology, the passage de-
stabilizes the spatiality and temporality of looking in the context of the
railway: the traveler-narrator could not have seen the butterflies from
 Shadows ❘ 203

the train window because they surge behind the train. Thus, the initial
impression that a “former region of death” is temporally separate from
a present region of beauty is deceptive; the butterflies are an anachro-
nistic image. Like the workers who constructed the railway, they are
simultaneously present and absent from the scene.
The very ordering of text and image in Andrade’s diaries emphasizes
this anachronism. The butterflies appear in two photographs taken by
him the day before the diary entry, while the poet was still in the city of
Porto Velho. One of these images (figure 0.1), which he would enlarge
twice, is a portrait of Andrade himself sitting on the tracks against a
desolate background. Each of the enlargements receives a different cap-
tion. One of the enlargements is captioned “Chapéu-de-chile no porto
de Porto Velho” (“Straw hat at the port of Porto Velho”), highlighting
that the poet is posing with a Chilean-style straw hat,29 a sign of fashion
and cosmopolitanism, that he bought in Iquitos.30 He poses in a port
city, a zone of circulation of commodities and people. In highlighting
the hat, the caption ends up calling attention to the portrait’s devastated
background and to the landscape of capitalist destruction that it does
not mention. The city of Porto Velho was developed at the margins of
the Madeira River at the height of the Amazonian rubber boom during
the construction of the railway. As a prototype of the modernization
process that could be wrought by the railway, the Amazonian town,
built using the US model of the grid, had sewage systems, an ice plant,
electric power and lighting, and even an English-language newspaper.
After the decline of the rubber boom, it acquired many features of de-
cayed port cities. The second caption that Andrade chooses for his por-
trait reveals that the actual subject of the photograph is much more
subtle: the almost invisible presence of the butterflies in the scene. The
caption reads: “Na verdade estou sentado nesses trilhos de Porto Velho
por causa das borboletas que estão me rodeando, amarelinhas e a objec-
tiva esqueceu de registrar. Era pra fotar as borboletas” (“Actually I am
sitting on these tracks in Porto Velho because of the butterflies that sur-
round me, all yellow, and the lens forgot to register them. It should have
photographed the butterflies”). By pointing out the inability of both the
Kodak camera and the photographer to focus on the butterflies, this
caption highlights the almost invisible presence of life and beauty in the
otherwise devastated background against which Andrade poses.
In Andrade’s diary description of his experience on the train, we find
a similar combination of the traveler’s enjoyment of luxurious consumer
goods and his disappointment at the lack of a landscape for him to look
204 ❘ Chapter 4

at, while the butterflies remain out of sight (out of focus, in the case of
the photograph, and out of frame, in the case of the train window). So
that we can analyze how Andrade reconstructs the scene in writing, I
include the entire passage below:

No . . . you cannot say it is beautiful . . . Terrible Cerrado

ground, feeble shrubs, swamps, marshes, along the fall-
ing river and that’s it. There is no Burgos Cathedral to be
seen . . . But these tracks were planted without Egyptians
kings or slaves . . . Without slaves? . . . At least without slaves
whipped to death . . . Thousands of Chinese, Portuguese, Bo-
livians, Barbadians, Arabs, Greeks, have come for a few pen-
nies. All sorts of nose and skin types came through here and
lay with a bit of a fever at dawn to rise in the never more.
What am I doing here! . . . Today the poet travels with his
friends, through the Madeira-Mamoré, in a clean car, well
seated in a chair made with cipó-titica, . . . entirely made
by the alamão [German] from Manaus. The waiter in uni-
form brings him a Simões guaraná, from Belém, very cold,
with the most beautiful ice in the world, which is from Porto
Velho. Today the poet eats roasted turkey made by a mestre
cook de primo cartello, who boarded the Vitória, sent by the
Amazon River to sweeten our life. Sometimes we stop, and
the landscapes are kodakized, even cinema is brought in! In
order to capture for our orgulhos futuros [future pride] the
exotic straw hut, woven with care and fancy. What am I do-
ing here! What is the reason for all these international dead
workers that are reborn in the uproar of the locomotive to
spy on me with their dim eyes through the train windows?
(O turista aprendiz, 158–59)

If in the photograph (figure 0.1 on page 2) we see Andrade sitting on the

train tracks surrounded by shadowy traces of butterflies, in the diary An-
drade appears sitting inside the train, surrounded by the ghostly presence
of dead laborers. From inside the train cabin, the poet recognizes his own
privilege as he travels on one of the great engineering achievements of
modernity. The embodied experience of the writer-photographer cannot
be separated from the guaraná he drinks, and the fact that he is served by
a waiter in uniform and the “mestre cook de primo cartello.” By referring
to the German carpenter from Manaus as an “alamão,” a brazilianiza-
tion of Portuguese, and inserting words in Italian and English, Andrade
 Shadows ❘ 205

performs in his writing the transformation of the region into a zone of

friction and the circulation of languages, bodies, and commodities. The
perfect products he consumes are framed against the backdrop of a
modern exploitation of labor that is comparable to slavery.
In a review of two war films he wrote for Diário Nacional in 1932,
in the inter-war period, Andrade comments on the importance of being
aware of the spectator’s removed position when confronted with images
of human destruction.31 Criticizing how the massive circulation of war
images normalizes indignation, Andrade brings up two films released
in 1930 that stand out for their cinematic value, although in opposite
ways. While Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front provides
an artistically rendered image of war that is truer by virtue of (not in
spite of) being figurative—in other words, by corresponding to the way
we imagine war to be—G. W. Pabst’s Vier von der Infanterie (Westfront
1918) is described as an honest attempt to reproduce reality. According
to Andrade, Pabst’s aesthetics explore cinematography’s unique ability
to reproduce reality, although the film’s value lies in a moment of the in-
terruption of realism. Andrade describes in detail a scene of a character’s
madness in the film, adding that the scene’s element of falsity reminds
the spectator, who is until then oblivious to the art of cinema, “that we
are in a movie theater, and we kind of suffer from not taking part (com-
fortably) in the war” (“Filmes de guerra,” 49–50). In Andrade’s descrip-
tion of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway, the narrative flow is interrupted
twice by the exclamation O que eu vim fazer aqui! . . . (What am I doing
here!). In between these exclamatory reminders of his own presence in
this sighting of death, Andrade describes his privileged and removed
participation (as spectator and consumer) in human destruction.
In his analysis of this passage, Kunigami rightly reminds us that the
train passenger was, in the early twentieth century, the prototype for
the cinematic viewer, in which an immobile spectator is politically inter-
pellated by moving images.32 Building on Kunigami’s suggestion by ap-
proaching this scene as Andrade’s reproduction of the cinematic situation
in writing,33 I would add that Andrade as spectator is not only confronted
with moving images, but with a montage that privileges anachronism, as
in the resurgence of the dead laborers and the unseen butterflies.
Strikingly, when Andrade finally refers to something to be seen outside
the train window—that is, something “interesting” or “beautiful”—the
train has to be stopped so that the photographer can turn it into a still im-
age (figure 4.6): “Sometimes we stop, and the landscapes are kodakized,
even cinema is brought in! In order to capture for our orgulhos futuros
[future pride] the exotic straw hut, woven with care and fantasy.” Who
206 ❘ Chapter 4

Figure 4.6. “Tapiri ao longo da linha Madeira-Mamoré” (“Indigenous hut

along the Madeira-Mamoré railway”). Photograph by Mário de Andrade, July
12, 1927. Reproduced by permission of Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de An-
drade, código de referência: MA-F-0445.

is this “we” who will be proud in the future of having photographed a

straw hut? Is it the group of travelers from São Paulo, the modernists, or
is it urban Brazilian citizens in general, overwhelmed by some nationalist
sentiment? Will they be proud of the photograph or of its referent? Why
“future pride”? Because there is a necessary delay in the photographic
process, or because the “exotic” straw hut will have been appropriated
as an image of the nation’s past—an Indigenous past? In contrast to
the moving images he sees from the train window, the photographic
gesture requires Andrade to get out of the train and make a choice that
is pregnant with expectations: “for our future pride.” This interested,
active gaze can be compared to an extractive gesture. But the interpre-
tation of this “we” as nation is further complicated by Andrade’s com-
ment that “even cinema is brought in,” a reminder of the screenings of
North American films that he constantly mentions in his diary and that
mediate his gaze. Once more, Andrade focuses on the entanglement of
multiple temporalities and geographies within Amazonian modernity, in
which he participates with his own photographic practice. Coexisting in
this zone of circulation of people, machines, images, and commodities
is the straw hut constructed with care and imagination. A result of both
tradition and inventiveness, the hut is an articulation of past and future
that gets entangled in, though not subsumed by, its photograph.
 Shadows ❘ 207

The relationship between extractivism, labor, and photography

imbues another of Andrade’s photographs with this sense of time as
transformation (figure 4.7). The photograph was taken in Nanay, Peru,
on June 23. The same enlargement of this image received two differ-

Figure 4.7. “Jangadas de mogno enconstando no São Salvador pra

embarcar”; “Vitrolas Futuras” (“Mahogany rafts touching the São
Salvador before boarding”; “Future phonographs”). Photograph by
Mário de Andrade, Nanay, Peru, June 23, 1927. Reproduced by per-
mission of Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de Andrade, código de
referência: MA-F-0320.
208 ❘ Chapter 4

ent captions. As with the photograph of butterflies, the process of re-

captioning, which in itself temporalizes the reading of this image, serves
to point out what might otherwise remain unseen in it. The first caption
for the Nanay picture describes floating mahogany lumber that is about
to be loaded onto a boat: “Jangadas de mogno encostando no São Sal-
vador pra embarcar” (“Mahogany rafts touching the São Salvador be-
fore boarding”). Through the use of the gerund “touching,” Andrade
emphasizes the transitory condition of the composition. The second
caption, “Vitrolas futuras” (“Future phonographs”), does not contain
any verb but points nevertheless to the process of transformation of
lumber into a phonograph player through labor, again connecting mod-
ern technologies with the human transformation of the environment.
This transformation is twofold, since before being turned into music
players the logs are transformed by photography into a modernist im-
age through the highlighting of geometric forms that blur the natural
and the manmade, the transitory and the permanent.
Similar to the photographs of butterflies, the double captioning here
is crucial to the destabilization of the photographic referent: it fosters a
multilayered reading of the image both by leading the viewer to see it in
steps and by pointing out the future and past inscribed in the image. In
“Vitrolas futuras,” the montage of image and captions also destabilizes
the relationship between art and its subject through the double empha-
sis on the transformation of nature into the subject of art—logs, water,
and sky become the subject for a modernist photograph—and on the
transformation of nature into art media (wood will become phonograph
players, and the phonographs can stand here for photographic cameras
or photographic paper). Finally, Andrade’s image/text assemblage also
points out that the exploitation of Amazonian trees and workers is pro-
pelling a global cultural industry in expansion. In his diary entry for
June 23, he affirms that this lumber, “Caoba in Castilian; here in the
region it is called aguano, we say mogno” (O turista aprendiz, 123),
will be shipped in their boat, then sent on to a phonograph factory in
Boston. Ultimately, as the list of different names for the wood suggests,
Andrade’s approach to globalization is not blind to difference and the
specificities of the local.
The same day, right after this passage which builds an image of an
all-encompassing network of capitalist labor and trade, the writer fic-
tionalizes an encounter that suggests the possibility of an alternative,
noncapitalist existence. He describes this encounter taking place during
a visit that the group of travelers made to a Huitoto village in Peru
 Shadows ❘ 209

where Andrade notes that the “Indians” wear clothes “like us” (O tur-
ista aprendiz, 123). This similarity—or evidence of “assimilation,” to
use a term common at the time to assess (positively or negatively) the
supposed disappearance of difference through the expansion of West-
ern culture—is misleading. Andrade’s account of his encounter with the
Huitoto was marked by friction, awkwardness, and misunderstanding,
especially on his part. First, he finds a beautiful vase and tries everything
he can to procure it, but the Huitoto decline, directing him to buy a
pot of much lesser value. The pot he wanted is, to his frustration, not
for sale. Next he sees a beautiful Huitoto woman and wants to photo-
graph her, but she refuses: si quieren, tienen que pagar (if you want it,
you have to pay for it, 124), she tells him in Spanish, laughing. To his
surprise, the Indigenous image is, unlike the pot, for sale. The agency
of the Huitoto—their ability to not freely offer their image or not to
sell their work—is finally explained by Andrade: “The Peruvian govern-
ment cedes this place to the Huitoto, with the condition that they work
twenty days a year . . . for themselves, planting. They chew coca and
live” (124). The Huitoto “live,” he says, meaning that their existence is
not subsumed by capitalist labor.
The theme of labor among the Huitoto will be further developed in
the next diary entry, June 24, which narrates a fictional encounter with
an “ironic Indian” (O turista aprendiz, 124). The man seeks Andrade
out because he has heard that he is a poet and asks if Andrade will
compose a song about the Huitoto. Irritated because the Huitoto man
refuses to sell him any coca leaves, Andrade tells him that they are a
decayed civilization who, unlike the Inca, do not work and do not have
laws, palaces, or emperors. In response, the Huitoto man narrates a
parable about a time when the tribes competed over who could build
the most beautiful palaces and pass the best laws, but there was always
another, more beautiful castle that would not be built and a law that
was so good that no one knew what it was. This led to destructive re-
bellions and wars. This fictitious parable aims to prove to Andrade that
the Huitoto do not represent the decay of old civilizations, but rather
their overcoming. The Huitoto man suggests that they are now long
past the era of palaces and laws. The subtext of the parable is the histor-
ical context of the Huitoto land reservation—that is, the rubber wars,
atrocities, and enslavement that victimized the Huitoto population in
particular34—which is subtly addressed when the Huitoto man remarks
that white men defeated the Huitoto, and this is why whites give them
land to work on and impose a law obligating them to work twenty days
210 ❘ Chapter 4

every year. The twenty-day work schedule initially disregarded by An-

drade as almost nothing—“they chew coca and live” (124)—is reframed
by the Huitoto man as an imposition of the conquerors, not a minimal
condition established by a benevolent government. The man explains
to Andrade that if they could, the Huitoto would not work the twenty
days: “it is too much” (127).
This story constitutes more than a primitivist celebration of Indige-
nous wisdom and a critique of Western civilization. The very structure
of the narrative challenges the temporal structure of modern histori-
cism. In the end, the Huitoto confesses that he has some coca leaves but
refuses to sell them to Andrade—who stands here as the urban traveler
who wants to consume Amazonian natural and cultural resources—
because the Brazilian has an emperor who forbids him from chewing
coca, and adds: “It is very late, no, it is very early for you to not be
unhappy” (O turista aprendiz, 127). He does not say it is too late, but
too early for the happiness of the white traveler. In doing so, the Hui-
toto again places his (desired) mode of living—free from the imposi-
tion of labor and primitive accumulation—in the future, not the past,
of Western civilization. This doesn’t mean that Andrade’s Huitoto live
in a utopian future instead of a primitive past. Andrade’s fictitious ac-
count of the Huitoto’s history emphasizes how Amazonian modernity
is, in Tsing’s words, “shaped and transformed by long histories of local/
global networks of power, trade, and meaning.”35 At the end, Andrade’s
tale is also about the appropriative character of ethnographic work: the
Huitoto man reveals his awareness that his story, like those collected by
ethnographers and used by artists like Andrade, will also be the subject
of the poet's work of art: “I told it to you so you would write a more
beautiful song” (127).

Desir e, C on tagi o n, a nd t he Ma l a ri al W o rke r

While his fictitious encounter with the “ironic Huitoto” provides Andrade
with a criticism of capitalism and primitive accumulation, in which the
writer/photographer takes part, it is the Amazonian worker and, more
specifically, the maleiteiro (an individual chronically infected with ma-
laria) who provides him with an example of a non-appropriative, un-
productive way of looking in the midst of capitalist ruins. Although the
stereotype of the lazy and work-averse Brazilian had already been the-
matized in his work, Andrade’s modernist reframing of malaria from a
 Shadows ❘ 211

stigma of the Amazon into a desirable mode of existence is not just a

reevaluation of unproductiveness or preguiça (laziness).36 More than a
representation of the malarial attitude as a cultural trait, Andrade’s writ-
ings on maleiteiros start as accounts of his embodied encounters with
malarial men, and how they affect or contaminate him. These encoun-
ters are not located in some imaginary, primitive Amazon. They take
place in a post-rubber boom Amazon, in environments transformed by
the extractive industry. Andrade’s self-declared obsession with malaria
(O turista aprendiz, 418) comes up for the first time in an encounter
with a beautiful “moreno” (dark-skinned) man in Peru (117) who, de-
spite causing a frisson among the tourists, does not show any interest in
looking at them. Years later, Andrade reformulated this experience into
a “philosophy of malaria,” which he developed in two crônicas written
for Diário Nacional in 1931.37 In these articles, malaria is characterized
as a mode of existence, a state of “indifference, egalitarian semi-death”
(418) and slowness, a delay in relation to everything, and above all, a
lack of curiosity, which is the “primary element of progress” (422).
Very few scholars have delved into Andrade’s writing on malaria
at length. In two articles published in 2013 and 2019, Nísia Trindade
Lima and André Botelho38 argue that it reflects a form of empathy or
cultural relativization that allows him to appreciate the Amazonian
mode of life, while Kunigami reads the malarial gaze as a model for the
filmic experience centered on an immobile spectator. In dialogue with
them, I discuss Andrade’s reframing of malaria from a stigma of the
tropics into a desirable mode of resistance to capitalist modernization,
in which I find not a mode of empathic relativism but rather, similarly
to Kunigami, a critical engagement with the history of the biopolitical
modernization of the region. Differently from them, I explore the con-
tradiction that lies in the fact that Andrade obsessively desires to be
contaminated by a state of non-desire. I am interested in how Andrade’s
desire for contagion challenges the fears of racial and interspecies con-
tact in the transformed environments of a post-rubber boom Amazon.
I contend that it does so through a pedagogy of the gaze that, contrary
to the medical gaze, teaches an embodied, affectable mode of looking
that is, like photography itself, both transitory and unlimited, always
pointing out to something other.
Andrade was obviously aware of the multifaceted role played by
malaria in the Brazilian imagery and discourse surrounding state and
capitalist expansion in the Amazonian region. The poet builds on the
national imagination linking malaria to a racialized Amazonian iner-
212 ❘ Chapter 4

tia and backwardness in order to reassess the temporality of progress

and capitalist productivity. This imaginary was derived from the inten-
sive development, institutionalization, and popularization of tropical
medicine in Brazil in the first decades of the twentieth century, which
was closely linked to the Brazilian Republic’s efforts to integrate and
modernize the backlands of the country and to allow for the maximum
exploitation of its resources.39 The most important surveys of malaria
carried out in the Amazon before World War I were, as the science his-
torian Nancy Stepan explains, almost exclusively related to the rubber
industry.40 These surveys and the medical reports that came out of them
were widely publicized, and the sanitarians were interviewed and fea-
tured in the press as modern heroes who would finally conquer the
Amazon, making it safe for white people.41
In some instances, such as that of the Madeira-Mamoré Railway and
other infrastructure works controlled by foreign companies, national
and imperialist interests in the management of disease were intertwined.
The imperialist prospects for capitalist expansion in the Amazon
brought about by the renewed field of tropical medicine become clear,
for example, in a speech given by Dr. Carl Lovelace, who had worked
for the Brazil Railway Company as the chief doctor of the Candelaria
Hospital in Porto Velho, at the Brazilian National Academy of Medicine
in 1912:

Amazonas and Mato Grosso constitute an impressively rich

Eldorado, waiting to be conquered. The ghosts of disease
and death inherent to the tropical climates have disappeared
because now we know that the maladies of equatorial re-
gions are not due to heat or humidity, but are instead caused
by parasites presently mastered by human intelligence.42

Dr. Lovelace’s work in the Candelaria Hospital in Porto Velho was, in

turn, supported by the Brazilian physician, epidemiologist, and public
health officer Dr. Oswaldo Cruz. Invited by the Brazil Railway Com-
pany in 1910 to assess medical conditions among the Madeira-Mamoré
workers, Cruz declared that malaria, “a preventable disease,” was the
“only serious terror in these regions” and that its control was key to the
development of the Amazon.43 In order to control malaria, Cruz recom-
mended strict measures that included compulsory quinine treatment for
workers and isolation of the sick. Moreover, workers should have their
blood tested for parasitic infection before being hired, and those who
 Shadows ❘ 213

disobeyed the measures imposed by medical professionals in the labor

camps should be fired.
The fact that the main cause of death in the region was malaria is rel-
evant: malaria can infect and reinfect a single individual several times,
generally causing milder symptoms on each occasion. In populations
without immunity, yellow fever, for example, is much more lethal than
malaria, but while yellow fever confers full immunity on survivors, ma-
laria victims can build resistance only through repeated bouts. The adult
populations in regions where the disease is endemic, while not being im-
mune, are largely able to live with the disease. If, as Lovelace suggested,
with the microbiological revolution, mosquitoes and parasites replaced
heat and humidity, or even race and moral degeneration, as the tropical
threats that should be addressed, the racialized body of the chronically
infected Amazonian dweller nevertheless continued to be an object both
of fear and intervention.
Inspired by the new sanitary ideals, Brazil’s coastal political elite
started attributing the country’s failure to be fully modern to the fact
that the population of its vast backlands was ill and therefore in a state
of lethargic unproductiveness. In their analysis of this phenomenon,
Nísia Trindade Lima and Gilberto Hochman examined the role of the
Brazilian hygienist movement in the early twentieth century in shifting
the focus in representations of the inhabitants of the backlands from
the issue of race to the concept of disease.44 But even if race was not
explicitly identified as a factor in the development of diseases such as
malaria, whose contagion was now attributed exclusively to parasites
transmitted by mosquitoes, the racialized body was still associated with
the danger of contagion, and an acquired immune resistance to malaria
served as a mark of weakness, of dangerous permeability to the nonhu-
man, of irrationality, and—crucially—of resistance to modernization.45
If, as Denise Ferreira da Silva argues, the European imperialist subject
(i.e., the white man) was regarded as a self-determining subject in oppo-
sition to other, more affectable, racialized colonial bodies—that is, bod-
ies subject to natural, biological factors—the latter’s affectability was
no longer explained primarily by theories of racial or environmental
determinism46—but public discourses on sanitation and disease control
still presented racialized bodies as dangerously permeable bodies.
In his 1910 report, Cruz suggested that the Madeira-Mamoré doc-
tors were unable to control malaria in the region due to the workers
who, out of “ignorance, negligence, and obstinacy,” did not follow the
company’s instructions.47 Even though it was well-known that quinine
214 ❘ Chapter 4

did present a risk of serious side effects, this emphasis on workers’

“irrational” resistance to taking quinine was repeatedly mentioned in
medical and newspaper articles about disease control in the Madeira-
Mamoré region, and became one of the means through which the ra-
cialization of disease entered the public debate about malaria control in
the region.48 But it was not only the undisciplined railway workers who
presented an obstacle to the control of the disease. As Cruz argues in
his report, the administration of quinine had to be rigidly disciplined,
in part because the dose administered had to be strong enough to kill
a quinine-resistant race of the parasite “that has been for a long time
carefully and insistently created by the local seringueiros [rubber tap-
pers].”49 Here, the obstacle is the Amazonian dwellers, more specifically
rubber tappers, many of them migrants from the poor and dry back-
lands of the Northeast who had been in the Amazon region long enough
to be affected by and to affect the local plasmodium parasites that cause
malaria, helping them to acquire resistance to quinine.
Despite governmental and private measures of disease control,
malaria-related infections and death rates in the Madeira-Mamoré re-
gion did not fall significantly. The railway was finished thanks to its
success in recruiting (and importing) thousands of national and foreign
workers. Absent from Cruz’s and other reports at the time is the fact that
the huge human displacement brought about by the Madeira-Mamoré
Railway, which was seen as both the effect of—and the solution to—the
human loss related to malaria, was, in fact, one of the main causes of
the epidemic. Moreover, surveys and reports of the time mostly ignored
the role of manmade environmental transformation in the spread of
the disease, and focused instead on how the disease was encumber-
ing the advance of the human activities that were transforming the
environment.
Described as a means for the malaria parasite’s reproducibility and
for disease contagion, the racialized malarial bodies become an image
of the belatedness of the Amazon, associated to visual markers such as
yellowness, empty gaze, and enlarged stomachs. In his report about the
Madeira-Mamoré region, Cruz notes:

The region is infected to such an extent that the people do

not have the notion of a healthy state, and for them “being
ill” constitutes normality. When asked about their health,
children—the few who exist—simply respond “I don’t have
disease, I have spleen.” This is how they characterize the
 Shadows ❘ 215

huge splenomegaly whose presence they feel and which fol-

lows the repeated bouts of malaria.50

By including in his medical report this informal interaction with Am-

azonian children, Cruz emphasizes both their normalization of their
contaminated state and the bodily transformations that result from that
contamination, such as the enlargement of the spleen, or splenomegaly.
For the sanitarians, this perception, or normalization itself, was part of
the problem that should be addressed. For the coastal political elites,
this queered,51 transformed body became a threat to the body of the
modern nation.
The malarial state of disinterest desired by Andrade engages with
the legacy of these medical surveys in multiple ways: while the malarial
disinterested, unproductive gaze challenges the “biopolitical” emphasis,
to use Michel Foucault’s term, on life as a resource to be managed, opti-
mized, and extracted, the traveler’s queer desire for—and to be contam-
inated by—the malarial body challenges the authoritative medical gaze.
In Andrade’s account of his encounter with malarial men, both their
“dark-skinned” malarial bodies and their gaze trigger a desire for con-
tagion, a desire to be transformed by the encounter with the maleiteiros.
Working against a naturalized association between malaria, the trop-
ical jungle, and backwardness, Andrade’s first reference to his encounter
with the maleiteiros takes place in the midst of capitalist ruins. The
scenery described in the diary entry for June 18 is a hot, poor town on
the border with Peru called Remate de Males. A photograph taken by
Andrade during a walk across the town shows two floating shacks and
two canoes at the margin of a small river (figure 4.8). As usual, Andrade
captions the image twice: “Aqui outrora se tomaram banhos” (“Here
baths were once taken”) and “Banheiros Amazônicos” (“Amazonian
bathrooms”). This combination of captions and image talks about time
and the effects of capitalism: the place where once one could bathe,
a clean river, has become the place where the waste of the extractive
economy is disposed. Remate de Males presents such a sad spectacle
that Olívia Guedes Penteado, Andrade’s travel companion and a coffee
baroness, decides to go back to the boat after a brief attempt to accom-
pany the group on a walk in the town. She “hid in her cabin,” according
to Andrade, so she would “not see the local people, without exception,
eaten by malaria” (O turista aprendiz, 117).
Immediately after the rainha do café (the coffee queen), as Andrade
calls her throughout the diary, refuses to see the people eaten up by
216 ❘ Chapter 4

Figure 4.8. “Aqui outrora se tomaram banhos”; “Banheiros Amazônicos”

(“Here baths were once taken”; “Amazonian bathrooms”). Photograph by
Mário de Andrade, Remate de Males, Brazil, June 18, 1927. Reproduced by
permission of Arquivo IEB-USP, Fundo Mário de Andrade, código de referência:
MA-F-0298.

malaria, a “dark-skinned Peruvian man of extraordinary beauty,” de-

spite being “entirely devoured by malaria” (O turista aprendiz, 117),
enters the boat. The man, who causes enormous excitement among
the travelers, resembles Richard Barthelmess, an American movie star
who had a large female following in the 1920s. The man’s body, in
Andrade’s account, is also visibly infected, transformed: Andrade de-
scribes the malarial man’s skin as one of lisura absurda—an absurd
smoothness or uniformity, “an earthy brown without pleasure” (118).
Besides being an image to be looked at, however, it is the man’s mode
of looking, or his refusal to look, that attracts Andrade’s attention. It
didn’t matter how much the travelers, particularly the women, tried to
attract his attention; the malarial man would not turn his gaze towards
them. Andrade repeats at least four times that the man “did not look”
at anything, even though this not-looking was never an active gaze: it
was neither performative nor shy, and thus it was even free of any effort
at self-concealment.
In this sense, the malarial attitude can be understood against an
increasingly industrialized, action-oriented world. In discussing what
she calls an “ethos of non-appropriative contentment” in nineteenth-
 Shadows ❘ 217

century British and American literature, the literary scholar Anne-Lise

François offers an interesting model for interpreting this kind of non-
instrumental ethos. She contrasts it to the “aesthetics of sublimity,” the
privilege of the non-representable that is “characteristic of romantic
investments in the heroic work of imagination.”52 The nonheroic, ef-
fortless, and passive attitude, on the other hand, allows for a concep-
tion of the “non-instrumental” that is removed from “the concept of
infinite, never-to-be-satisfied ethical responsibility found in the roman-
tic sublime’s postmodern heirs.” Like the characters François analyzes,
Andrade’s malarial man is not heroic. If he delivers any knowledge or
provides any alternative to capitalist instrumentality, he does so effort-
lessly and passively.
The passivity of the malarial attitude reminds us of Andrade’s de-
scription of the butterflies that arise at the railway, drawn in the wake
of the whirlwind formed by the passing train. Neither sublime nor in-
strumental, the butterflies move with the flow, adapting to the change in
atmosphere provoked by the train. This passive, purposeless movement
delivers the most vivid contrast to the train’s forward and purposeful
movement.
Besides being a model for a disinterested gaze, however, malarial skin
is also, like the butterflies, an image to be looked at. While the butterflies
are blurred, almost invisible in Andrade’s photograph in Porto Velho,
malarial skin is described as absurdly uniform, smooth, lacking defined
lines and texture. The word lisura in Portuguese can also mean honesty
or candor. Thus, Andrade reads in the smooth skin of malaria both the
sign of the disease and a mode of being that is pure surface, neither an
expression of internal struggles nor hidden intentions, nor a product of
artifice or deception.
The lisura absurda of malarial skin can also be compared to An-
drade’s discussion of Charlie Chaplin’s composition of Carlito’s face in
a 1934 article for Espírito Novo titled “Caras” (“Faces”).53 According
to Andrade, the most exquisite aspect of Carlito’s face is that it looks
like a face that has been drawn. It is entirely created by the camera, but
at the same time it is anti-cinematic in the sense that it lacks shadow
or movement, giving the impression of being a real man with a static,
drawn face seen among “real people” with moving faces. But most im-
portant, Carlito’s face is not actually a mask. We do not have the sense
that behind Carlito’s face is Charlie Chaplin pretending he is Carlito.
The perceived reality is that of one entity—Carlito/Chaplin—possessing
a drawn, cartoonish face. In order to explain this further, Andrade com-
218 ❘ Chapter 4

pares Chaplin to Buster Keaton, whose face is created through the aes-
thetic element of immobility, which is, however, just external:

It is not part of the structure of the face: it doesn’t come

from the bony carcass of the face, it doesn’t come from the
flesh, the epidermis. And less so from the cinematographic
machine. It is not a plastic element. It is an element of the
psychological order, added to the structure of the face to give
it comic interest. (“Caras,” 57)

In contrast to Carlito, Keaton’s face generates interest, a desire to know

the Keaton behind the mask, even to befriend him. Carlito’s face, on
the contrary, does not provoke interest because there is nothing to be
discovered behind it.
Like Charlie Chaplin’s creation, the malarial man embodies an aes-
thetic element that fosters a gaze that remains at the surface of the
image: the maleiteiro’s appearance is not a manifestation of internal
psychological dimensions. The malarial state is pure skin, pure surface.
In this sense, it is not much different from a passage in which Andrade
describes the landscape in the north, where the excess of light covers
everything in a “violent epidermis, perfectly delimited, that does not
hold any mystery . . . the soul of things disappeared” (O turista apren-
diz, 188), and everything has an honest “brutality of the ‘thing’ in itself”
(188). From this brutal concreteness comes a “sensuality of contact”
that contagia (contaminates) the traveler with a “sensory life, that in-
toxicates.” It is interesting to note that Andrade uses the medical verb
contagiar to refer to the effect that this brutal epidermic environment
with no soul has on the spectator. Similar to Andrade’s description of
the landscape, what the malarial man’s image instills in the spectator-
traveler is not so much a desire to know him, but rather a desire for
contagion: “And then I desired to have this malaria, so that nothing
else would interest me in this world in which everything interests me
excessively” (118). It is as an image, not as an example to be learned,
that the malarial man contaminates the spectator with a malarial way
of looking.
In Andrade’s second mention of the disinterested malarial gaze in
his diary, on July 17, the scene is repeated: a (different) man with a
similarly smooth face enters the boat, and the women try in vain to
attract his attention, “desiring to be desired” (O turista aprendiz, 166).
This repetition, however, is somewhat different. In a similar gesture to
 Shadows ❘ 219

that of re-captioning his photographs, the repetition in the written diary

allows the reader to see something they had not seen before. Andrade
tells us that the man, whose “cloudy eyes do not see anything” (165),
does not turn his gaze toward the women, and adds, “I can’t even begin
to imagine what the problem is, but the fact is that it exists, it’s true, I
saw it” (166). Playing with the authoritative genre of testimonial travel
writing, Andrade reminds the reader of the contradiction inherent in his
providing an eyewitness account of a scene of not seeing. Refusing to
look, the eyes of the malarial man become an object for the traveler’s
gaze, which now occupies the center of the narrative.
In talking about his own gaze, Andrade’s writing becomes more clear,
more professorial, as if it were important to recount his learning pro-
cess. The traveler’s gaze is, at first, an inquiring, curious gaze. The narra-
tor wonders what type of problem is behind the malarial eyes. He notes
the difference, the visible signs of the infection. Andrade’s first impulse
to look for the “problem” at play is then transformed into the attempt
to name a phenomenon: the malarial state is not the result of a problem
that needs to be solved, but rather the “dilution of problems in indiffer-
ence. Or in patience, or in monotony, which has more objectivity” (O
turista aprendiz, 166). Note that objectivity here is not on the side of
the inquiring scientific gaze; rather, it is a gaze that remains on the sur-
face level of the image. The abandonment of the need to scrutinize the
“problem” behind the cloudy malarial eyes leads Andrade once again
to end the scene with his desire for contagion. “The image of the man
haunts me,” he writes, wishing “to have malaria like this, that could
make me indifferent” (166). Here, Andrade’s desire to have malaria ap-
pears more clearly as a recognition of his own difference from the non-
desiring malarial man. Andrade cannot appropriate, or incorporate, this
mode of being, because more than a mode of being, the malarial man
is defined as an “image” that “haunts him,” affects him, provokes in
him a certain way of looking. Again, Andrade’s pedagogy of the gaze
is phenomenological: it proposes a way of looking that does not come
from the subject, or his subjectivity, but is provoked by his encounter
with an image.
Based on his recognition of difference—he cannot be the other—and
affectation—he can be transformed by his encounter with the other—
the politics of looking in Andrade’s O turista aprendiz is more fragile
and transient than that of other works discussed in this book. This poli-
tics of looking, in which the writer places himself within a complex web
of unequal exchanged gazes, is highlighted by the fact that the first ma-
220 ❘ Chapter 4

laria scene occurs while Olivia Guedes Penteado is hiding in her cabin,
refusing to look, because she doesn’t want to see the effects of malaria
on the population. In order to enjoy her trip discovering the Amazon,
the celebrated aristocrat, a generous patron of modernist artists, has to
turn a blind eye to what she recognizes as the misery and decay of the
country’s backland. Meanwhile, the party’s noisy and narcissistic urban
girls, who, according to the writer, embrace all the “modern liberties”
(O turista aprendiz, 119), unashamedly desire the gaze (and the desire)
of the malarial man. Between these two poles, the modernist poet af-
firms his own desire, and his own pleasure in looking at the other. But
in looking, he recognizes both the inequality present in this (lack of)
exchange of gazes and the way this difference affects his way of look-
ing. Both alluding to the authority of the ethnographic gaze—“It’s true,
I saw it”—and subverting it, Andrade describes the malarial man as an
image—“the image of the man haunts me.” This image provokes in him
a transitory, non-inquisitive gaze.
Thus, if the poet desires in vain the malarial state of non-desire, per-
haps it is because the disinterested malarial gaze is not a quality he can
possess, but is, rather, an effect that some images—the brutally bright
landscape and the smooth malarial skin—have on him. Although this is
made clearer in the second apparition of a malarial man, the first pas-
sage about the topic already suggests that the malarial man is an image,
almost a cinematic image, by comparing him to the American movie
star Barthelmess. If the “effect of Carlito’s face,” which lacks shadow
and movement, is “entirely produced by the cinematographic camera”
(“Caras,” 26) as is Barthelmess’s seductiveness, could the photographic
camera produce the malarial face? Could the photographic portrait
produce a face that does not generate an inquiring gaze, a gaze that
looks behind the face for a psychological character, an ethnographic
meaning, or the symptom of a medical condition?
This leads us to the question of Andrade’s thoughts on the photo-
graphic medium itself, which he elaborated in only two published ar-
ticles, one about the artist Jorge de Castro’s photographic exhibition
and the other about the poet Jorge de Lima’s experiments with pho-
tomontage. In his 1940 review of Jorge de Castro’s exhibition, titled
“O homem que se achou” (“The Man Who Found Himself”), Andrade
praises the artist’s transition from drawing to photography, which he
defines as a form of art that, “like drawing,” is still black and white,
but is “even more realistic and more phantasmagorical.”54 As is com-
mon with Andrade’s art criticism, the review becomes a vehicle for a
 Shadows ❘ 221

meditation on the specificities of various media, which never appear to

him in isolation, but through their articulation with other media. In dis-
cussing photography, Andrade suggests a recurrent and subtle approx-
imation with drawing. This comparison is interesting for our purposes,
first, because of its connection with Carlito’s cara de desenho (drawn
face), and second, because this analogy allows Andrade to highlight the
temporal dimension of the “immobile material” of both drawing and
photography.
Before developing his definition of photography, Andrade reminds
the reader that Jorge de Castro’s exhibition does not include any still
lifes, which the critic deems an appropriate decision because photo-
graphic still lifes give him the impression of looking at a photograph
of a painting. This is because the photographic still life “steals from
painting its principles of composition and balance, which are naturally
imposed by the rectangle of the canvas.”55 Photography, in contrast,
encompasses an unlimited field. A similar unlimitedness is claimed by
Andrade in another article, “Do desenho” (“On Drawing”), to be the
principle of drawing.56
In order to understand the unlimitedness of photography and its rela-
tionship to time, I will take a detour to examine this more detailed arti-
cle on drawing, in which the unlimited character of drawing is explained
in temporal terms. Drawing, according to Andrade, is an intermediary
art that exists between the temporal arts, such as prose and poetry, and
the spatial arts, such as sculpture or painting. Different from other such
intermediary arts—he cites dance as an example, but we could also add
film—drawing is not an art of movement because its “material is immo-
bile” (“Do desenho,” 71). And different from the plastic arts, such as
painting or sculpture, drawings are not limited by the edges and mar-
gins of the paper: “In truth, drawing is unlimited, because not even the
trace . . . delimits it” (74). Drawing, Andrade affirms, is “at the same
time a delimiter that has no limits” (74). It is not a closed fact, like
painting or sculpture; that is why it is not made to be framed and hung
on a wall (71). The proper way to handle drawings is to store them in
a folder and leaf through them. This interesting and temporal recom-
mendation for the viewing of drawings is also manifested in his affirma-
tion that, in contrast to painting’s aspirations to immortality, or divinity,
drawing is “much more agnostic, [it] is a way of transitorily defining
[definir transitoriamente], if I may express myself this way” (75). This
awkward use of the verb definir (to define), accompanied by the adverb
transitoriamente (transitorily) captures the combination of immobility
222 ❘ Chapter 4

and impermanence that Andrade sees in drawings. This transitory delin-

eation and this process of delineating both rely on conventional traces
to create “a finite vision, moment, or gesture” (75). The connection with
photography comes to mind instantly, but it is to writing that the writer
alludes in his always-entangled definitions of various media; here, he
claims that drawing is like a proverb. Different from a common phrase
or a spontaneous expression that stands for something outside of itself,
the proverb is a phrase that goes through a process of purification be-
cause it is constructed over time, without losing its transitory character.
In both its duration and transitoriness it is a form of “wisdom,” because
it escapes the contingent character of a common phrase. A proverb is not
eternal, since it can always be contradicted by another proverb (76). In
a similar manner, drawing is unlimited, it is not defined by the frame; its
coming into being (in both its production and reception) happens over
time, and the result is both transitory and agnostic.
For Andrade, photography is, like drawing, immobile, unlimited, and
transitory. It is not contained by the frame, and although it relies on
conventions, it is agnostic, for it does not aspire to the divine or the
eternal. I do not wish to imply that Andrade establishes a total identity
between photography and drawing. In his article on Jorge de Castro,
Andrade defines photography as a “fact of light.”57 In this sense, it is
closer to cinema than to drawing, because its essence is to “register real-
ity as light.” But because it is not a medium of movement, photography’s
means of registering time can be compared to that of drawing because
both encompass campos ilimitados (unlimited fields)58 in their immobile
materiality. Let us recall the scene in which Andrade travels through the
Madeira-Mamoré region, and the train stops for him to photograph
an Indigenous hut. If the moving train is the prototype for cinematic
spectatorship, a photograph taken when the train has stopped registers
time in multiple ways. The immobile image bears the trace of tradition
and creativity, of work, and of the “future pride” of the nation. Another
way in which time can be inscribed in a photograph appears in a quo-
tation at the end of Andrade’s review of Jorge de Castro’s photographs.
The passage is actually a quote from an artist named Santa Rosa (who
interestingly is a draftsman), who suggests that Castro creates his pho-
tographs by “searching in the appearance of objects and beings [for]
their moment of poetic transfiguration,”59 like in Andrade’s own photo
“Vitrolas futuras.”
While photography can lead to an appropriative gaze, its objectivity
and openness, its transitory and agnostic character, can also produce a
 Shadows ❘ 223

non-inquisitive, unfixing, and embodied gaze that wavers. In his mon-

tage of images and texts, Andrade explores this temporal unlimitedness
of the photographic, for example, by fostering a processual reading (as
if leafing through drawings in a folder) that prevents the fixing of the
Amazonian subject.
Four years after he returned from the Amazon, Andrade published
two articles in Diário Nacional based on his encounter with malarial
men, titled “Maleita I” and “Maleita II.” If, in his diary, the malarial
man is an image, an image that reminds Andrade of an American movie
star and speaks of the transitory experience of looking and the way in
which images affect the spectator, the articles take, as Kunigami has
already suggested, a slightly different path. In these articles, detached
from the context of the travel diary, the malarial gaze becomes a “phi-
losophy of malaria.” The author begins “Maleita I” by trying to con-
vince his readers—urban newspaper consumers who regard him as a
“crazy futurist”—of the seriousness of his desire to get malaria. When
rebutting his readers’ hypothetical argument that he certainly would
not want to go through the malarial fevers, Andrade clarifies that what
he desires is the post-fever state of torpor, comparing it to the effect of
certain drugs. He reminds his readers that, after all, “in our idiotíssima
[idiotic] imported civilization” (O turista aprendiz, 419), drug users of-
ten go through unpleasant experiences in the name of future pleasures.
Among these necessary evils he cites the grimaces and sniffs of the co-
caine user, the injections of the morphine user, and adds that even the
consumers of alcohol have to suffer temporarily, for “the great majority
of cocktails, the great majority of strong drinks are supremely unpleas-
ant. And we drink all that for a vast number of tendencies, aspirations,
curiosities, vanities . . . and for the fulfillment of pleasures of posterior
physio-psychic states” (419). Based on the articles’ comparison between
malaria and “our civilization’s” modes of achieving altered modes of
perception, some scholars have linked Andrade’s “philosophy of ma-
laria” to metropolitan modernism’s praise of both intoxication and
avant-garde primitivisms. Lima and Botelho have argued that Andrade’s
“defense of malaria” is an exercise in cultural relativism and a mode
of challenging the reader’s ethnocentrism.60 In comparing malaria to
modes of intoxication familiar to his readers, or, in his words, common
to “our civilization,” Andrade seeks to defend an Amazonian, stigma-
tized mode of living. It is interesting to note, however, that although it
is certainly present in his diaries, this cultural question only becomes
central in the 1931 articles. These articles shift the focus from the effect
224 ❘ Chapter 4

that images have in triggering a malarial mode of perception to a “phi-

losophy of malaria” as an alternative mode of living and perceiving the
world that is proper to the Amazon. This shift is confirmed by the fact
that Andrade begins the articles by explaining the theory intellectually,
then situates it in the Amazonian reality, and only then narrates his
(now anecdoctal) encounter with the malarial man at the end of the
second article, “Maleita II.”
In these articles, written as a dialogue with skeptical urban readers
about a “philosophy of malaria,” the malarial effect loses the situational
character inherent to a scene of encounter and becomes connected to a
mode of living proper to the Amazonian space. Even though malaria
was not exclusive to the northern part of the country, in his articles
Andrade builds a connection between the malarial state and the Ama-
zonian environment and life. Andrade admits that he does not want to
have malaria in São Paulo, where he has deadlines to fulfill, but he de-
sires “the disease with all its environment and expression, in an igarapé
[watercourse] of the Madeira river . . . in silence, surrounded by gods,
questions, patience. With episodic work or no work at all” (O turista
aprendiz, 419). Even though the malarial men of the diaries are work-
ers in modern extractive industries, in the articles Andrade argues that
the malarial state, an organized laziness, a state of sublime semi-death,
should only happen there, “at that end of the world, delayed at least a
month relative to the rest of the world” (421).
Despite being localized to the Amazon, this phenomenon is capable
of putting the entire Europeanized south into perspective:

Curiosity is a curse. And in hot lands it is simply made in

Germany, camelote, imported, lack of culture. That is why
I dream of malaria, which must put an end to my curiosity
and calm my disgraceful vanity of needing to be someone in
this competition here in the South. (O turista aprendiz, 422)

In this passage, we see two gestures common to Andrade’s work: what

Antônio Cândido called desrecalque localista, in which the local is not
opposed to the universal, but can be a privileged expression of it; and an
interest in inventing the basis for a national culture.61 I will discuss An-
drade’s interest in ethnography, cultural education, and cultural heritage
in the next section. For now, it is important to remember that while the
“Maleita” articles develop several ideas already present in the diaries,
such as the critique of curiosity as an aspect of modernization and the
 Shadows ❘ 225

temporality of progress, in the diaries, greater emphasis is placed on

contagion in the process of looking, allowing Andrade to thematize the
question of the gaze in the context of inequality.

Look in g a n d A c t i ng

In an interview with Diário Nacional on August 20, 1927, soon after

he returned to São Paulo, Andrade publicly announced for the first time
the title of his future book O turista aprendiz (Uma excursão) (The
Apprentice Tourist [An Excursion]). Ten days later, in a letter to his
friend Manuel Bandeira, Andrade lamented the fact that his editor had
turned down his manuscript—“he says he can’t publish it, and he must
be right”62—and added that, for this reason, he would not continue
working on his notes.63 As with other unpublished projects, such as
his novel Café, Andrade used fragments from his Amazonian diaries in
other works, such as in his articles published in Diário Nacional, his
poetry—the book Remate de Males was named after the town where he
met the malarial man—and his novel Macunaíma, published in 1928.
The opposite also happened: Andrade turned a poem he had sent to the
writer Manuel Bandeira, with whom he kept up a constant and volumi-
nous correspondence, into a diary entry.64
Andrade never entirely gave up the idea, however, of turning his Am-
azonian diary into a travel book. His manuscripts and letters reveal
that, in addition to the 1927 version of the manuscript, the author typed
out a new one fifteen years later in 1942, three years before his death.
In 1943 he added a preface to the manuscript in which he affirmed that,
as much as the text displeased him, he could not “destroy it” (O turista
aprendiz, 49). As important as the fact that Andrade did not publish
the diaries is the fact that he never gave up working on them. This last
section of the chapter explores the trajectory of these archival materi-
als. Considering both what pleased and displeased Andrade about the
diaries, and examining his work in the late 1920s and the early 1940s,
I suggest that the Amazonian diary is at once central to understand
Andrade’s political and aesthetic positions and odd in relation to them.
The final version of the manuscript, the one with the 1943 preface,
can be found today inside a green folder at the University of São Paulo’s
IEB—the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros (Institute of Brazilian Stud-
ies). On the folder’s cover, Andrade wrote a title and subtitle, and drew
an Indigenous-looking figure wearing a disproportionally small and
226 ❘ Chapter 4

almost falling-off European-style crown. This satirical figure, referenc-

ing the colonial history of the region, was captioned “AMERICA,” and
the complete title, Turista aprendiz: Viagem pelo Amazonas até o Peru,
pelo Madeira até a Bolívia e por Marajó até dizer chega (Voyage through
the Amazon to Peru, up the Madeira to Bolivia and through Marajó un-
til one says enough), parodies the titles of pre- and post-independence
travel literatures and, more specifically, of a particular travel account
written by Andrade’s own grandfather.65 Andrade died in 1945, and his
manuscript was published for the first time in 1976, prepared by the
researcher Telê Ancona Lopez.
Published under the title O turista aprendiz, the 1976 edition in-
cludes the 1927 Amazonian diary and other materials from Andrade’s
travels to the northeast of the country in 1928, thus suggesting that
they consist of two parts of the book he had hoped to publish.66 Lopez’s
choice is justified by the fact that the 1928 materials were found in the
same green folder as the diary manuscript, inside a sub-folder entitled
“Viagem Etnográfica” (“Ethnographic Voyage”). The later materials
are composed of 58 clippings from a total of 70 of Andrade’s articles
published by the Diário Nacional from December 1927 through March
1929,67 plus an envelope containing travel notes taken during his 1928
trip. Unlike the 1927 diary text, these notes are not elaborate and are
mostly brief, frequently noting ethnographic work he had done, people
he had met, dance or music spectacles he attended, and even the party-
ing and drugs he shared with friends. In contrast to the 1927 Amazo-
nian diary, which was rewritten, typed, and edited, the 1928 notes and
articles on the Northeast were never organized into book form,68 and
there is no clear reason to believe that they were meant to be published
as a second part of O turista aprendiz. We find a similar pattern in
the photographic archive: while the 1927 photographs, which comprise
the majority of the photographs,69 contain elaborate captions—and, as
noted earlier, more than one layer of captions—only a few of the 1928
photographs are captioned, and these captions are mostly descriptive,
quite different from the uniquely multilayered relationship between
photographs and diary analyzed throughout this chapter. Although it
is difficult to identify specific changes Andrade made to his initial diary
notes since the first handwritten version is lost, a close analysis of pho-
tographs and diary shows a deliberate dialogue between them; some
captions were written later, probably influenced by the diary text, and
the rewriting of the diary was probably also influenced by the photo-
graphs. One example of this can be found in my analysis of the butter-
 Shadows ❘ 227

flies in the photograph of Andrade sitting on the tracks at Porto Velho

(figure 0.1, discussed earlier in this chapter).
In the most recent edition of O turista aprendiz, published in 2015,
editors Telê Ancona Lopez and Tatiana Longo Figueiredo rightly choose
to make a clear distinction between the 1927 and 1928 materials, not-
ing that the latter do not constitute a book project designed by the
author.70 Instead, they publish the 1928 materials noting that they may
have served as source materials for the development of certain passages
of the 1927 diary.71 This clarification is important for understanding
the specificity of O turista aprendiz and its form because it prevents
us from classifying Andrade’s Amazonian account as an “ethnographic
voyage,”72 an expression only used by Andrade in reference to his 1928
trip across the Northeast. Although O turista aprendiz contains some
material with ethnographic interest, parts of the book parody ethnog-
raphy, and despite Andrade’s undeniable interest in ethnographic work,
his voyage to the Amazon was not a research trip, and its purpose can-
not be reduced to a plan to trace, in Lopez’s words in the 1976 edition,
the “coordinates for a national culture”73 through a search for the prim-
itive and the popular.
To examine the singularity of the Amazonian trip and of the man-
uscript of O turista aprendiz, I propose to re-situate this trip between
Andrade’s “ethnographic voyage,” made in 1928, and an earlier “voy-
age of discovery of Brazil” that the writer made in 1924. This was how
Andrade referred to a trip to the state of Minas Gerais that he made in
the company of central figures of the São Paulo movimento modernista,
including the writer Oswald de Andrade, the painter Tarsila do Amaral,
and Olivia Guedes Penteado, to celebrate the visit of the French poet
Blaise Cendrars to Brazil. The year 1924 is considered the date when
the main figures of modernismo turned their attention to the question
of brasilidade, or the search for an avant-garde artistic expression that
would be rooted in the popular cultures of Brazil.74 The year was also
marked, in the words of Fernando Rosenberg, by a more general geo-
political “critique of the modern as a global project,”75 as well as by a
preoccupation with Brazil’s “positionality” in this context. Andrade’s
playful and ironic reference to his “voyage of discovery” captures well
the simultaneously critical and optimistic tone of his 1924 trip. More
than any other modernist, Mário de Andrade engaged, in the years fol-
lowing this voyage, in a more serious and systematic ethnographic re-
search into Brazilian cultural manifestations76 and dedicated himself to
the preservation and democratization of the Brazilian cultural heritage.
228 ❘ Chapter 4

His focus on the study of Brazilian culture culminated, after the 1930
revolution, in his work as the director of the Department of Culture of
São Paulo (1935–38).77 During his tenure there, Andrade founded the
Discoteca Pública Municipal (Municipal Record Library, 1935); created
the Sociedade de Etnografia e Folclore, directed by Dina Lévi-Strauss
(1936); organized the Missão de Pesquisa Folclóricas (Mission for Folk-
lore Research,1938); built parks and public libraries; and prepared a
plan for the creation of SPHAN, the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico
e Artístico Nacional (National Historic and Artistic Heritage Service)
established by the Brazilian government in 1937.78 But back in the
1920s, more specifically in 1926, the year before his Amazonian trip,
Andrade had planned a journey to the Northeast to carry out ethno-
graphic work. More than during the flamboyant group voyage in 1924
to Minas Gerais, for the trip across the Northeast he planned to pursue
a systematic collection of data, in particular on local music and dance
traditions. This planned research trip did not happen in 1926, and an
unexpected invitation from Olivia Guedes Penteado to go to the Am-
azon in 1927 postponed Andrade’s ethnographic trip to the Northeast
until the following year.
Andrade accepted Penteado’s invitation expecting, as he reveals in
the diary, that the trip would look somewhat like the 1924 trip, in the
company of a fun group of artists and intellectuals.79 However, as soon
as the poet joins Penteado in the boat that will take them from Rio de
Janeiro to the north of the country, he realizes that the trip will not be
anything like the 1924 trip (O turista aprendiz, 55). Instead of a group
of artists, the caravan is composed of himself, Penteado, her niece Mag,
and the modernist couple Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral’s
daughter Dolur. Andrade finds himself a member of the entourage of the
coffee queen, who will be introduced to the governors of each state they
visit. The entourage is highly honored and has to follow tiring protocols
and attend official meetings at almost every stop. The travelers’ dis-
tinction—in both meanings of the word: what gives them prominence
and what separates them from the others, marking their difference—is
heightened by these political rituals. Neither a member of a modernist
caravan nor an ethnographer focused on the systematic collection of
data about local dances and festivals, Andrade travels through the Am-
azon planning to write a book about traveling across the region.80 Even
though the traveler, or the apprentice tourist, is at the center of the nar-
ration, the narrator does not transcend, as Lévi-Strauss did years later,
the importance of the market and the state apparatus in delimiting his
 Shadows ❘ 229

experience. While the traveler’s body is posited as the site from which
the text and images originate, this position is always unstable, tenta-
tive, and uncomfortable. At times, Andrade plays the modernist writer,
parodying ethnography in fictionalized accounts of imaginary tribes; at
other times, he is a joyful tourist and avid consumer, so intoxicated by
sensory stimuli that he is incapable of gaining knowledge or writing. He
feels uncomfortable with being part of the coffee queen’s entourage but
nevertheless revels in the comforts of the trip. This narrator is deeply
aware of his distinction; his simultaneous privilege and out-of-placeness
in the Amazonian voyage.
In his 1943 preface to the book, Andrade speculates as to why he has
never been able to finish the manuscript, and attributes this to the exces-
sive personalism of the notes. He then affirms that the reason he could
never abandon the project was precisely this feeling of impropriety
while traveling, “always hurting [machucado], alarmed, incomplete, al-
ways inventing himself as disliked by the environment that he traverses”
(O turista aprendiz, 49). It is this open wound, the machucado—and
the emotions that it still provokes in him—that keeps the text alive for
Andrade.
This preface, and more generally his decision to retype the manuscript
in 1942, can be better understood in the context of Andrade’s revalua-
tion of his life’s work in his famous speech “O Movimento Modernista”
(1942; “The Modernist Movement”). In this speech, after expressing a
general disenchantment with the devastation of war in Europe and Asia,
and with the dictatorial regime of President Getúlio Vargas (1937–45),
which had terminated his position as secretary of culture for São Paulo,
Andrade concludes with deep sadness that his generation had failed
politically. In the speech, which was delivered on the occasion of the
twentieth anniversary of the Modern Art Week of 1922, he recounts
the excess of joy of the 1920s generation of modernists who undertook
the heroic, adventurous, and pretentious “salvation of Brazil and inven-
tion of the world” (“O movimento modernista,” 241). Victims of their
own pleasure in life, they consumed everything, including themselves,
voraciously.81 Andrade does not discredit the results of the work of the
modernista generation: they made possible the “normalization of the
right to aesthetic experimentation” in Brazil and the “stabilization of a
national creative consciousness” (242), which meant not only the pro-
duction of original art made in Brazil or about Brazil, but the creation
of a Brazilian artistic culture. What the modernists, and especially An-
drade himself, failed to do was to be atual, to actively engage with the
230 ❘ Chapter 4

problems of the “present,” which were primarily political. He explains

this political failure in temporal terms, as an abstention from engaging
in contemporary life—“and this was paramount” (252). He condemns
the modernist movement as outdated, and afflicted with the “most an-
tiquated absence of reality” (252). If Andrade recognizes that they did
struggle, he believes they did so against ghosts.
Some scholars have interpreted Andrade’s lecture as a fair mea culpa
which accurately defines the limits of the modernist movement,82 while
others see it as a manifestation of his personal frustration, the bitterness
of someone who now realizes the uselessness of his life’s work.83 An-
drade himself corroborated in letters to friends that the speech was a
bitter confession of his attitude toward life.84 In addition to the grim na-
tional and international political scenarios, Andrade’s violent dismissal
from his position at the Department of Culture of São Paulo, which
was based on accusations of mismanagement and led to his decision to
move to Rio de Janeiro, seemed to confirm the irrelevance of his years
of dedication to a governmental project aimed at the democratization
of culture. With regard to his literary work, whose artistic value he now
believed he had sacrificed, to use Pedro Fragelli’s concept,85 in the name
of a social purpose, Andrade now reevaluates it as vain, incredibly in-
dividualistic, and aristocratic: “I thus arrive at the suffocating paradox:
having deformed my entire work for the sake of a programmed and
assertive anti-individualism, my entire work is nothing more than an
implacable hyperindividualism!” (“O movimento modernista,” 254).
The paradox is that by “sacrificing” his individual creative work in the
name of a social ideal, the less in touch with political reality he became.
Through this lens, we can understand Andrade’s disgust for the “per-
sonalism” of O turista aprendiz, but not his attachment to it.
If the 1942 speech can be interpreted as a bitter self-judgment, or,
as some scholars have pointed out, one of many instances in which
Andrade expresses the long-standing and ultimately unresolved conflict
he experienced between the collective and the individual86 or the social
and the aesthetic characters of art,87 it also touches on another set of
oppositions that is crucial for understanding O turista aprendiz: the
conflict between seeing and doing, passive and active, atual (contempo-
raneous) and outdated. The problem of action and that of temporality
are intertwined: all Andrade had done—and “I did a lot,” he admits (“O
movimento modernista,” 252)—were actions that did not engage with
the problems of the present. What, then, does political action mean? At
 Shadows ❘ 231

the end of his speech, Andrade puts out a call for the younger genera-
tion to leave “abstentions and eternal values for later”:

May others not sit like this at the margins, watching the
multitude go by . . . Make art, science, work. But do not
stop there, as observers of life, disguised as life technicians,
watching the multitudes go by. March with the multitude.
(“O movimento modernista,” 255)

The idea of marching with the multitude, joining the movement of the
mass with his body, is placed in opposition to watching from the mar-
gins. In an earlier passage, however, Andrade admits that he does not
see his own nature as that of a man of action, that he would not like to
write incendiary pages or get into fights. He says that he does not want
to “hide behind the contemplative doors of a monastery,” but neither
would he like to “earn the glory of being put in jail” (“O movimento
modernista,” 253). And between voluntary, speculative abstention and
an active engagement that could lead to incarceration, Andrade slips the
question of vision:

There is always a way of slipping into an angle of vision,

into a choice of value, into the blur of a teardrop that gives
more volume to the unbearable of the world’s conditions.
No. We turned into abstemious and transcendental absten-
tionists. (“O movimento modernista,” 253)

This question of vision brings into view the possibility that not all ways
of looking are equally irrelevant, purposeless, or outdated. As I dis-
cussed in this chapter’s introduction, tears, in O turista aprendiz, point
us toward the thresholds between sight and body, vision and blindness,
subject and object. Neither refusing to look (as Olivia Guedes Penteado
does) nor achieving the passive malarial state of not looking, the ap-
prentice tourist sustains the pain of being a spectator. While he does not
join the multitude—and Andrade doubts he could have done this—in O
turista aprendiz, he also does not hide behind speculative ideas about
the past and the future. His phenomenology of looking recognizes his
embodied complicity as an observer in the destructive process of mod-
ernization. O turista aprendiz is neither fiction nor ethnography, by a
writer who is neither a member of a joyful modernist caravan “invent-
232 ❘ Chapter 4

ing the world” nor a public servant constructing a cultural political

project—and the book opens up this unresolved pain of looking.
Finally, O turista aprendiz, a work in which photography and writ-
ing are inseparable, and the only photographic experiment of the first
generation of Brazilian modernism,88 might have appeared to Andrade
in 1942 to be both painful and relevant exactly because it presents an
embodied, transient, and non-instrumental pedagogy of looking. Seeing
through the blur of a teardrop is not only a refusal of the ethnographic
gaze, it is also a refusal to appease the unbearable of the world’s con-
ditions through either aristocratic speculation and “eternal values” or
instrumental, state-led political project.
Epilogue

Fire

As I write this conclusion in September 2019, images of the Amazon

rainforest on fire pop up on my phone. Most of them are aerial views of
the devastation. The frame is divided in two by a line of fire that looks
to be advancing over the green side of the screen. The second most
common type of image is taken at ground level and shows trees being
consumed by fire from bottom to top; they will soon cease to exist.
Lastly, I see photographs of the city of São Paulo being covered by a
dark cloud—a reminder that the world is connected, that the remains of
destruction arrive from the sky at the largest South American metropo-
lis. There are no humans in these photographs. Combined with repeated
mottos, such as those defining the Amazon as “the earth’s lungs,” these
images tell me and those around me—so far removed not only from the
Amazon but also from Brazil’s urban centers—that this asphyxiating
apocalypse is coming from the South.
There is very little, in the North American media, connecting these
images of fire to the recent political events (and geopolitical interests)
that have led to a right-wing turn in Brazil and Latin America, marked
by the emergence of political figures who reproduce, in almost identical
language, the early twentieth-century calls for modernization, devel-
opment, extractivism, and the assimilation of Indigenous communities
into national territories. These decontextualized images of fire consum-
ing the Amazon seem straightforward enough. They are at once familiar
and scandalous in that they document an acceleration of what seems

233
234 ❘ Epilogue

like an inevitable environmental catastrophe that shapes our imagina-

tion of the future. The inevitability of the end of the world is an image
taken from above and from a distance. It is fire and dark clouds coming
from the South. From this perspective, it is impossible to appreciate the
contingencies and entanglements of local and global destructive forces
and horrors, but also of utopian critique and activism. It is hard to see
what lives despite extractive capitalism or in its ruins.
The contemporary images of the Amazon on fire haunt me while I
revisit the question that informs this book: What do people do with
traces of ruination happening far from their immediate surroundings,
and how do photographic images shape our political imagination? The
context I examined in this book seems far removed from us: it refers to
a time when precarity seemed mostly the fate of the less fortunate and
the most fortunate were addressed as spectators of traces of destruction,
in order to learn lessons from these traces and to develop cultural and
political responses. While the experience of looking at images of the de-
structive processes of modernization in the extractive peripheries of cap-
italism has intensified, their mode of interpellating us has changed: now
we are often addressed by these images as fellow victims of an inevitable
catastrophic future. This is, of course, just one dimension of the shifts in
our experience of viewing images of destruction, which was also marked
by the development in the late twentieth century of a more standard-
ized and organized humanitarian language and logic,1 and the advent
of visual inclusion and Indigenous media initiatives that substantially
increased the production and distribution of media content by histor-
ically marginalized groups.2 In addition, new modes of circulation and
montage of images and texts in social media and messaging apps reveal
the coexistence of a myriad of other practices of seeing in the context of
ongoing processes of ruination. Catastrophic narratives of the end of the
world dispute the hegemonic discourse with the multiplicity of images
made and circulated by people who live in or with capitalist ruins. Re-
search that takes into account the contemporary entanglements of these
different practices of seeing, I believe, remains to be done.
One could argue that this multiplicity is a peculiarity of our contem-
porary multimedia image environment. In this book I argue, on the con-
trary, that the practices of seeing the destruction caused by extractive
capitalism and modernization have never been homogeneous. Rather, if
we pay close attention to heterogeneous strategies developed to circu-
late, exhibit, and arrange photographic traces of violence with other im-
ages and texts, this can illuminate different facets of some of the pillars
 Fire ❘ 235

of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernity: the forma-

tion of a public realm, the consolidation and territorialization of market
channels and state governance, and disputed concepts of history. If we
can, for example, situate Euclides da Cunha and Roger Casement in
the same historical context—both men worked in the first two decades
of the twentieth century, when trust in progress and in photography
as both a symbol of and a tool for such progress prevailed—a close
examination of their work allows for a more nuanced understanding
of how progress was envisioned through different modes of visualizing
the traces of modernity’s failure. Da Cunha’s ekphrastic narration of the
corpses of Canudos as a (mis)step in the constitution of a modern Brazil
presupposed the engulfment of the other in the history of the birth of a
national subject. While for Da Cunha the trace had to be assimilated in
a forward-moving narrative of progress, Casement struggled to make
scars visible as traces of a long-term geopolitics of imperialism. Case-
ment’s emphasis on the historicity of different points of view, which af-
fected the subject’s ability to see the unequal distribution of scars on the
world stage (and thus, how Ireland was connected to the Putumayo), led
him to foresee the possibility of progress through the education of public
opinion in the imperial metropoles in ways that would open it to a hu-
manist perspective, based on universal ideals of rights and justice. Thus,
what is at stake is not that Casement or Da Cunha’s respective contexts
deny modern capitalism’s universalizing tendencies, but, as Anna Tsing
has suggested, that universals are engaged differentially in each case,
generating heterogeneous “arrangements of culture and power.”3
Similarly, Lévi-Strauss and Andrade both partook in a modernist cri-
tique of photographic realism and power, shared a desire to break with
linear narratives of progress, and valued Indigenous or popular cultures.
However, their efforts to make visible the traces of destruction caused
by early twentieth-century modernizing enterprises in the non-urban
areas of the continent are diametrically opposed. Lévi-Strauss aims to
make Indigenous people visible as the debris of lost cultures through
a restricted use of photography, which, combined with captions and
montages, should call attention to symbolic information at the expense
of portraying historically specific embodied encounters. In contrast, An-
drade uses captions to destabilize the temporal coordinates of the refer-
ent of the image, revealing the multiple traces of bodily encounters that
constitute the very act of seeing. While Lévi-Strauss recognizes capitalist
modernity’s force of destruction, this recognition does not lead him to
expose the realpolitik of the 1930s’ anthropological enterprises. Call-
236 ❘ Epilogue

ing himself an archeologist, he focuses on the readability of the debris

instead of engaging with the present political and embodied processes
of fabrication of that debris. In contrast, Andrade’s politics of the gaze,
which focuses on the entanglement of his own body with the past and
ongoing traces of violence, reveals differential and very empirical in-
teractions, misunderstandings, and even alliances between politicians,
artists, workers, and Indigenous people.
Despite all these differences, these four men were imbued (or imbued
themselves) with the mission and power to make visible the traces of
destruction in regions that were foreign to them. It is not surprising
that the characters in this story were all city-dwelling white men, even
if they were not quite white or not quite heteronormative. Da Cunha,
for example, is well known for having formulated a progressive view
of the nation from a not-quite-white position. Despite believing in ra-
cial categories and the inevitability of biological evolution, he found a
mestiço solution to progress in the tropics which partially contradicted
the European racial theorists he so admired. It could be argued that the
Jewish anthropologist Lévi-Strauss’s pessimistic critique of modernity
was also made from the point of view of a people who were victims of
modern states and racial discourses. If, for da Cunha, history, as the ful-
fillment of the modern subject, meant progress, for Lévi-Strauss it meant
catastrophe. Lévi-Strauss’s pessimism, however, is counterbalanced by
his Rousseauan search for the origin as the potential beginning of ev-
ery social organization. If we can imagine the origin, says the reader
of Rousseau, we can also imagine different futures. What is left out of
the frame in Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes tropiques is the political present, its
messy alliances and negotiations, and the wordly frictions of heteroge-
neous temporalities, images, and bodies.
Interestingly, it is in Casement and Andrade, an Irishman and a Bra-
zilian man whose queerness was not the focus of this book, but has been
vastly documented and studied,4 that we find the question of positional-
ity: Roger Casement insists on the historicity of the gaze, and Mário de
Andrade proposes an embodied spectatorship. Despite their differences,
it is fair to say that their photographs and diaries present a politics of
looking that emphasizes their bodily orientation towards the subjects
they encounter and how they are affected by them. Their queer sensibil-
ity and embodied positionality also affect their way of taking into ac-
count the entanglement of their bodies in the exploitation of human and
nonhuman lives. Casement wondered what would be exhausted first,
 Fire ❘ 237

the rubber trees or Indigenous people, and Andrade was attentive to the
entangled human and nonhuman lives in the transformed landscapes
of the Amazon. Both men emphasized that in the midst of destruction,
there is also creative work, desire, and emotion.
Both Casement and Andrade held long-term positions in state
apparatuses—Casement as British consul and Andrade as director of
the Department of Culture of São Paulo. Although these positions were
quite different in scope and aim, both men imbued them with a cul-
tural and pedagogical mission that was directed in part at the cultural
and political elite, who should learn to appreciate non-European cul-
tures and democratic values. And both men ended up turning against
the state for which they worked. Later committing to a radical fight
against British imperialism, Casement joined the Irish nationalist up-
rising, for which he was sentenced to death. Andrade, on the contrary,
never turned to direct action against the state, but condemned himself
for never having truly acted in a political sense. But despite Andrade’s
disillusionment, for him, the future never appeared as a given. In his
famous 1942 speech, the modernist poet exhorts new generations to
engage with the present, to take their bodies to the streets and march
with the masses.
In contrast to the mostly human-centered imaginaries of these early
twentieth-century critics of modernization, the aerial images of the Am-
azon rainforest, characterized as the “earth’s lungs,” on fire leave very
little room for utopian critique. Just as some scholars in the humanities,
social sciences, and environmental studies rightly question an anthro-
pocentric history and propose new ways of rethinking human and non-
human interactions and temporal scales, I am drawn to those who are
doing very important work on multispecies and multicultural lives in
ruinous spaces and precarious environments.5 There is, however, still
considerable and urgent work to be done in the field of visual culture in
examining more closely what has changed in our mainstream practices
of looking, what these changes can tell us about our own ability to
imagine futures and pasts, and how to engage politically with the pres-
ent. Images of the end of the world can make us lose sight of concrete
engagements and cut off the forces of change.
Another spectacular fire, which also took place in Brazil, mobilized
national, regional, and international communities exactly one year from
the time of writing this epilogue. In September 2018, a fire consumed
the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. Devastated researchers and the
238 ❘ Epilogue

Figure 5.1. “The Bendegó meteorite at the National Museum after an overnight
fire in Rio de Janeiro,” September 3, 2018. Photograph by Léo Corrêa. Copy-
right © AP Photo/Léo Corrêa.

museum’s curator remarked that the fire was the result of years of aus-
terity and drastic reductions in the budget dedicated to the museum’s
maintenance. Founded in 1818 by the Portuguese emperor Dom João
VI and housed in a historic building in the Boa Vista neighborhood of
Rio de Janeiro since 1892, the museum was the oldest scientific institu-
tion in Brazil and held one of the largest anthropological and natural
history collections in the world. Among the museum’s world-renowned
collections was Luzia, a 12,000-year-old human fossil found in Brazil,
and audio recordings of Indigenous languages from all over the coun-
try. As the National Geographic reported, “some of these recordings,
now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.”6 In these global
manifestations of mourning for a double loss—of the Indigenous lan-
guages and of their recordings—we are reminded that museums, which
are nineteenth-century institutions par excellence, reflected modernity’s
fascination with the past while moving forward into the future. Result-
ing from the same political landscape that triggered this year’s increase
in fires in the Amazon forest, the museum’s fire is not an image of the
destruction of life, but of the memory of lost worlds.
One of the few objects in the burnt-out building that survived the fire
was the Bendegó meteorite. Weighing 5.36 tons, the meteorite is around
 Fire ❘ 239

four billion years old. A photographic image of the meteorite among the
ruins of the Museu Nacional is a reminder that ruins not only pertain
to anthropological history, but to the deep time of cosmological order
(figure 5.1). I am being led again to visions of the end of world, but
something brings me back to this book’s main question: What becomes
of the traces of early twentieth-century destructive modernizing proj-
ects? The Bendegó meteorite was found in 1784 in the Bahian sertão,
close to Monte Santo, the town that would later serve as the military
base of operations during the Canudos Campaign. In 1888, one year
before the fall of the Brazilian Empire, an imperial commission led by
a retired veteran of the Paraguayan War, Bernardo Carvalho da Cunha,
was established to transport the meteorite to a newly extended railway
and from there to Salvador, from where it would be taken to its new
home at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro. The heroic feat of trans-
porting the meteorite was widely reported in the news. In chapter 1, I
discussed how in his January 31, 1897, article for A Semana, Machado
de Assis associated the transportation of the Bendegó meteorite with the
photographic enterprise in Canudos. He suggested that photographing
and collecting the traits of Antonio Conselheiro would be a feat similar
to the removal of the Bendegó from the sertão. Associating the military
and scientific enterprises of the nineteenth century with the territorial
expansion of the state and its discourses of progress, Machado seems to
have predicted that Conselheiro’s traces would later be exhibited, like
the Bendegó, as a relic in something like a science museum. Curiously, the
building where Conselheiro’s skull was preserved, the Medical School
of Bahia, was consumed by fire in 1905. These coincidences reveals two
levels of violence: the violence that turns others into museum pieces,
and the violence that erases the traces of their existence; the obliteration
of human beings, and that of the memory of the obliteration.
This circles back to the main question: What do we make of traces
of destruction? What is the value of the photographs of Canudos’s ru-
ins and corpses, for example, and does it matter that they still exist?
After decades of photographic criticism similar to that of Lévi-Strauss,
who recognized the predatory aspect of ethnographic and travel pho-
tography, recent works on visual culture have proposed new ways of
reading nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photography that em-
phasize the unruliness of photographic meaning which allows it to be
revitalized differently in varied political contexts.7 For example, photo-
graphs taken by the state in order to control subaltern subjects—
enslaved people, laborers, criminals, women, Indigenous peoples—are
240 ❘ Epilogue

being reappropriated by descendants of these subjects, who locate their

histories in these photographs. Similarly, the history of the traces of
Canudos does not end with the engulfment of Conselheiro’s portrait in
the book Os sertões. On the contrary, the repeated efforts to efface the
ruins of Canudos are evidence of their very force.
Soon after the end of the conflict, a village began to flourish among
the ruins of Canudos’s old and the new churches, occupied by survivors
of the massacre who insisted on staying there. As I have mentioned,
accounts of the war have, following the narrative of Os sertões, disre-
garded the existence of these survivors for a long time. This effacement
was later duplicated: the new village was flooded, in 1968, by the con-
struction of a dam. Its inhabitants moved to different localities, includ-
ing a new village, which was later called “Canudos.” A small part of the
flooded Canudos, which remained out of the reach of the dam, is known
today as “Old Canudos” and can be visited by those interested in the
history of the region. The ruins of the old and the new churches, which
become visible only in times of drought, have been re-photographed
many times. Along with Flávio de Barros’s photographs, they have been
revitalized in the context of different utopian critiques and activist art.
The burning of public archives and the recent rise of ultraconservative
and revisionist discourses targeting what we once felt were established
narratives of violence—such as the killings and torture perpetrated by
military dictatorships or the genocide of Indigenous people—are an-
other reason for us to engage with the traces of history. Activists, artists,
journalists, and scholars everywhere are generating new arrangements
of images and texts that invite us to imagine the multilayered temporal-
ity of the now.
Notes

In trodu c tion
1. I follow here Gastón R. Gordillo’s concept of “rubble,” which, contrary
to the reification of ruins in some modernist traditions, implies formless debris
with no transcendental significance. Gastón R. Gordillo, Rubble; The Afterlife
of Destruction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
2. Mário de Andrade, O turista aprendiz, ed. Telê Ancona Lopez and Tati-
ana Longo Figueiredo (Brasilia: IPHAN, 2015), 157.
3. The discussions around the mutually constitutive processes of the forma-
tion of nation-states in Latin America and the rise of global capitalism extend
across a range of disciplines. See, for example, Steven C. Topik and Allen Wells,
Global Markets Transformed, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2014), for an interdisciplinary approach to this topic.
4. I use the term “modernization” to refer to the historically specific pro-
cesses and projects aimed at expanding capitalist modernity, conquering, as
Graciela Montaldo put it, “all that is not modern” (“Modernity and Modern-
ization: The Geopolitical Relocation of Latin America,” in Critical Terms in
Caribbean and Latin American Thought: New Directions in Latino American
Cultures, ed. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben Sifuentes-Jáuregui, and Marisa
Belausteguigoitia [New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016], 154).
5. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “A Semana,” Gazeta de Notícias, Feb-
ruary 14, 1897.
6. I follow here Denise Ferreira da Silva’s reading of the notion of homo
modernus as the nineteenth-century embodiment of a global/historical con-
sciousness that posits a post-Enlightenment version of the subject as the sole
self-determined thing. Silva reminds us that homo modernus is not abstract, but
is a white man, and that the elimination of its “others” is necessary for the re-

241
242 ❘ Notes to Introduction

alization of the subject’s exclusive ethical attribute; namely, self-determination.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2017), 171–251.
7. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “A Semana,” Gazeta de Notícias, Jan-
uary 31, 1897.
8. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connec-
tion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 74.
9. Jens Andermann, The Optic of the State: Visuality and Power in Argen-
tina and Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007), 1.
10. Luciana Martins, Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of
Modern Brazil (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013).
11. Natalia Brizuela, Fotografia e império (São Paulo: Companhia das Le-
tras, 2012).
12. Kevin Coleman, A Camera in the Garden of Eden: The Self-Forging of a
Banana Republic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016).
13. Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico
and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 37.
14. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. trans. John Weightman and Do-
reen Weightman (New York: Penguin, 2012).
15. I refer here to the anthropologist Christopher Pinney’s “Parallel Histories
of Photography and Anthropology,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–
1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London:
Royal Anthropological Institute, 1992).
16. Eduardo Cadava, Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Mauricio Lissovsky, Pausas
do destino: Teoria, arte e história da fotografia (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad Editora,
2014); Ulrich Baer, Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 2002).
17. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illumina-
tions, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), 263.
18. Ann Laura Stoler, Imperial Debris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2013); Gordillo, Rubble.
19. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 14.
20. Deborah Poole, Vision, Race and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the
Andean Image World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
21. Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories: Photographs, Anthropology and Mu-
seums (Oxford: Berg, 2001).
22. Roland Barthes, “The Third Meaning: Research Notes on Several Ei-
senstein Stills,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art,
and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 58.
23. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans.
Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
24. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1977), 84.
 Notes to Introduction ❘ 243

25. Rielle Navitski, Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and

Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017).
26. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2003), 18.
27. Joseph Anthony Amato and David Monge, Victims and Values: A His-
tory and a Theory of Suffering (New York: Greenwood, 1990); Ian Wilkinson,
Suffering: A Sociological Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005).
28. Luc Boltanski, Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
29. Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian
Sensibility, Part 1,” American Historical Review 90, no. 2 (1985): 339–61;
Thomas L. Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins of the Humanitarian Sensibil-
ity, Part 2,” American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (1985): 547–66.
30. Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarian-
ism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Robert M. Burroughs, Travel
Writing and Atrocities: Eyewitness Accounts of Colonialism in the Congo, An-
gola, and the Putumayo (New York: Routledge, 2011); Haskell, “Capitalism
and the Origins, Part 1,” and “Capitalism and the Origins, Part 2.”
31. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno, eds., Humanitarian Photogra-
phy: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Jane Lydon,
Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
32. Heather Curtis, “Picturing Pain: Evangelicals and the Politics of Picto-
rial Humanitarianism in an Imperial Age,” in Humanitarian Photography: A
History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015); Kevin Grant, “The Limits of Exposure: Atrocity Pho-
tographs in the Congo Reform Campaign,” in Humanitarian Photography: A
History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2015); Sharon Sliwinski, Human Rights in Camera (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012).
33. Thomas Laqueur, “Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the
Making of Humanity,” in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of
Empathy, ed. Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2009), 40.
34. Curtis, “Picturing Pain”; Grant, “The Limits of Exposure”; Christina L.
Twomey, “Framing Atrocity: Photography and Humanitarianism,” in Human-
itarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
35. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History,
Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989),
36. James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social Democracy and Progres-
sivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920 (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1986).
37. An important and pioneering contribution to the study of humanitarian
photography in diverse political and geographic contexts, Heide Fehrenbach
and Davide Rodogno’s edited volume Humanitarian Photography: A History
includes two valuable studies of early twentieth-century photographs of atroc-
244 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

ity in non-Western contexts: Peter Balakian’s article on amateur photographs

of the Armenian genocide and Caroline Reeves’s article on the development of
a humanitarian language of photography in China, which shift the focus away
from photographs made by a professionalized or international point of view.
See Balakian, “Photography, Visual Culture, and the Armenian Genocide,” and
Reeves, “Developing the Humanitarian Image in Late Nineteenth- and Early
Twentieth-Century China,” in Humanitarian Photography: A History, ed. Heide
Fehrenbach and Davide Rodogno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015).
38. Janaína Amado, “Região, sertão e nação,” Revista Estudos Históricos 8,
no. 15 (July 1995); Victoria Saramago, “Transatlantic Sertões: The Backlands
of Ruy Duarte de Carvalho and Mia Couto,” Ecozon@: European Journal of
Literature, Culture and Environment 8, no. 1 (April 2017).
39. I thank one of my anonymous reviewers for inviting me to discuss this
“leaky,” in their words, dimension of the book’s geography.
40. The expression appears in Casement’s notes about a talk he had with a
trader of Iquitos on August 24, 1910, National Library of Ireland, MS 13,087
(26/i).

C ha pter 1
1. The “Campanha de Canudos” (Canudos Campaign) was the name given
to the fourth and final expedition of the newly founded Brazilian Republic’s
military against the rural community of Belo Monte in the north of Bahia.
2. Euclides da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, trans. Elizabeth
Lowe and Ilan Stavans (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 464. I will refer
throughout to this book as Os sertões, but will quote from the English transla-
tion unless otherwise noted. Subsequent citations will be made parenthetically
in the text.
3. In her insightful approach to the photographs of Canudos, Natalia Brizu-
ela highlights the dialectics of visibility and invisibility of Canudos as part of the
Brazilian Republic’s spectacle of modernity and its spectral, photographic char-
acter. In one of the only scholarly works to offer an interpretation of Euclides
da Cunha’s reference to the photograph of Conselheiro’s body, Brizuela sees this
passage in Os sertões as a recognition of the insufficiency of words, and as a
deference to the image, the trace, as the sole testimony of the tragedy. In reading
this ekphrastic passage in relation to other photograph/text assemblages in the
book, I argue that da Cunha temporalizes Conselheiro’s image, trying to control
the meaning of this trace, including it in a narrative that argues that violence
through killing should be replaced by assimilation and modernization. Natalia
Brizuela, “‘Curiosity! Wonder!! Horror!!! Misery!!!!’ The Campanha de Canu-
dos, or the Photography of History,” Qui Parle 15, no. 2 (2005): 139–69.
4. An important reference in my approach to Os sertões as a text that ad-
dresses the question of the formation of Brazilian nation in a global/historical
context is Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Idea of Race. Ferreira da
Silva examines the role of the concept of the racial in the nineteenth century’s
double discursive fields of science and history, and in the production of the
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 245

idea of homo modernus as the universal self-determining subject. Ferreira da

Silva’s emphasis on how the racially instituted subjects that stood differentially
before universality, manufacturing both man and his (non-European) others, is
a productive way of understanding how the racial produces the spatial configu-
ration of the global. Even in the context of the nineteenth-century construction
of modern non-European nations, she argues that racial subjection cannot be
separated from global subjection. I am deeply indebted to this author’s analysis
of the role played by the concept of mestiçagem in producing a national subject
in Brazil premised on an obliteration (or engulfing) of otherness that allows for
the fashioning of a trajectory for the European subject in the tropics.
5. Based on testimonies, the historian José Calasans argues that Conselheiro
did not settle in the abandoned Canudos farm, on the right bank of Vaza-Barris
River, as was widely believed. Calasans argues that he settled in a relatively
privileged settlement on the left bank of the river, also known as Canudos. See
Calasans, Cartografia de Canudos (Salvador: Secretaria de Turismo, Conselho
Estadual de Cultura, EGBA, 1997), 188.
6. For an account of the diverse groups that migrated to Belo Monte in its
first years, see José Calasans’s “Canudos: Origem e desenvolvimento,” Revista
da Academia de Letras da Bahia 34 (January 1987): 73.
7. A republican government was established in Brazil after a little-resisted
military coup against the emperor Dom Pedro II on November 15, 1889—nearly
seven decades after most of Brazil’s Latin American neighbors had become re-
publics. As historians have shown, the period that followed was marked by
political instability and a series of struggles between different forces: politicians
who represented a new bourgeois class, the military, old landowners, and aris-
tocrats. A good historical overview of the social and political context of the
so-called Velha República (Old Republic) is Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822–
1930, edited by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
For a historical contextualization of Canudos, see Robert Levine’s Vale of Tears:
Revisiting the Canudos Massacre in Northeastern Brazil, 1893–1897 (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992).
8. While Robert Levine, Leslie Bethell, and other historians recognize the
importance of examining national and local political forces to understand the
violent actions of the Brazilian Republic, other historians remind us of the rel-
evance of the global context. By the end of the nineteenth century, similar re-
sistance communities in countries including the United States, Argentina, and
Mexico had also clashed with modern states in expansion. Mike Davis, Late
Victorian Holocaust: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
(London: Verso, 2012), for example, argues that violent repression was a com-
mon tactic in the processes of incorporation of peripheries into nation-states
and global chains of supply. Additionally, even at the local level, as Ralph della
Cava and Adriana Campos Johnson have pointed out, Canudos was not the
exceptional event that Brazilian twentieth-century historiography seems to
suggest, but rather one of many rebellions stemming from modernization and
the foundation of the republic. See Ralph della Cava, “Brazilian Messianism
and National Institutions: A Reappraisal of Canudos and Joaseiro,” Hispanic
American Historical Review 48, no. 3 (1968); and Adriana Campos Johnson,
246 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

Sentencing Canudos: Subalternity in the Backlands of Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA:

University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).
9. For an overview of press coverage of the Canudos Campaign, see Walnice
Nogueira Galvão’s No calor da hora: A Guerra de Canudos nos jornais, 4. ex-
pedição (São Paulo: Atica, 1974).
10. Raimundo Nina Rodrigues, “The Madness Epidemic of Canudos: Anto-
nio Conselheiro and the Jagunços (1897),” International Review of Psychiatry
29, no. 3 (2017): 208–15.
11. All in-text citations that have not been previously published in English
are translated by the author.
12. Souza, Marcelo Medeiros Coelho de. “O analfabetismo no brasil sob
enfoque demográfico.” Cadernos de Pesquisa, no. 107 (July 1999): 169–86.
https://doi.org/10.1590/S0100-15741999000200007.
13. Canudos crossed borders mainly thanks to Euclides da Cunha’s Os
sertões, becoming an important reference in Latin American culture and inter-
nationally, through the works of philosophers and political theorists such as Er-
nesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek, and Antonio Negri. In Spanish, it was popularized in
Mario Vargas Llosa’s novel La guerra del fin del mundo (The War of the End of
the World), which is in great part based on his reading of da Cunha’s Os sertões.
14. This was part of a series of three articles for the Rio de Janeiro news-
paper O Paíz, later published in the book Contrastes e confrontos, in which
da Cunha argued that only engineering could succeed in a crusade against the
harshness of the Brazilian environment. He accuses Brazil of alternating be-
tween two extreme (and equally harmful) attitudes toward the environment:
the first, leaving it to wither due to passive indifference, a victim of droughts
and infertile soils; and the second, ferociously exploiting its fertile regions and,
as a result, creating future deserts. In other regions, da Cunha writes, the tena-
cious work of scientists and engineers has shown that it is possible to modify
the earth and transfigure the climate. In contrast to Brazil’s alternating between
neglect and thoughtless exploitation, da Cunha praises the imperialist nations
that had transformed the regions they had occupied: “Indisputably, such pur-
pose is enough to ennoble modern invasions.” Euclides da Cunha, Contrastes e
confrontos, in Obras completas, ed. Afrânio Coutinho, vol. 1 (Rio de Janeiro:
Nova Aguilar, 1995), 43.
15. It has often been argued that Os sertões is simultaneously the work of a
poet and a scientist, a work at once symbolist and positivist. As Lilia Schwarcz
notes, the end of the nineteenth century in Brazil was marked by a “veiled dis-
pute between ‘men of science’ and ‘men of letters’” (The Spectacle of the Races:
Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil, 1870–1930 [New York:
Hill and Wang, 1999], 37). Ever since José Veríssimo’s critical piece “Campanha
de Canudos,” published in the newspaper Correio da Manhã on December 3,
1902, the book’s hybrid character and the relationships in it between its scien-
tific and literary dimensions have been the focus of ongoing debate. Da Cunha’s
contemporary Araripe Júnior, as well as Antônio Cândido later on, and more
recently Leopoldo Bernucci are among the authors who have read Os sertões as
a work at the border between science and literature and have tried to provide
an account of how these facets shape one another. Araripe Júnior, “Os sertões:
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 247

Campanha de Canudos,” Jornal do Commercio, March 6 and 18, 1903; Antô-

nio Cândido, Literatura e sociedade (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2006);
and Leopoldo Bernucci, A imitação dos sentidos: Prógonos, contemporâneos
e epígonos de Euclides da Cunha (São Paulo: EDUSP, 1995). The book’s dual
character is often described as a tension between a scientist who examines the
land and the people of the sertão and a poet who creates, imagines, and, without
being able to visualize and fix what he encounters, describes the sertão through
extremely metaphorical language and symbolic correspondences. Francisco
Foot-Hardman, Walnice Nogueira Galvão, and others have suggested that Os
sertões should be read instead in relation to its literary references. See Fran-
cisco Foot-Hardman, “Brutalidade antiga: Sobre história e ruína em Euclides,”
Estudos Avançados 10, no. 26 (January–April, 1996): 293–310; and Walnice
Nogueira Galvão, Euclidiana: Ensaios sobre Euclides da Cunha (São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2009). In his Terra ignota: A construção de “Os sertões”
(Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1997), Luiz Costa Lima analyzes Os
sertões as a text split into not two but three modes of expression: first, the scene
or center ruled by da Cunha’s scientific models and characterized by a mode
of “description”; second, the text’s ornamental and literary dimensions; and
finally, the text’s “subscene,” which is dominated by mimesis. This third mode
of expression is formed by what is not totally controlled by the author: “The
subscene is less a scene of a phantasmal order than a condensation in which the
ghostly acquires form” (Terra ignota, 172). This third dimension, Costa Lima
stresses, characterized by impasses, silences, and aporias, threatens the science
that rules the text. In this book, I do not aim to take part in this debate opposing
the literary and the scientific, the text and its outside, but to recast Os sertões
in terms of its engagement with the archival material on Canudos, in particular
Flávio de Barros’s photographs. It is this archival material itself that is at the
same time in and out of the narrative, woven into it but also on the verge of
freeing itself from it. Finally, I argue that this effort to control the archives of
Canudos is part of what Adriana Campos Johnson called the “prescriptive”
dimension of the text (Sentencing Canudos, 7)
16. Col Dantas Barreto, who in 1898 published one of the first accounts of
the conflict, re-creates the process of bringing the buried corpse to the surface
with suspense, noting that the grave was deep, and emphasizing the soldiers’
curiosity as they “were digging, digging, digging with caution when finally they
came across a man’s feet” and, how they continued to dig, with even more ea-
gerness, until the entire body came to light. Émidio Dantas Barreto, A última
expedição à Canudos (Porto Alegre: Editores Franco e Irmão, 1898), 235.
17. Euclides da Cunha quotes this from the report by the first column’s com-
mander. Da Cunha, Backlands: The Canudos Campaign, 476.
18. Machado de Assis is still considered one of the most important writers
in Brazilian literature. By the time his article about Canudos appeared he had
already published more than ten books, among them novels, plays, poetry, and
collections of short stories. In the Gazeta de Noticias, Machado published the
series “A Semana” (“The Week”), his longest and best-known contribution to
the press. “A Semana” consists of 247 texts published weekly from April 1892
to February 1897 and is the only series of such essays that Machado did not
248 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

sign using a pseudonym. Arguing that there should be more serious criticism
of Machado’s long-overlooked newspaper texts, critics such as John Gledson
and Massaud Moisés have noted that Machado not only dedicated years of his
life to writing them, but thought it worthwhile to republish six essays written
during this period in the collection Página recolhidas (1899). Among them is
“Canção de piratas,” Machado’s first text mentioning Canudos.
19. Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, “A Semana,” Gazeta de Notícias (Rio
de Janeiro), 1892–97.
20. See Tom Gunning, “In Your Face: Physiognomy, Photography, and the
Gnostic Mission of Early Film,” Modernism/Modernity 4, no. 1 (1997): 1–29,
25.
21. For a detailed study of Nina Rodrigues’s work, see Lilia Schwarcz, The
Spectacle of Races: Scientists, Institutions, and the Race Question in Brazil,
1870–1930 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).
22. For an overview of press coverage of the Canudos Campaign, see Gal-
vão’s No calor da hora.
23. Olavo Bilac, “Chronica,” Revista Kosmos 3, no. 10 (Rio de Janeiro),
October 1906.
24. As Robert Levine’s Vale of Tears has shown, the attack on Canudos was
ultimately the consequence of a larger, conflicted process of state intervention in
the rural interior, which clashed with the established power of local landlords
even as it reinforced traditional patterns of coerced labor and herd voting.
25. See Javier Uriarte’s “Through an Enemy Land: On Space and (In)Vis-
ibility in Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões,” in Revisiting 20th Century Wars:
New Readings of Modern Armed Conflicts in Literature and Image Media, ed.
Tom Burns, Élcio Cornelsen, Volker Jeckel, and Luiz Gustavo Vieira (Stuttgart:
ibidem-Verlag, 2012), for a discussion of nomadism and immobility, and the
struggle of the people of Belo Monte to freely occupy the space.
26. The community was described as outlaw and anti-capitalistic. An ac-
count of a pastoral mission sent to Canudos in May 1895 to bring Conselheiro
and his people under church control—the only extensive written eyewitness ac-
count of the settlement before the military expeditions—suggested that private
property did not exist in Canudos. The mission stayed there for one week and,
having failed to acquire any authority within the community, was then sus-
pended. Frei João Evangelista de Monte Marciano, Relatório apresentado pelo
Revd. Frei João Evangelista de Monte Marciano ao Arcebispado da Bahia sobre
Antônio Conselheiro e seu séquito no arraial dos Canudos (Bahía: Typographia
do “Correio de Notícias,” 1895; facsimile edition, with an introduction by José
Calasans, Salvador: Universidade Federal da Bahia, 1987). In another example,
a local landowner accused Canudos of being a threat to private property, and
ended a letter by exclaiming that Conselheiro’s doctrine was communism. This
would later fuel a series of positive historiographic representations of Canu-
dos, starting in the 1950s, which framed the emergence of the settlement as a
revolutionary attempt to found a communist utopia. The first of Machado de
Assis’s crônicas on Canudos, however, already offers a positive depiction of
the community as a negation of capitalist bourgeois society. In the crônica en-
titled “Canção de piratas” (“Pirate’s Song”), published in 1894, one year after
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 249

the foundation of the community and before the “War of Canudos,” Machado
compares the canudenses to the pirates described by the poets of 1830, who
criticized a life regimented by calendars, watches, and taxes, and who “shook
their sandals at the gates of civilization, and left in search of a free life.”
27. Roberto Ventura, “‘A nossa Vendéia’: O mito da Revolução Francesa e
a formação de identidade nacional-cultural no Brasil (1897–1902),” Revista de
Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 12, no. 24 (1986): 114.
28. This is important, as it raises questions as to what kind of knowledge
of conselheirismo was being produced, what voices had to be silenced in this
production, and who was given the right to speak. As Calasans's works on
Canudos have shown, some voices, ignored by the “lettered city” (Rama), have
survived and circulated—especially in rural areas—through oral history and
popular poems. See Jose Calasans, Canudos na literatura de cordel (São Paulo:
Atica, 1984). From the capital of the republic, Machado de Assis declared that
the public could only imagine what wonderful promises the preacher was mak-
ing. Based on oral and written accounts by people who lived in Canudos and the
surrounding areas, revisionist historiography after the 1960s has challenged this
construction of Canudos as an “extraordinary event” and has emphasized the
everyday life in the community. For a debate about this shift, see Dain Borges,
“Salvador’s 1890s: Paternalism and Its Discontents,” Luso-Brazilian Review 30,
no. 2 (1993), as well as Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos.
29. In Ressemblance par contact (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008), Georges
Didi-Huberman explores the technique of print (empreinte) in its varied forms
and reappearances throughout history—from prehistoric hand-prints on cave
walls to holy shrouds to Marcel Duchamp’s “Female Fig Leaf.”
30. The relationship between photography and death is one of the most en-
during themes in the history of photographic criticism. It has also been a pre-
occupation for those interested in photographic ontologies that focus on the
relationship between photography and time (Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes,
Siegfried Kracauer, Eduardo Cadava, Ulrich Baer). In brief, these ontologies ex-
plore the ways in which photography is a trace from the past, the presence of
an absence, and, ultimately, a figure for history itself. The relationship between
photography and death has also been a crucial element in histories of photog-
raphy interested in the medium’s connection to power relations in the context
of institutional practices and spaces (Alan Sekula, Thomas Keenan and Eyal
Weizman). These works highlight how photographs function analogously to
corpses in the objectification of bodies for medical, anthropometric, crimino-
logical, or forensic analyses.
31. This book would be written, according to Machado, by a writer named
Coelho Neto, who was then publishing a collection of short stories called
Sertão. Machado de Assis’s crônica comments on three contemporary “events”:
Canudos; Coelho Neto’s recently released book; and the centenary of the top
hat. The book that would “sentence Canudos to history,” in the words of Adri-
ana Campos Johnson, ended up being Euclides da Cunha’s Os sertões (1902).
There were, surely, other forms of transmission of the stories of Canudos not
mentioned by Machado de Assis. Canudos was present in flyers or cordel liter-
ature (see Calasans’s Canudos no literatura de cordel)—popular and inexpen-
250 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

sively printed booklets of stories-in-verse produced and sold at fairs and by

street vendors.
32. For studies of the last decades of the nineteenth century in Brazil in rela-
tion to the growth of a new bourgeoisie, financial capital, enthusiasm about new
technologies, and the consumption of international products, see Lilia Moritz
Schwarcz and Angela Marques da Costa, 1890–1914: No tempo das certezas
(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000); Jeffrey D. Needell, A Tropical Belle
Epoque: Elite Culture and Society in Turn-of-the-Century Rio de Janeiro (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Nicolau Sevcenko, Literatura
como missão: Tensões sociais e criação cultural na Primeira República (São
Paulo: Brasiliense, 1983).
33. For more examples, see Galvão’s No calor da hora.
34. As I argue in my article “Spectacle and Rebellion in Fin de Siècle Brazil:
The Commodified Rebel in Machado de Assis’s Chronicles,” Machado’s use
of the top hat and the cabeleira highlights the contradictions of a liberal bour-
geoisie culture in the context of a society shaped by an only-recently abolished
system of slavery (Journal of Lusophone Studies 3, no. 2 [Fall 2018], https://doi
.org/10.21471/jls.v3i2.174). As Jeffrey D. Needell has mentioned, aristocratic
values, anxiety about social status, and an expanding urban market combined
to explain the centrality of fashion in bourgeois culture in fin-de-siècle Brazil
(Needell, A Tropical Belle Epoque, 156–71). The top hat, a sign of both bour-
geois consumerism and of Europeanized aristocratic distinction, seems to have
embodied an apparently contradictory aristocratic urge to distinction through
fashion: knowing how to choose a hat was, as Machado discusses in other texts,
a question of distinguishing oneself not only from the poor, but also from a
tropical petite bourgeoisie that lacked “good taste.” Conselheiro’s cabeleira, in
contrast, works as a reminder of a colonial past that must be overcome.
35. Alan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 3–64.
36. This was not a new theme for Machado. In his novella O alienista,
for example, published in 1882, he tells the story of a renowned doctor who
searches for a positivist way to distinguish the lunatics from the sane. Once the
doctor realizes that he has put his whole town in the asylum, he concludes that
he himself must be the abnormal one. Hence, he releases all the “lunatics” and
locks himself up. The central issue of O alienista is the flimsy scientific pretense
that draws lines between the normal and pathological, and the use of psychiat-
ric discourse in the governance of bodies and peoples.
37. As Joaquim Marçal Ferreira de Andrade has shown in História da fo-
torreportagem no Brasil: A fotografia na imprensa do Rio de Janeiro de 1839
a 1900 (Rio de Janeiro: Elsevier, 2004), a detailed history of the nineteenth-
century antecedents of photojournalism in Brazil, there were some exceptions,
which included woodcut or lithographic portraits printed in loose pages,
separate from the text itself. However, although there were some attempts to
implement the use of woodcuts in the press—which, unlike lithography, had
the advantage of being compatible with typography—these were soon aban-
doned due to the lack of expertise in producing woodcuts, which had to be
imported from Europe. A Revista da Semana—fotografias, vistas instantâneas,
desenhos e caricaturas, founded in 1900, was the first illustrated magazine to
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 251

regularly use the halftone process (Andrade, História da fotorreportagem no

Brasil, 240).
38. Juan Gutierrez was a Spanish photographer. In 1880 he was already
working in Rio de Janeiro and soon became one of the most recognized por-
traitists and landscape photographers in the capital. In the 1890s he became the
only Brazilian representative to the prestigious Societé Française de Photogra-
phie. See Boris Kossoy, Dicionário histórico-fotográfico brasileiro: Fotógrafos e
ofício da fotografia no Brasil, 1833–1910 (São Paulo: Instituto Moreira Salles,
2002).
39. Joaquim Marçal Ferreira de Andrade, “A fotografia de guerra e o episó-
dio de Canudos ou a documentação como alvo,” in Instituto Moreira Salles,
Cadernos de fotografia brasileira: Canudos (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira
Salles, 2002), 256–57.
40. See, for instance, Cícero Antônio F. de Almeida, Canudos: Imagens da
guerra (Rio de Janeiro: Museu da República/Lacerda Editores, 1997), 25; and
Kossoy, Dicionário histórico-fotográfico, 74–75. Elsewhere, Almeida mentions
a text by the photographer and researcher Claude Santos, in which he affirms
that Barros also worked as a portrait painter. The only reference to this article
is on a website that is no longer available, and I did not find any historical
reference to prove this assertion. See Cícero Antônio F. de Almeida, “O sertão
pacificado: O papel da fotografia na Guerra de Canudos” (MA diss., Universi-
dade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 1999), 273.
41. Quoted in Cícero Antônio F. de Almeida, “O álbum fotográfico de Flávio
de Barros: Memória e representação da guerra de Canudos,” História, Ciências,
Saúde-Manguinhos, vol. 5 (1998), 284.
42. Brizuela, “‘Curiosity! Wonder!! Horror!!! Misery!!!!’” 151.
43. Kodak’s flexible negative films became available in 1888, but the di-
mensions of Barros’s photographs suggest the use of conventional dry plates
measuring 18 × 24 cm and 12 × 18 cm (Almeida, “O sertão pacificado,” 278).
44. Almeida, “O sertão pacificado,” 278–79
45. These two albums are stored at the Museu da República in Rio de Ja-
neiro, along with three platinum prints of Canudos whose authorship is con-
tested (Almeida points out that they may have been taken by Juan Gutierrez,
the photographer who died on the battlefield). There is also an album located
at the Instituto Geográfico e Histórico da Bahia in Salvador, containing 68 pho-
tos, and another at the Casa de Cultura Euclides da Cunha in São José do Rio
Pardo, São Paulo, with 23 images. All of the images in the two last albums
are present in the Museu da República’s album, except one. Hence, the total
number of known photographs taken by Barros at Canudos is 70. These were
all restored and reproduced in Instituto Moreira Salles, Cadernos de fotografia
brasileira: Canudos.
46. See, for example, the discussions of American Civil War photographs in
Timothy Sweet, Traces of War: Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Trachtenberg,
Reading American Photographs.
47. See, for example, reporters Favila Nunes’s and Manuel Benício’s dis-
patches reproduced in Galvão, No calor da hora. Such negative aspects are
252 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

omitted or disguised in Euclides da Cunha’s news reporting. Almeida (“O álbum

fotográfico”), author of the first book reproducing Flávio de Barros’s albums,
was one of the first to counterpose the critical comments about the Canudos
Campaign in the news with the positive images made by Flávio de Barros.
48. Ana Maria Mauad, “‘O olho da história’: Análise da imagem fotográfica
na construção de uma memória sobre o conflito de Canudos,” Acervo: Revista
do Arquivo Nacional 6, no. 1–2 (December 1993): 25–40; Almeida, Canudos:
Imagens da guerra; Almeida, “O álbum fotográfico”; Almeida, “O sertão pacifi-
cado”; and Andermann, Optic of the State.
49. In Andermann, Optic of the State, 196–202.
50. See Berthold Zilly, “Flávio de Barros, o ilustre cronista anônimo da
guerra de Canudos: As fotografias que Euclides da Cunha gostaria de ter tirado,”
História, Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos, vol. 5 (1998), https://doi.org/10.1590/
S0104–59701998000400018. Andermann argues that this out-of-frame makes
its way into the frame through indexical excesses. An example of that is the way
in which this supplemental violence appears in the staged scene of the wounded
jagunça by recording the presence of men in the back rows trying to make their
way into the image and take a look at her. Instead of an image of care, this turns
the jagunça into a “trophy,” at the same time that “the second place of the image
also undercuts its claims of orderliness and control.” Andermann, Optic of the
State, 198.
51. Campos Johnson, Sentencing Canudos, 164–65.
52. I use the term conselheiristas to refer to those who fought to hold Belo
Monte against the Brazilian army. Jagunços, a regional term that already existed
to refer to ruffians or armed bodyguards who did the dirty work for the land-
owners in the sertões, was largely popularized during the Canudos Campaign
as a way to criminalize the Belo Monte dwellers. A sertanejo refers to a person
from the sertão.
53. The children of Canudos are used as evidence of the good heart of mili-
tary men, for example, in Émidio Dantas Barreto’s A última expedição à Canu-
dos (Porto Alegre: Editores Franco e Irmão, 1898), 239–40.
54. See, for example, da Cunha’s letter to the orphan, named Ludgero
Prestes, on October 7, 1908. Euclides da Cunha, Correspondência de Euclides
da Cunha, ed. Walnice Nogueira Galvão and Oswaldo Galotti (São Paulo: Edi-
tora da Universidade de São Paulo, 1997), 380.
55. In his account of the last day of the Canudos Campaign, Col Dantas
Barreto describes the importance of this moment, when soldiers “impatiently”
made themselves into the “ruínas fanáticas” [fanatic ruins] to scrutinize every
corner and “all that was mysterious about them.” Émidio Dantas Barreto, A
última expedição à Canudos (Porto Alegre: Editores Franco e Irmão, 1898),
229–30.
56. W. J. T. Mitchell, Landscape and Power (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002), 38.
57. Sweet, Traces of War, 124.
58. In using the term “ruin gazing,” I follow Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle’s
assertion about the relationship between ruins and modernity in Ruins of Mo-
dernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). In secular modernities, the
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 253

centrality of the experience of an insuperable break from the past allows ruins
to become objects of contemplation as both signs of that break and traces from
the past which should be cherished (Hell and Schönle, eds. Ruins of Modernity,
5).
59. See José Calasans’s “Canudos: Origem e desenvolvimento,” Revista da
Academia de Letras da Bahia 34 (January 1987), 4.
60. Stoler, Imperial Debris, ix.
61. Almeida, “O sertão pacificado,” 285.
62. Rielle Navitski, Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and
Journalism in Early Twentieth-Century Mexico and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2017).
63. Brizuela, “‘Curiosity! Wonder!! Horror!!! Misery!!!!’” 145–46.
64. The massacre was vehemently criticized by the monarchist Afonso Arinos
right after the end of the conflict in the newspaper O Comércio de São Paulo,
which also published a report written by journalist Lélis Piedade decrying the
abuses committed against women and children. In 1898, three books were pub-
lished on the campaign: Os jagunços (1898), by Afonso Arinos (Brasilia: Phi-
lobiblion, 1985); Última expedição de Canudos (Porto Alegre: Editores Franco
& Irmão, 1898), by the future minister of war and Pernambuco governor Emí-
dio Dantas Barreto; and A quarta expedição contra Canudos (Pará: Tipografia
Pinto Barbosa & Cia., 1898), by Major Antônio Constantino Neri. In the same
year, Guerra de Canudos was published in installments by the journalist Favila
Nunes. Three books published in 1899 also criticized the army: Descrição de
uma viagem a Canudos (Bahia: Lito-Tipografia Tourinho, 1899) by Alvim Mar-
tins Horcades, a medical student who had worked as a volunteer during the
conflict; Líbelo republicano acompanhado de comentário sobre a Campanha
de Canudos (Bahia: Tipografia e Encadernação do “Diário da Bahia,” 1899) by
César Zama; and the novel O rei dos jagunços (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2003) by
Manuel Benício.
65. Roberto Ventura, Os sertões, Folha Explica, vol. 51 (São Paulo: Publi-
Folha, 2002), 10–11.
66. Os sertões was Euclides da Cunha’s first work and earned him a nomi-
nation for a seat in the Brazilian Academy of Letters, which had been founded
in December 1896.
67. Euclides da Cunha, “Academia Brasileira de Letras: Discurso de recep-
ção,” in Obras completas, vol. 1: 114.
68. Lorraine Daston and Peter Gallison, Objectivity (New York: Zone
Books, 2010).
69. Hyppolite Taine, De l’intelligence, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1870). In
Taine’s epistemology, perceptual error, delusions, and false memories are intrin-
sic to knowledge, and the only way to get closer to truth is by reconciling mental
images, “rêve du dedans,” with external objects.
70. See Zakir Paul, “Gathering Intelligence from Taine to Bergson,” L’Esprit
Créateur 56, no. 4 (Winter 2016): 149.
71. Scholars have more consistently pointed out Taine’s influence on da
Cunha in the partitioning of Os sertões into three sections—“The Land,”
“Man,” “The Battle”—which bear a strong similarity to Taine’s theory that a
254 ❘ Notes to Chapter 1

historical approach should consider its subject within its hereditary, sociolog-
ical, and historical conditions—“race, milieu, moment”—than in the way da
Cunha builds the book’s narrator.
72. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
73. In his study of the conditions that supposedly explain Canudos as a
manifestation of primitivism, da Cunha relies not only on Taine but on a series
of authors, from the English anthropologist Herbert Spencer to the Brazilian
medical anthropologist Raimundo Nina Rodrigues.
74. A reassessment of da Cunha’s text that examines his construction of a
narrator for whom truth only emerges in a tuning of internal images by the
sensorial, the back-and-forth between synthetic abstraction and empirical ob-
servation, complicates the dual emphasis that critics have placed on the power
of science and vision in the book. I refer here, first, to the assumption that the
role of vision in Os sertões reflects the author’s intention to establish complete
domain over the reality being analyzed. The second diagnosis, which appears in
late twentieth-century readings of Os sertões, switches the focus to the aporias
and limits of the author’s scientific project, suggesting that da Cunha’s text es-
capes the hegemony of scientific discourse when the reality he describes seems
to overwhelm or resist his gaze or his reasoning, appearing through words like
mirages or illusions. See, for example, Costa Lima, Terra ignota; and Roberto
González Echevarría, Myth and Archive: A Theory of Latin American Narra-
tive (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chapter 3. More recently,
Campos Johnson provided an insightful critique of this model of reading Os
sertões that focuses on the impasses, aporias, and limits of da Cunha’s scien-
tific project, and concludes that these features end up redeeming the text: “He
now sees because, either consciously or unconsciously, he is confronted with the
problem of not seeing” (Sentencing Canudos, 17). What interests me is not just
a question of visibility versus invisibility, as if the visible were always on the
side of objectivity, but how photographers and writers in this period engaged in
disputed conceptualizations of the relationship between vision and knowledge,
and, more specifically, ethical knowledge.
75. Regina Abreu, O enigma de “Os sertões” (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte/
Rocco, 1998).
76. Euclides da Cunha, “Olhemos para nossa terra,” O País (Rio de Janeiro),
May 14, 1904.
77. For more on the strands of evolutionary thought in the late nineteenth
century, see Nancy Stepan’s The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Na-
tion in Latin America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Lilia
Schwarcz’s The Spectacle of Races.
78. Euclides da Cunha, À margem da história (Porto, Port.: Chardron, 1909;
reprint, São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1975); Euclide da Cunha, The Amazon:
Land without History, trans. Ronald Sousa (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006).
79. Da Cunha, “Olhemos para nossa terra,” 36.
80. Costa Lima, Terra ignota, 24–35.
81. I use “newspapers” as a substitute for Elizabeth Lowe’s term “journal”
in Backlands.
 Notes to Chapter 1 ❘ 255

82. Euclides da Cunha cites in particular Scipio Singhele, the Italian author
of The Criminal Crowd (La follà criminale).
83. Euclides da Cunha, Caderneta de campo, ed. Olímpio de Souza Andrade
(Rio de Janeiro: Cadernos da Biblioteca Nacional, 2009).
84. Leopoldo Bernucci, “Pressupostos historiográficos para uma leitura de
Os sertões,” Revista USP 54 (June–August 2002): 15.
85. Among all these different documents, one might assume that photo-
graphs would provide the privileged access to facts desired by a nineteenth-
century writer with positivist aspirations. After all, technical images have an
indexical, chemical-optical quality that supposedly allows for “mechanical ob-
jectivity,” that is, “the insistent drive to repress the willful intervention of the
artist-author” (Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 121). Photographers and pho-
tographic institutions at the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth
century incessantly claimed that their practice served the work of the historian.
Multiple library sections and archives worldwide were dedicated exclusively to
the preservation and organization of photographs. Photographic sections were
created, for example, for recording state and military events. And yet, as differ-
ent scholars have noticed, few attempts at studying history through photographs
were made until the last decades of the twentieth century. See Ilsen About and
Clément Chéroux, “L’histoire par la photographie,” Études Photographiques
10 (November 2001): 8–33; Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images
as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); and Boris
Kossoy and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Um olhar sobre o Brasil: A fotografia na
construção da imagem da nação, 1833–2003 (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2012).
86. See chapter 4 of Campos Johnson’s Sentencing Canudos for an insightful
discussion of the difference between the jagunço and the sertanejo in da Cunha’s
work.
87. Sontag, On Photography, 83.
88. Da Cunha, Correspondência de Euclides da Cunha, 133.
89. I borrow here Jose Barreto Bastos’s title on the symbolic war against
Canudos: Incompreensível e bárbaro inimigo: A guerra simbólica contra Canu-
dos (Salvador: Editora da Universidade Federal da Bahia, 1995).
90. For a discussion of da Cunha’s readings of the manuscripts found in
the ruins of Canudos, see Roberto Ventura’s “Canudos como cidade iletrada:
Euclides da Cunha na urbs monstruosa,” Revista de Antropologia 40, no. 1
(1997): 165–81.
91. The passage is not translated in the English version of Backlands. The
translation is mine.
92. In a poem written in 1905, titled “Dedicatória,” da Cunha uses a photo-
graphic vocabulary to talk about the desire to bring together depth and surface,
and inscribe the soul on the skin of a photographic plate (Obras completas,
vol. 1: 508).
93. Rachel Price’s The Object of the Atlantic: Concrete Aesthetics in Cuba,
Brazil, and Spain, 1868–1968 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
2014) locates Os sertões and other turn-of-the-century histories in the geneal-
ogy of the concrete as part of a shift “toward privileging inscription” instead of
a lyric interior.
256 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

94. The English translation chooses “moat” to translate vala.

95. Walnice Nogueira Galvão calls attention to the recurrence of death im-
ages throughout Os sertões, and suggests that the first two parts of the book, in
which the author explores, respectively, the climatic and geologic aspects of the
region and the anthropological formation of its inhabitants, serve as a kind of
prologue to the third part, in which he narrates the combat between the jagun-
ços and the army. Galvão’s argument is that da Cunha inscribes the conflict into
nature, dramatizing it. See Galvão, Euclidiana, 38–39.
96. These different sections have received titles in modern editions of Os
sertões in both Portuguese and English. Following the 1902 and 1905 editions,
I do not use titles here.
97. In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell suggests that ekphrasis—the verbal
representation of visual representation—puts into play a dynamic that is not
only aesthetic but also social. It involves the hope of overcoming the borders
between the text and its other, as well as the fear of not being able to do so.
Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1994).
98. Costa Lima, Terra ignota; Raul Antelo, “Series e sertões: A questão da
heterogeneidade,” Outra Travessia, vol. 2 (2004): 13–21.
99. Da Cunha, Contrastes e confrontos, vol. 1: 43.
100. Da Cunha, Contrastes e confrontos, vol. 1: 37.
101. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 168.
102. This connection between Canudos and contemporary favelas is not
new. First, there is a historical reason: one of the versions of the history of the
emergence of the first slum in Rio begins with the soldiers’ return from the
Canudos battlefield. Without money or support from the state, they occupied
a hill in the city center of Rio de Janeiro called Favela. Beyond this historical
anecdote, Canudos has also reemerged at the center of struggles for the recog-
nition of vernacular architecture and communitarian ways of life in informal
communities.

C ha pter 2
This chapter is derived from an article published in the Journal of Latin Ameri-
can Cultural Studies, 2021, copyright © Taylor and Francis, available online at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569325.2020.1805589.
1. For a discussion of the interrelated processes of consolidation of national
borders and global capitalist colonialism in the Amazon, see Susanna B. Hecht,
The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
2. For historical accounts of the rubber boom, see Barbara Weinstein, The
Amazonian Rubber Boom 1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1983); Michael Edward Stanfield, Red Rubber, Bleeding Trees: Violence, Slav-
ery, and Empire in Northwest Amazonia, 1850–1933 (Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press, 1998); Richard Collier, The River That God Forgot: The
Story of the Amazon Rubber Boom (New York: Dutton, 1968); and Hecht, The
Scramble for the Amazon.
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 257

3. In using the term “humanitarian,” I follow authors who consider that,

although the history of humanitarianism dates back to the emergence of moral
sentiments in philosophical reflection from the eighteenth century onward—
connected to shifting notions of pain (Amato and Monge), the rise of senti-
mental literature, and the spread of capitalist markets (Haskell)—it was in
the nineteenth century, with the antislavery and missionary movements, that
humanitarianism became prominent among cosmopolitan publics in Western
capitals, nations, and empires. Joseph Anthony Amato and David Monge, Vic-
tims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering (New York: Greenwood,
1990). See also Michael N. Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Hu-
manitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Burroughs, Travel
Writing and Atrocities; and Haskell, “Capitalism and the Origins, Part 1,” and
“Capitalism and the Origins, Part 2.” The term “humanitarian” was used for the
first time in 1844 in England. Although Casement’s task and position as British
consul was not officially humanitarian, he worked directly in connection with
the Anti-Slavery Society and with E. D. Morel, who “served as a center of calcu-
lation, receiving and redistributing firsthand testimonies through humanitarian
networks” (Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 9). Moreover, Casement
saw the mobilization of public opinion as a crucial aspect in the success of the
Putumayo case (i.e., in any chance of reforms to ameliorate the living conditions
of the Indigenous populations)—and had even worked personally as an advo-
cate and fundraiser for a missionary expedition to be sent to the region.
4. The expression appears in Casement’s notes about a conversation he had
with a trader from Iquitos on August 26, 1910. See “Notes written by Roger
Casement titled ‘Notes of talk with Mr Victor Israel’ concerning the Putu-
mayo and Amazon River region in regard to the treatment of South Ameri-
can Indians, 1910 Aug. 26,” National Library of Ireland (hereafter NLI), MS
13,087/26i/1, 1.
5. I thank Erna von der Walde for directing me to this source. Sydney Pater-
noster, “The Devil’s Paradise: A British Owned Congo,” Truth (September 22,
1909): 663–66.
6. For a history of the company, see Roberto Pineda Camacho, Holocausto
en el Amazonas: Una historia social de la Casa Arana (Bogotá: Espasa, 2000).
7. Roger Casement, The Amazon Journal of Roger Casement, ed. Angus
Mitchell (London: Anaconda Editions, 1997), 163.
8. For a study of textual and visual sources about the Barbadians employed
by the Peruvian Amazon Company, see Gabriel Cabrera Becerra, “La presencia
antillana en la Amazonia: Los negros barbadenses en la explotación del caucho
y sus imágenes,” Memorias: Revista Digital de Arqueología e Historia desde el
Caribe 14, no. 36 (2018).
9. See Charlotte Rodgers, Jungle Fever: Exploring Madness and Medicine in
Twentieth-Century Tropical Narratives (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University
Press, 2012).
10. For a discussion of the constitution of the Amazon as a “space of death,”
see Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man: A Study in
Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). In his book,
Taussig relies on Casement’s Blue Book to examine the Irishman’s effort to me-
258 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

diate terror through an “objectivist fiction.” Taussig did not focus on The Ama-
zon Journal, which, I argue, complicates such a claim.
11. Roger Casement, “Correspondence respecting the Treatment of British
Colonial Subjects and Native Indians Employed in the Collection of Rubber in
the Putumayo District,” House of Commons Sessional Papers, vol. 68 (February
14, 1912–March 7, 1913), also known as the Blue Book.
12. The Black Diaries were partially published by Roger Sawyer. See Roger
Casement, Roger Casement’s Diaries: 1910: The Black and the White, ed. Roger
Sawyer (London: Random House, 1997).
13. Quoted in Angus Mitchell, “The Diaries Controversy,” in Casement, The
Amazon Journal, 36.
14. See Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities; Angus Mitchell, “Histo-
ries of ‘Red Rubber’ Revisited: Roger Casement’s Critique of Empire,” ABEI
Journal 18 (2016); Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man; Roger
Casement, Sir Roger Casement’s Heart of Darkness: The 1911 Documents,
ed. Angus Mitchell (Dublin: Irish Manuscripts Commission, 2003); Margaret
O’Callaghan, “‘With the Eyes of Another Race, of a People Once Hunted Them-
selves’: Casement, Colonialism and a Remembered Past,” in Roger Casement
in Irish and World History, ed. Mary E. Daly (Dublin: Royal Irish Academy,
2005).
15. See Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice Girodias, “Introduction,” in The
Black Diaries: An Account of Roger Casement’s Life and Times with a Collec-
tion of His Diaries and Public Writings, ed. Peter Singleton-Gates and Maurice
Girodias (New York: Grove, 1959), 15–35; Michael G. Cronin, “Pain, Plea-
sure, and Revolution: The Body in Roger Casement’s Writings,” in The Body in
Pain in Irish Literature and Culture, ed. Fionnuala Dillane, Naomi McAreavey,
and Emilie Pine (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); David Squires, “Roger
Casement’s Queer Archive,” PMLA 132, no. 3 (2017); and Javier Uriarte,
“‘Splendid testemunhos’: Documenting Atrocities, Bodies, and Desire in Roger
Casement’s Black Diaries,” in Intimate Frontiers: A Literary Geography of the
Amazon, ed. Felipe Martínez Pinzón and Javier Uriarte (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2019).
16. In “Splendid testemunhos,” Javier Uriarte treats the Black Diaries not as
a separate document, but in the context of the Putumayo investigation. Even
though he discusses the relationship between photographing and sexual de-
sire in Casement’s diaries, in his article Uriarte does not analyze photographs
themselves.
17. Many of the issues raised by John Beverly in his analysis of Latin Amer-
ican testimonial literature (a genre born in the 1960s, but whose precursors
can be traced back to abolitionist and humanitarian texts from the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries) apply to Casement’s use of the testimonies of
the Barbadian men. Although not in the context of a gesture “against litera-
ture,” the affirmation of their truth value is based on the sincere intentions of
the narrators despite (or because of) their simplicity, and authenticity can be
seen in a supposedly direct transcription (without mediation) of the witnesses’
speech. Casement repeatedly emphasizes the sincere intentions of the simple
Barbadians, their urge to speak as the cause of the testimony, and his efforts
to transcribe their exact words. At the same time, the same criticism made of
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 259

the “unmediated” character of the testimonials of the 1960s can be applied to

Casement’s: he is the coauthor of the testimonies that he not only wrote down
himself, but conducted, through questions and even pressure on those who
he thought were not speaking the truth. See John Beverley, Against Literature
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
18. Kevin Coleman, “The Photos We Don’t Get to See: Sovereignties, Ar-
chives, and the 1928 Massacre of Banana Workers in Colombia,” in Making the
Empire Work: Labor and United States Imperialism, ed. Daniel E. Bender and
Jana K. Lipman (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 119.
19. Secrecy and obliteration have also been widely thematized in the de-
bates about Auschwitz. See, for example, Georges Didi-Huberman’s Images in
Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, trans. Shane B. Lillis (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2012); and Walter Laqueur, The Terrible Secret:
Suppression of the Truth about Hitler’s “Final Solution” (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicholson, 1980).
20. See Thomas Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narra-
tive,” in The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1989); Boltanski, Distant Suffering; and Christina Twomey,
“Severed Hands: Authenticating Atrocity in the Congo,” in Photography and
Atrocity, ed. Geoff Batchen, Mick Gidley, Jay Prosser, and Nancy Miller (Lon-
don: Reaktion Books, 2012), 39–50.
21. Scarry, The Body in Pain. For more on the representation of wounded
bodies in humanitarian narratives, see Laqueur, who argues that such narratives
have focused on details of victims’ individual bodies as both “signs of truth”
and “as the object of the scientific discourse.” Laqueur, “Bodies, Details, and the
Humanitarian Narrative,” 177.
22. See Jordan Goodman, The Devil and Mr. Casement: One Man’s Battle
for Human Rights in South America’s Heart of Darkness (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2010); and Goodman, “Mr Casement Goes to Washing-
ton: The Politics of the Putumayo Photographs,” ABEI Journal 12 (November
2010).
23. Quoted in Goodman, “Mr Casement Goes to Washington,” 28.
24. The trajectory of this photograph was first brought up by Goodman in
The Devil and Mr. Casement.
25. The Colombian anthropologist Juan Álvaro Echeverri attempts to fill in
the void of Indigenous voices by addressing the memory of the Putumayo atroc-
ities from the point of view of the Muinane Indigenous group in “To Heal or to
Remember: Indian Memory of the Rubber Boom and Roger Casement’s ‘Basket
of Life,’” ABEI Journal 12 (November 2010).
26. Didier Fassin and Estelle d’Halluin, “The Truth from the Body: Medical
Certificates as Ultimate Evidence for Asylum Seekers,” American Anthropolo-
gist 107, no. 4 (2005): 598.
27. It has often been remarked that the nineteenth-century belief in photog-
raphy’s capacity to testify to a presence is related to the fact that photography
results from the inscription of the light that emanates from the forms in front
of the camera, which later, drawing on Peirce’s theory of the sign, was called the
“indexical” characteristics of the image. Charles Peirce, Selected Writings (New
York: Dover, 1958).
260 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

28. For a historical account of the relationship between the invention of

photographic techniques and the modern desire to eliminate the mediation of
language from the process of representation, as well as the contingencies and
specificities of vision, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990).
29. The photographic collection sent to Washington was first uncovered by
historian Jordan Goodman at the National Archives in Washington, DC. See
Goodman, “Mr Casement Goes to Washington.”
30. Roger Casement, “Photographs of Putumayo Indians,” January 26, 1912,
US National Archives, Record Group 59: General Records of the Department
of State 1910–29 Central Decimal File. File: 823.5048/30. Because there is a
page missing from the original document provided to me by the US National
Archives (closed for in-person consultation during the COVID-19 pandemic), I
am relying on Jordan Goodman’s transcription of the very last part of the quote
in “Mr Casement Goes to Washington,” 41.
31. Roger Casement, letter to Gertrude Bannister, October 9, 1906, NLI, MS
13,074/3ii/11.
32. Roger Casement, letter to Edward Grey, March 4, 1907, NLI, MS
13,081/2i/2.
33. Roger Casement, letter to E. D. Morel, March 18, 1908, in Roger Case-
ment in Brazil: Rubber, the Amazon and the Atlantic World, 1884–1916, ed.
Angus Mitchell and Laura P. Z. Izarra (São Paulo: Humanitas, 2010), 65.
34. Quoted in Séamas Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement: Imperialist, Rebel, Rev-
olutionary (Dublin: Lilliput, 2008), 250.
35. Quoted in Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement, 253. Another critique of the
system of rubber extraction in Brazil, which described the debt peonage system,
had been published by Euclides da Cunha in the magazine Kosmos in 1906:
“Entre os seringais,” Kosmos 3, no. 1 (January 1906). Both travelers noted the
striking contrast between the technologically advanced, highly capitalized rub-
ber goods industry on the one hand, and the primitive Amazonian system of
rubber extraction and the colonial-like modes of exploitation of the workforce
on the other.
36. For a lengthier discussion of Casement’s criticism of the Brazilian rubber
economy, see Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement.
37. Benjamin Saldaña Rocca was the first to accuse Julio César Arana and his
rubber-gathering regime through his two newspapers, La Felpa and La Sanción.
In 1908 Saldaña Rocca was forced to leave Iquitos and went to live in Lima,
where he died destitute in 1912.
38. According to Robert Burroughs’s historical analysis of British human-
itarian campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Casement’s
Putumayo report represented a move from a style of travel writing on atrocity
that focused on the subjectivity of the traveler, based on the “confession of
‘darkest’ secrets and ‘inner savagery,’” to a more legalistic language. Burroughs,
Travel Writing and Atrocities, 47.
39. See Burroughs, Travel Writing and Atrocities, 70.
40. I don’t intend to contribute to the debate over Casement’s biography in
this book, but it is important to take into consideration his growing involve-
 Notes to Chapter 2 ❘ 261

ment with the Irish nationalist movement when analyzing the different docu-
ments Casement produced during his Putumayo trip. Although, as Margaret
O’Callaghan (“With the Eyes of Another Race”) has shown, Casement had
expressed his Irish nationalism in his early writings and poems, during the pe-
riod after his return from the Congo, he strengthened his relationships with the
nationalist movement. During the years spent in Ireland before he assumed his
consular position in Brazil, he made connections with prominent Irish national-
ist intellectuals and published his first articles critical of British rule in Ireland.
Nor do I aim to add to the debates on Casement’s subjectivity or personality.
Instead, I claim here that in the Putumayo expedition, Casement had to deal
with the contradictions of being both a British consular officer (thus represent-
ing British interests) and an Irishman and humanitarian.
41. Margaret Rich Greer, Walter Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan, Reread-
ing the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the
Renaissance Empires (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
42. Didi-Huberman, Images in Spite of All, 6.
43. John Dewey, quoted in James Kloppenberg, Uncertain Victory: Social
Democracy and Progressivism in European and American Thought, 1870–1920
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 100.
44. Through an analysis of Hines’s pedagogical strategies, Alan Trachtenberg
concludes that the non-interventionist creed that underlined the “documental”
in the 1930s does not fit entirely with the photographic aesthetic developed
by Hine. In this sense, my work is deeply indebted to Trachtenberg’s. See Alan
Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew
Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 192.
45. Roger Casement, letter to Alice Stopford Green, April 20, 1907, NLI MS
10464 /3/1. Alice Stopford Green was an Irish scholar who participated in the
foundation of the Africa Society in 1901 and was a founding member of the
School of Irish Studies in 1903. She became one of Casement’s closest friends.
46. For a historical account of travel writing in the Putumayo, see Lesley
Wylie, Colombia’s Forgotten Frontier: A Literary Geography of the Putumayo
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
47. Rafael Reyes, The Two Americas, trans. Leopold Grahame (London:
Werner Laurie, 1913). Mary Louise Pratt named this traveler who saw nature
as raw material—and Indigenous people as laborers—the “capitalist vanguard.”
Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge,
1992), 141–68.
48. Letter written by Julio César Arana, archived and annotated by Case-
ment, London, December 28, 1909, NLI, MS13,087/3.
49. Hardenburg’s book was named after the article by Paternoster published
in Truth magazine in 1909. Walter E. Hardenburg, The Putumayo: The Devil’s
Paradise: Travels in the Peruvian Amazon Region and an Account of the Atroc-
ities Committed upon the Indians Therein, ed. Reginald Enock (London: T. F.
Unwin, 1912).
50. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 36–38.
51. For a thorough discussion of the war of images spurred by the Putumayo,
including Robuchon’s photographs, see Alberto Chirif and Manuel Cornejo
262 ❘ Notes to Chapter 2

Chaparro, Imaginario e imágenes de la época del caucho: Los sucesos del Pu-
tumayo (Lima: Centro Amazónico de Antropología y Aplicación Práctica; Co-
penhagen: IWGIA; Iquitos, Perú: Universidad Científica del Perú, 2009). Chirif
and Chaparro provide an insightful reading of the conflictual use of Robuchon’s
papers as evidence.
52. In 1907, Casa Arana and the Peruvian consul in Manaus, Carlos Rey de
Castro (who played an important role in Arana’s defense), published a version of
Robuchon’s diary accompanied by a selection of his found photographs: Eugène
Robuchon, En el Putumayo y sus afluentes (Lima: Imprenta La Industria, 1907).
53. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 16–17.
54. The Illustrated London News, July 20, 1912.
55. Roger Casement, “The Putumayo Indians,” The Contemporary Review
102 (1912).
56. Brian Inglis, Roger Casement (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1973),
257; Ó Síocháin, Roger Casement, 356.
57. Roger Casement, “The Keeper of the Seas,” in The Crime Against Eu-
rope: The Causes of the War and the Foundations of Peace (Berlin: The Conti-
nental Times, 1915), 22.
58. Lesley Wylie, “Rare Models: Roger Casement, the Amazon, and the Eth-
nographic Picturesque,” Irish Studies Review 18, no. 3 (2010): 316.
59. See Roslyn Poignant, Professional Savages: Captive Lives and Western
Spectacle (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).
60. See the painting in Carolina Sá Carvalho, “How to See a Scar: Human-
itarianism and Colonial Iconography in the Putumayo Rubber Boom,” Journal
of Latin American Cultural Studies 27, no. 3 (March 2018): 389.
61. As Deborah Poole has argued in her article on photographs in Oaxaca,
Mexico, it was not an uncommon practice at the beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury to have the same subjects represented in both photography and painting.
In some cases, the painting isolated certain elements of the photograph, such as
the physiognomic traits or the material culture, creating different types of racial
or cultural genealogies. Poole, “An Image of ‘Our Indian’: Type Photographs
and Racial Sentiments in Oaxaca, 1920–1940,” Hispanic American Historical
Review 84, no. 1 (2004).
62. Quoted in Wylie, “Rare Models,” 322.
63. Quoted in Wylie, “Rare Models,” 321.
64. As Wylie points out, despite its insistence on the direct, physical presence
of the young men’s bodies, the interview was in fact a compilation of testi-
monies that the Huitotos had given to Bishop—the Barbadian man who had
become Casement’s interpreter—in Pará in December 1910. Casement, who did
not speak the Huitoto language, is cited in the article as the Huitoto men’s in-
terpreter. Wylie, “Rare Models,” 321.
65. One of the most influential anthropometric systems, produced by J. H.
Lamprey in 1869, advocated the use of a wooden frame with silk threads hung so
as to form two-inch squares against which each subject would be photographed.
66. For a critique of salvage anthropology, see James Clifford, The Predic-
ament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cam-
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 263

bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist

Nostalgia,” Representations 26, no. 1 (1989); and Marshall Sahlins, “Ethno-
graphic Experience and Sentimental Pessimism: Why Culture Is Not a Dis-
appearing Object,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine Daston
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
67. Quoted in Wylie, “Rare Models,” 327.
68. Goodman, “Mr Casement Goes to Washington.”
69. Goodman, “Mr Casement Goes to Washington,” 31.
70. Roger Casement, “Photographs of Putumayo Indians,” January 26, 1912,
US National Archives. Record Group 59: General Records of the Department of
State 1910–29 Central Decimal File. File: 823.5048/30.
71. Casement, “Photographs of Putumayo Indians.”
72. Casement, “Photographs of Putumayo Indians.”
73. Roger Casement, letter to Alice Stopford Green, April 20, 1907, NLI,
MS10464 /3/1

C ha pter 3
1. Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others provides a variety of exam-
ples of such history, including the debates about photographs of the American
Civil War.
2. From 1890 to 1892, under the recently established republican government,
Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon, then a young military engineer, participated
in the construction of a 360-mile line in the state of Mato-Grosso. In 1900,
Rondon was charged with leading a military commission that inaugurated, in
1906, 1,100 miles of telegraph lines. The so-called Rondon Commission also
surveyed and mapped vast territories of the Brazilian northwest. In 1910,
Rondon became the first director of the Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (Indian
Protection Service)—the federal agency entrusted with protecting Indigenous
peoples—and devised a plan for establishing relationships with the Indigenous
people through a process of pacification through acculturation. In defining his
itinerary, Lévi-Strauss decided to follow Rondon’s telegraph lines, which he de-
scribed as a failed civilizational project: by the time the line was finally being
completed, it had quietly been superseded by shortwave radiotelegraphy. For
historical accounts of the Rondon Commission, see Todd A. Diacon, Stringing
Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of
a Modern Brazil, 1906–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); and
Laura Antunes Maciel, A Nação por um fio: Caminhos, práticas e imagens da
“Comissão Rondon” (São Paulo: EDUC, 1998).
3. Unless noted, I quote from the English translation of Tristes Tropiques by
John and Doreen Weightman (New York: Penguin, 2012). My comments on
the photographs published in Tristes Tropiques draw from the first French edi-
tion of Tristes tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955). The images I use were reproduced
from the Brazilian edition Tristes trópicos, trans. Rosa Freire Aguiar (São Paulo:
Companhia das Letras, 2010), which allowed for higher-quality copies.
4. Matthieu Lévi-Strauss, personal communication.
264 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

5. Claude Imbert, “On Anthropological Knowledge,” in The Cambridge

Companion to Lévi-Strauss, ed. Boris Wiseman (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009), 125.
6. For a discussion of the formative role of Lévi-Strauss’s encounter with
Brazilian Indigenous tribes, see Fernanda Peixoto’s “Lévi-Strauss no Brasil: A
formação do etnólogo,” Mana 4, no. 1 (1998); and Patrick Wilcken’s Claude
Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory (New York: Penguin, 2010).
7. The importance of Dina Lévi-Strauss in the formation of Brazilian eth-
nography is discussed in works by scholars Ellen Spielman, Luisa Valentini, and
Luciana Martins. See Ellen Spielman, Das Verschwinden Dina Lévi-Strauss’ und
der Transvestismus Mário de Andrade: Genealogische Rätsel in der Geschichte
der Sozial und Humanwissenschaften im modernen Brasilien / La desaparición
de Dina Lévi-Strauss y el transvestismo de Mário de Andrade (Berlin: WVB,
Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2003); Luisa Valentini, Um laboratório de antropo-
logia: O encontro entre Mário de Andrade, Dina Dreyfus e Claude Lévi-Strauss,
1935–1938 (São Paulo: Alameda, 2013); and Martins, Photography and Docu-
mentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil.
8. In this respect, Imbert argues that it was in the 1950s that Lévi-Strauss ex-
plicitly focused on anthropological knowledge: “When Lévi-Strauss came back
from New York, he might have decided either to start new fieldwork in the
Pacific or to pursue his theoretical research, turning to some non-elementary
structures of kinship. These would have supplied a link of sorts to confront con-
temporary social constructions of family relations in postwar Western societies.
Although he never forgot his concern for civil life, he finally chose a third op-
tion, precisely to reconsider anthropological knowledge as such” (Imbert, “On
Anthropological Knowledge,” 118).
9. James Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism: Lévi-Strauss in a Literary
Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 141
10. In From Symbolism to Structuralism (1972), Boon presents Lévi-Strauss’s
theory of knowledge as the act of re-encoding a previous text in a new one, and
argues that in Tristes tropiques “Lévi-Strauss most clearly demonstrates his own
personal basis of symbolist sensitivity” (148). More recently, Boris Wiseman
stated that “the geological allegory contained in Tristes Tropiques conceals a
theory of aesthetic perception.” Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aes-
thetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52. Wiseman, who in
this follows Yvan Simonis, not only shows “the connected nature between the
aesthetic and anthropological dimensions of Lévi-Strauss’s thought” (10), but
also reveals the latter’s attempt to grasp this connection through the question
of language: “What kind of ‘language’ is best suited to the carrying out of the
programme of structural anthropology, ‘metonymic’ or ‘metaphorical’?” (10).
Vincent Debaene, in Far Afield: French Anthropology between Science and Lit-
erature, trans. Justin Izzo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), his thor-
ough study of the relationship between literature and ethnography in France,
argues that Tristes tropiques is “the result of an experience in writing” (220)
that “offers the opportunity for an initial experience of the logic of sensation”
(212), which Lévi-Strauss would later develop in The Savage Mind (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966) and The Naked Man, trans. John Weight-
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 265

man and Doreen Weightman, vol. 4 of Mythologiques (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1983).
11. Many of the Rondon Commission’s photographs and film stills were
later published in the three-volume work Índios do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Con-
selho Nacional de Proteção aos Índios, Ministério da Agricultura, 1946–53).
12. Rondon, Índios do Brasil, vol. 1: 5
13. Rondon, Índios do Brasil, vol. 1: 5.
14. Da Cunha and Rondon were close friends, and the latter would for
a short time become the guardian of da Cunha’s sons after his death. After
publishing his book Os sertões, da Cunha expressed a wish to join Rondon
in his Amazonian expedition. Casement did not have any personal contact
with Rondon, but expressed, in a letter to Spicer dated August 11, 1910, his
approval of the fact that the Brazilian government had chosen Rondon as
“Chief of the Service for the Protection of the Forest Indians,” affirming that
“Rondon is a very capable man I believe. It is a good thing to see that one of
these republics is beginning to realise its duties and responsibilities towards
the Indian tribes.” Roger Casement, letter to Gerald Spicer, August 11, 1910,
PRO FO371/968. The full letter can be found in Casement, The Amazon Jour-
nal, 71.
15. Much changed in Brazil’s indigenist policies throughout the twentieth
century, which reflected a relative consensus among both specialists and Indig-
enous activists (although not always among politicians and the general public)
in opposing the SPI’s early defense of assimilation.
16. For a lengthy discussion of the relationship between inscription and
blindness, see Jacques Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and
Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1993).
17. I refer here to the debates on the embodied dimension of photography,
which would challenge a history of photography based on the expansion of the
empire of the visible. For more on this topic, see the edited volume by Marcus
Banks and Jay Ruby, Made to Be Seen: Perspectives on the History of Visual
Anthropology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
18. “Land without history” is the English translation of Euclides da Cunha’s
posthumous book on the Amazonian region, À margem da história (Porto,
Port.: Chardron, 1909; reprint, São Paulo: Editora Cultrix, 1975); Euclides da
Cunha, The Amazon: Land without History, trans. Ronald Sousa (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2006).
19. Rondon, Índios do Brasil, vol. 1: 10.
20. Rondon, Índios do Brasil, vol. 1: 136.
21. See Diacon, Stringing Together a Nation, 129.
22. Christopher Pinney, “Seven Theses on Photography,” Thesis Eleven 113,
no. 1 (2012): 144, https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513612457864.
23. This reading of Tristes tropiques emphasizes what the anthropologist
Marshall Sahlins called “an attack on the cultural integrity and historical agency
of the peripheral peoples.” According to Sahlins, this vision of “first contact” as
the beginning of the end of non-Western cultures “does in theory just what
imperialism attempts in practice.” Sahlins, “Goodbye to Tristes Tropes: Ethnog-
266 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

raphy in the Context of Modern World History,” Journal of Modern History 65,
no. 1 (March 1993): 7.
24. For a critique of Lévi-Strauss’s historical account of the birth of writ-
ing, see Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Derrida characterizes Lévi-Strauss’s “pho-
nocentrism” as sentimental ethnocentrism fueled by an oversimplified reading
of Rousseau. Instead of viewing writing as a perverse supplement to natural
speech, Derrida argues for the necessary recognition of writing in speech.
25. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Charbonnier, Conversations with
Claude Lévi-Strauss, trans. John Weightman and Doreen Weightman (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1969).
26. In relation to this idea, some scholars who worked on aesthetics in Lévi-
Strauss, such as Boris Wiseman and José Guilherme Merquior, have pointed out
that art for Lévi-Strauss resembles language itself, although the latter differs
from the former due to its essentially arbitrary character. See Wiseman, Lévi-
Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics; and José Guilherme Merquior, A estética
de Lévi-Strauss (Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1975).
27. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Didier Eribon, Conversations with Claude Lévi-
Strauss, trans. Paula Wissington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 64.
28. Wiseman relates Lévi-Strauss’s view of “primitive” art as the “outcome
of a positive aesthetic” (Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 29) to a
broader shift that led to the creation of museums or pavilions in museums ded-
icated not to ethnography, but to non-Western art: “It was in 1960, at more or
less the same time that Lévi-Strauss was writing The Savage Mind, that André
Malraux decided to convert the Musée Permanent des Colonies, built in Paris
for the 1931 Exposition Coloniale, into a Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et
d’Océanie, which he divested of its earlier ethnographic function that Malraux
saw as the prerogative of the Musée de l’Homme. This was the sign of a deep
cultural shift that is still ongoing. The most recent episodes in its story were the
opening, at the Louvre, of the Pavillon des Sessions (to date, it has had more
than 3.5 million visitors), and in June 2006 of an autonomous museum of non-
Western art, the Musée du Quai Branly (it was going to be called ‘Musée des
Arts Premiers’). Lévi-Strauss’s writings on art have doubtless played their part
in this ‘pantheonisation’ of ‘primitive’ art, as one initiator of the Quai Branly
project puts it” (28). This movement, however, had already started in the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, when “culture was being extended to all of
the world’s functioning societies” (James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art [Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1988], 235). This can be seen, for example, in early twentieth-
century avant-garde artists’ appropriation of African artifacts.
29. Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Charbonnier, Entretiens avec Claude
Lévi-Strauss (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2010), 81.
30. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read, trans. Brian C. J. Singer (New
York: Basic Books, 1997); Claude Lévi-Strauss, “To a Young Painter,” in The
View from Afar, trans. Joachin Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss (New York: Basic
Books, 1985).
31. See José Guilherme Merquior’s works for a more detailed analysis of
Lévi-Strauss’s writings on art. Merquior’s A estética de Lévi-Strauss, the first
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 267

book entirely dedicated to the anthropologist’s aesthetic thought, focuses on the

passages in which Lévi-Strauss writes directly about art, and situates them in the
context of other contemporary aesthetic theories in order to evaluate the con-
tribution of structuralism to aesthetics. Another important book published on
this theme, Wiseman’s Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, takes as its
starting point the hypothesis that Lévi-Strauss’s work as a whole is an aesthetics
in the philosophical sense of the term, and not merely an anthropological theory
of art. In this he follows Yvan Simonis, who in 1968 identified structuralism as
a logic of aesthetic perception. See Simonis, Claude Lévi-Strauss ou la passion
de l’inceste: Introduction au structuralisme (Paris: Flammarion, 1980). I do not
aim to participate in this debate, although all of these scholars have important
insights concerning the relationship between Lévi-Strauss’s ideas on art and his
critique of photographic representation.
32. This is one of the fundamental principles of Lévi-Strauss’s aesthetic the-
ory. Its importance has been emphasized by a number of critics, among them
Wiseman, Merquior, and Marcel Hénaff, the last of whom remarks: “If we had
to define the function of art according to Lévi-Strauss, we could say without
hesitation that it is primarily a function of knowledge.” Hénaff, Claude Lévi-
Strauss and the Making of Structural Anthropology (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1998), 191. Merquior (A estética de Lévi-Strauss) relates
Lévi-Strauss’s thesis regarding the cognitive function of art to the proposition in
The Savage Mind that art is to be situated “half-way between scientific knowl-
edge and mythical or magical thought” (Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 17).
Merquior is concerned with the system of resemblances and differences that
relates art, as a medium of knowledge, to myth and science, and he explores the
specificity of art in this domain.
33. Lévi-Strauss, “To a Young Painter,” 248.
34. For a comparison between Lévi-Strauss’s and other aesthetic theories, see
Merquior, A estética de Lévi-Strauss. He argues that this emphasis on the “re-
duced model” puts Lévi-Strauss in the tradition of Lessing’s Laocoon (23–24).
35. See Wiseman, Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 38.
36. What characterizes aesthetic cognition, according to the theory of the
“modèle reduit” such as it appears in The Savage Mind, is the fact that instead
of operating analytically, artworks enable the world to be apprehended as a
totality. And it is this totalizing effect that Lévi-Strauss puts forward as the
source of aesthetic pleasure. In Lévi-Strauss’s words, “even if this is an illusion,
the point of the procedure is to create or sustain the illusion, which gratifies
the intelligence and gives rise to a sense of pleasure which can already be called
aesthetic on these grounds alone” (23–24).
37. Lévi-Strauss, “To a Young Painter,” 253. Following these criteria, Lévi-
Strauss detracts from the high value attached to figuration since the Renais-
sance; at the same time, however, he places great value on trompe l’oeil painting
and has a marked predilection for an art of minute observation, as one can
see from his fascination with the lace ruff painted by Clouet. He is also highly
critical of cubism and abstract art even though both of these, on the surface of
things, seem closer to the “primitive” art forms he loves and defends than, say,
classical representational art. Lévi-Strauss’s views on Western art, however, are
268 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

conflicting only in appearance. In the case of cubism, for example, he affirms

that in moving away from the object seen, the purely sensible dimension, to the
conceptual, it does not succeed in fulfilling the collective function of a work
of art. In Wiseman’s words, “although Cubism aspires to becoming a new aes-
thetic language, it is condemned to being no more than an idiolect (a private
language).” It becomes a mimesis of a second order, a mimesis of a manner of
painting; that is, academicism. This is discussed in more detail in Wiseman’s
Lévi-Strauss, Anthropology and Aesthetics, 123–26.
38. Philippe Descola, The Ecology of Others: Anthropology and the Ques-
tion of Nature, trans. Geneviève Godbout and Benjamin P. Luley (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm, 2013), 22.
39. Boon, From Symbolism to Structuralism, 28.
40. Edwards, Raw Histories, 32.
41. Roslyn Poignant, “Surveying the Field of View: The Making of the RAI
Photographic Collection,” in Anthropology and Photography, 1860–1920, ed.
Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; London: Royal An-
thropological Institute, 1992), 64.
42. Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and Photography,” 78.
43. Banks and Ruby, eds., Made to Be Seen, 3.
44. This was surely a complex process that was not homogeneous. Debaene
explains how in France, for example, contrary to most countries where “the link
that existed at the outset between anthropology and museums weakened during
the twentieth century” (Far Afield, 29), the exhibition of ethnographic docu-
ments in museums played a central role in making the new science. According
to Debaene, opposed to both the model of the cabinet of curiosities and the mu-
seum of fine arts, the aim of the new anthropological museum in France, which
became evident in the reorganization of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Tro-
cadéro, was to present artifacts to the wider public in a meaningful and scien-
tific way, situating the concrete object among charts and explanations designed
to instruct the public. As Michel Leiris described it, alongside the specialist’s
descriptions and charts, photographs, audio recordings, and other “accessible
representations” were used to “situate an object in its milieu and its everyday
life and . . . lend it a didactic purpose, preventing it from becoming something
dead and lost in the glaciers of abstraction” (Leiris, “La jeune ethnographie,”
Masses 3 [1933]: 11). In assessing the artifices traditionally used to “wrap” the
object in the museum in a context to which only the ethnographer had access,
Debaene compares this to another phenomenon peculiar to France: anthro-
pologists’ recourse to literature. In what he called the “second books” written
by the fathers of French ethnography, narratives were written to “complement
scientific documents and to house evocations of the ‘atmosphere’ of societies
under study” (Far Afield, 77). Photographs are also present in some of these
narratives, which triggered the imagination of the public and served as a kind of
affidavit for the presence of the anthropologist in the field. Anthropology’s need
to “communicate” with a wider public, or to educate the masses, was a common
justification for both the publication of these “literary” works and the reformu-
lation of the museum in France (Far Afield, 79). Given the importance placed
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 269

on museums and documents, the role of the French field-worker in the inter-
war period—when Lévi-Strauss made his own trip to Brazil—was twofold. On
the one hand, as newspapers themselves publicized, the ethnographer’s mission
was to bring artifacts “home” to museums. Lévi-Strauss’s expedition in Mato
Grosso was no exception to this. It was in great part justified by the collecting
of artifacts from the Indigenous populations to be shared between the recently
founded Musée de l’Homme and Brazilian institutions. On the other hand, a
different kind of definition of the fieldwork experience, more in tune with what
was happening in British-American anthropology, was found in works by Leiris,
Alfred Métraux, and especially Marcel Mauss, who emphasized the importance
of extended exposure of the ethnographer to his subjects of study.
45. Debaene, Far Afield, 36.
46. Poignant, “Surveying the Field of View,” 65.
47. Pinney affirms that this idea was first suggested by David Tomas in a
personal communication. Pinney, “The Parallel Histories of Anthropology and
Photography,” 81–82.
48. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Saudades do Brasil: A Photographic Memoir, trans.
Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 22.
49. It is remarkable that neither Lévi-Strauss’s texts nor his use of photogra-
phy allude to the avant-garde photographic experiments occurring at the time
of his travels to Brazil, and which questioned the definition of photography as
an act of recording and highlighted the capacity of photographs to reveal, as
Benjamin wrote in “Little History of Photography,” new ways of seeing. Walter
Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and
Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas
Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (Boston: Belknap Press
of Harvard University Press, 2008), 286.
Lévi-Strauss’s lack of recognition of the contribution of contemporary avant-
garde artists is not restricted to photography. In fact, although he befriended
André Breton and contributed to avant-garde magazines, he rarely cites the
surrealists. As Patrick Wilcken remarks, in a response to commentaries made
by Roger Callois, Lévi-Strauss denied the affiliation, saying that “he had never
really collaborated with them; he knew Breton, but their ideas were ‘completely
different’” (Wilcken, Claude Lévi-Strauss: The Poet in the Laboratory [New
York: Penguin, 2010], 200–201). Moreover, Lévi-Strauss’s references in his writ-
ings are mostly classical: he recognizes himself in Rousseau and Montaigne, for
instance. About Lévi-Strauss’s contradictory affinities and his negation of mod-
ernist thought and aesthetics, see also Vincent Debaene’s préface to Oeuvres by
Claude Lévi-Strauss, ed. Vincent Debaene, Frédéric Keck, Marie Mauzé, and
Martin Rueff (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), xxxii–xxxiii.
50. The book’s first sentence has been widely criticized for being a purely
rhetorical gesture in a narrative that reproduces the most common conventions
of travel writing and consequently does not escape what it seeks to denounce.
See Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), 25–48.
51. Debaene, Far Afield, 414.
270 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

52. In this respect, Debaene compares Lévi-Strauss’s denial of narrating “in-

sipid events” to Paul Valéry’s critique of writing as a form of recording or note-
taking (Far Afield, 201).
53. In an interesting declaration to the French newspaper Libération on
September 1, 1988, Luiz de Castro Faria criticized Lévi-Strauss for his non-
collaborative behavior during the trip. He also emphasized that while Dina
Lévi-Strauss was a true ethnographer who made valuable findings and observa-
tions, her husband was more of a philosopher who did not seem very comfort-
able in the field. Castro Faria’s notes and photographs were published in Um
outro olhar: Diário de expedição à Serra do Norte (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre
Azul Editora, 2001).
54. Maurice Blanchot, “Man at Point Zero,” in Friendship (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 78.
55. Carol Jacobs, Telling Time: Lévi-Strauss, Ford, Lessing, Benjamin, de
Man, Wordsworth, Rilke (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), 10.
56. In an interview with Didier Eribon, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes again the
question of time. Asked what led him to write Tristes tropiques, he says that, al-
though when invited by Jean Malaurie to contribute to the series Terre humaine
he had not desired to write about his travels, as “time went on” he had gained
a “certain distance” and “it was no longer a matter of transcribing a journal
of [his] expedition”: “I had to rethink my old adventures” (Lévi-Strauss and
Eribon, Conversations, 58).
57. Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin,
2004), 6.
58. In the folder called “Tristes Tropiques” in Lévi-Strauss’s archive (in the
Bibliothèque Nationale), one can find most of the documents used by him in the
making of the book. Among them, there are pages detached from his field note-
books that illustrate the process of unmaking the chronological writing of the
field book and rearranging it in another form. For a detailed description of the
manuscripts used in Tristes tropiques, see Debaene’s “Notices et notes: Tristes
Tropiques,” in Lévi-Strauss’s Oeuvres, 1690–98.
59. Quoted in Wilcken, The Poet in the Laboratory, 71.
60. One example is Benjamin’s concept of the optical unconscious, also based
on Freud’s notion of the unconscious, in “Little History of Photography,” 286.
61. Christopher Pinney, Photography and Anthropology (London: Reaktion
Books, 2011), 105.
62. Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 69.
63. Such a connection between image, otherness, and atemporality has been
established frequently. In Time and the Other, one of the seminal books of his-
torical critique of anthropology that came out in the 1980s, Johannes Fabian,
for example, argues that the subordination of anthropology to the visual—
which he identifies with both spatial distance and objectivism—is at the root
of the “allochronism” of anthropology. Fabian, Time and the Other: How An-
thropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
On the enduring anxiety toward the visual in twentieth-century French critical
 Notes to Chapter 3 ❘ 271

theory, see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-
Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
64. In the first edition of Tristes tropiques, the photographs were all pub-
lished together at the end of the book, on glossy paper that differs from the pa-
per used in the rest of the book. However, the organization of the photographs
into four parts named exactly like the central chapters of the book, “Caduveo,”
“Bororo,” “Nambikwara,” and “Tupi-Kawahib,” suggests that they should be
read as part of these specific chapters.
65. Castro Faria, Um outro olhar, 184.
66. Jacobs, Telling Time, 42.
67. Lévi-Strauss, Oeuvres, 1749n3.
68. Debaene, Far Afield, 204.
69. Regarding the importance of his encounter with the Kadiwéu in Lévi-
Strauss’s philosophical inquiry into the provenance of the mathematical struc-
tures that underpin kinship exchange (in societies that often do not possess a
formalized mathematics), see Imbert, “On Anthropological Knowledge.”
70. Before publishing Tristes tropiques, Lévi-Strauss had made two other
attempts at interpreting the Kadiwéu art form which he captured in his photo-
graphs. In his essay “Indian Cosmetics” (1942), published in the first number
of the surrealist magazine VVV, with the editorial assistance of André Breton
and a cover by Max Ernst, Lévi-Strauss published a photograph of a boy four
or five years old and two drawings of facial designs made by Kadiwéu women
on sheets of paper (Lévi-Strauss, “Indian Cosmetics,” trans. P. Blanc, VVV 1
[1942]). In his 1944 article “Split Representation in the Art of Asia and Amer-
ica,” later published as a chapter in Structural Anthropology, he reproduced
two photographic portraits of Kadiwéu women with painted faces, a drawing
made by the Italian painter and ethnologist Guido Boggiani in 1892, and two
drawings from his own collection, both made by Kadiwéu women—a facial
design reproduced on a piece of paper, and a drawing representing a figure with
a painted face. Lévi-Strauss’s article also reproduces drawings from other parts
of the world in order to illustrate his comparative analysis of the highly stylized
form of art known as “split representation.” Lévi-Strauss’s proposal is that in
Kadiwéu facial painting, it is the human face itself that is split and reassembled
as two profiles by the designs painted onto it. Lévi-Strauss, “Split Representa-
tion in the Art of Asia and America,” in Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire
Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963).
71. In this sense, it is noteworthy that Lévi-Strauss remarks that the Kadi-
wéu had previously tattooed the designs, and he interpreted the fact that they
ceased to do so as a sign of the decline of Kadiwéu society. Luciana Martins,
however, argues that this is a contested fact. She notes that Boggiani himself had
come to a different conclusion after his analysis of mummies, and insisted that
the ornaments on the mummies’ skins were transient marks instead of perma-
nent ones. Martins, “‘Resemblances to Archaeological Finds’: Guido Boggiani,
Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Caduveo Body Painting,” Journal of Latin American
Cultural Studies 26, no. 2 (2017): 22.
72. Boris Wiseman, “Lévi-Strauss, Caduveo Body Painting, and the Ready-
made: Thinking Borderlines,” Insights 1, no. 1 (2008).
272 ❘ Notes to Chapter 3

73. The chapter begins with an affirmation that “the customs of a commu-
nity, taken as a whole, always have a particular style and are reducible to sys-
tems” and that “the number of such systems is not unlimited and that—in their
games, dreams or wild imaginings—human societies, like individuals, never cre-
ate absolutely, but merely choose certain combinations from an ideal repertoire
that it should be possible to define” (Lévi-Strauss, Tristes tropiques, 179).
74. Martins, “Resemblances to Archeological Finds.”
75. There are very few works that examine Lévi-Strauss’s photographs; I
refer directly to most of these in the present chapter. Jay Prosser’s Barthesian
Light in the Dark Room is one of the few to situate the photographs in the
epistemological debate. In the chapter dedicated to the anthropologist, Prosser
argues that in Tristes tropiques the photographs are “over-codified,” published
side-by-side with graphs and drawings and other encoded forms, in order to be
suitable for a structuralist work. Prosser, Light in the Dark Room: Photography
and Loss (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 58–65.
76. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.
77. See Alejandra Reyero, “Imagen, objeto y arte: La fotografía de Guido
Boggiani,” Iconos: Revista de Ciencias Sociales 42 (2012).
78. Claude Lévi-Strauss, foreword to Enciclopédia Bororo, by César Albi-
setti and Ângelo Jayme Venturelli, vol. 3, part 1, “Textos dos cantos de caça e
pesca” (Campo Grande: Museu Regional Dom Bosco, 1976), n.p.
79. Wilcken, The Poet in the Laboratory, 71.
80. Fabian, Time and the Other.
81. Geertz, Works and Lives, 25–48.
82. Martins, Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern
Brazil, 170.
83. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale
des Indiens Bororo,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 28, no. 2 (1936).
84. Sylvia Caiuby Novaes, “Lévi-Strauss: Razão e sensibilidade,” Revista de
Antropologia 42, no. 1–2 (1999), http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/S0034–7701199
9000100005.
85. Quoted in Wilcken, The Poet in the Laboratory, 72.
86. For a critique of the sentimental rhetoric used by Lévi-Strauss and other
anthropologists to mourn the extinction of Indigenous cultures, see Marshal
Sahlins, “Ethnographic Experience and Sentimental Pessimism: Why Culture Is
Not a Disappearing Object,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Lorraine
Daston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See also James Clifford
and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnogra-
phy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Mary Louise Pratt,
Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992)
for a discussion of the anti-conquest and the sentimental traveler as one of the
tropes in travel literature.
87. Marcelo Fiorini suggests that Lévi-Strauss was influenced by Robert
Lowie’s Primitive Society (1920), which explored the specific cultural styles of
diverse societies, as well as Marcel Mauss’s concept of body techniques. Fiorini,
“Lévi-Strauss’ Photographs: An Anthropology of the Sensible Body,” Journal de
la Société des Américanistes 94, no. 2 (2008), https://doi.org/10.4000/jsa.10555.
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 273

88. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses
(New York: Routledge, 1993), xiii.
89. According to Matthieu Lévi-Strauss (personal communication), he was
responsible for making the first selection of photographs, but consulted with his
father regarding the final decisions.
90. Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, 102–4.
91. Pinney, Photography and Anthropology, 104.

C ha pter 4
1. Tsing, Friction.
2. Mário de Andrade, O turista aprendiz, ed. Telê Ancona Lopez and Tatiana
Longo Figueiredo (Brasilia: IPHAN, 2015), 50. All references, unless otherwise
stated, are to the 2015 edition.
3. Telê Ancona Lopez, “O turista aprendiz na Amazônia: A invenção no texto
e na imagem,” Anais do Museu Paulista: História e Cultura Material 13, no. 2
(July–December 2005): 140; André Botelho, “A viagem de Mário de Andrade
à Amazônia: Entre raízes e rotas,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros
57 (2013): 67.
4. Esther Gabara, Errant Modernism: The Ethos of Photography in Mexico
and Brazil (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Martins, Photography
and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern Brazil.
5. Although not comparing Mário de Andrade directly to Lévi-Strauss, some
scholars have inserted Andrade in a similar tradition of critical ethnographic
writing. André Botelho, for example, affirms that Andrade questions what Clif-
ford Geertz called the “being there” of ethnographic writing. The approxima-
tion between Lévi-Strauss and Andrade also appears in Botelho’s choice to begin
his article about O turista aprendiz with an epigraph from Tristes tropiques
(Botelho, “A viagem de Mário de Andrade à Amazônia,” 17).
6. Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind, 126
7. For Andrade, joy has the painful and religious character that Derrida re-
fers to in his reading of Augustine and Nietzsche. In his letters to the young
poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Mário de Andrade repeatedly “preaches”
(to use his word) about this aesthetic and the politics of joy, which he defines as
“to live with religiosity.” Mário de Andrade, A lição do amigo: Cartas de Mário
de Andrade a Carlos Drummond de Andrade, anotadas pelo destinatário (São
Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2015), 20, 47.
8. Gabara, Errant Modernism, 57–59; Douglas Canjani, “Mário de Andrade
fotógrafo-viajante e a linguagem modernista,” Revista do Instituto de Estudos
Brasileiros 57 (2013): 62; André Keiji Kunigami, “Film and Malaria: Mário de
Andrade and the Politics of Just Looking,” Journal of Latin American Cultural
Studies 29, no. 3 (2020): 380.
9. I thank Hérica Valladares for opening my eyes to the double meaning of
“Abrolhos” (personal communication).
10. For discussions of Mário de Andrade’s engagement with photographic
modernism, see Canjani, “Mário de Andrade fotógrafo-viajante”; Lopez, “O
turista aprendiz na Amazônia”; and Gabara, Errant Modernism.
274 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

11. Lopez, “O turista aprendiz na Amazônia,” 139.

12. It can be seen, for example, in the way Andrade writes different prefaces
to his works in progress, almost as if they were different captions for photo-
graphs, which he ends up discarding in the final version. In her preface for
Andrade’s novel Café (Coffee), another work published posthumously, Tatiana
Longo Figueiredo analyzes Café’s archive from the point of view of genetic
criticism in order to discuss the author’s multiple rewritings of his texts. Tatiana
Longo Figueiredo, “Pausa para café,” in Café by Mário de Andrade, ed. Tatiana
Longo Figueiredo (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2015), 7–41.
13. I am referring here to Julio Ramos’s concept of uneven modernities. See
his Divergent Modernities: Culture and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Latin
America, trans. John D. Blanco (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).
14. Botelho, “A viagem de Mário de Andrade à Amazônia,” 21
15. Martins, Photography and Documentary Film in the Making of Modern
Brazil, 133
16. Gabara, Errant Modernism, 38.
17. Kunigami, “Film and Malaria.”
18. Andrade, O turista aprendiz, 48.
19. Mário de Andrade, “O movimento modernista,” in Aspectos da literatura
Brasileira (São Paulo: Livraria Martins Editôra, 1974).
20. The modernist movement was, in large part, embraced and sponsored by
the coffee aristocracy of São Paulo.
21. The term “caboclo” was commonly used in early twentieth-century Bra-
zil to designate mixed Indigenous and European ancestry, or a culturally assim-
ilated or detribalized person.
22. New York Herald, “Off for Brazil,” January 3, 1878, 10.
23. One of the most thorough accounts of the failure of the first attempt to
build the Madeira-Mamoré Railway is Neville B. Craig’s Recollections of an
Ill-Fated Expedition to the Headwaters of the Madeira River in Brazil (Philadel-
phia: J.B. Lippincott, 1907).
24. Francisco Foot-Hardman, Trem-fantasma: A ferrovia Madeira-Mamoré
e a modernidade na selva, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras,
2005), 25.
25. Early accounts written by employees or former employees of the company
include P. H. Ashmead’s articles for the Pan American Union Bulletin (1911) and
for the Railway Age Gazette (1911); John J. Bayliss’s article for the Stone and
Webster Journal (1928); and Frank Kravigny’s memoir The Jungle Route (New
York: O. Tremaine, 1940). Although not credited, some of Merrill’s photographs
also appeared in a long article by the Brazilian writer Julio Nogueira for the Jor-
nal do Comercio (January 13, 1913), as well as in Henry Pearson’s The Rubber
Country of the Amazon (New York: India Rubber World, 1911). Most of Dana
Merrill’s photographs were, however, kept by private parties related to Merrill
himself and to the railway, and remained relatively unknown to scholars and
the larger public until recently. In the past few decades, Merrill’s photographs of
the Madeira-Mamoré Railway have been rediscovered and re-characterized as
providing evidence not of progress and the triumph of modernity, but of labor
exploitation and environmental destruction. Manoel Rodrigues Ferreira’s A fer-
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 275

rovia do diabo (São Paulo: Melhoramentos, 1960), a book based on extensive

archival work and interviews that became the best-known critical historical ac-
count of the working conditions during the construction of the Madeira-Mamoré
line in Brazil, is known for having rediscovered Merrill’s photographs. The best-
known scholarly works on the Madeira-Mamoré line to include an analysis of
Merrill’s photographs, Foot-Hardman’s Trem-fantasma and journalists Gary
and Rose Neeleman’s Tracks of the Amazon: The Day-to-Day Life of the Work-
ers on the Madeira-Mamore Railroad (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press,
2014), which published a large selection of Merrill’s prints, were both inspired
by Merrill’s photographs, thus adding to a kind of corpus of histories that rec-
ognize these photos as testimonies of the ruinous heroism of technological mo-
dernity. In addition, more formal analysis of the photographs appear in both
Pedro Ribeiro’s “Dana Merrill: Other Images from the Chronicler of the Jungle,”
an afterword to Neeleman and Neeleman’s Tracks in the Amazon; and in Pe-
dro Ribeiro and Dana Merrill’s Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré (São Paulo:
Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, 1993); as well as in Mariana von Hartenthal’s
“Corporate Photography Goes to the Forest,” Artelogie: Recherche sur les Arts,
le Patrimoine, et la Littérature de l’Amérique Latine 12 (September 5, 2018),
https://doi.org/10.4000/artelogie.2181, which situates Merrill’s photographs in
the context of corporate photography, highlighting their exceptionality.
26. Two of these albums can presently be consulted at the New York Public
Library and at the National Library in Rio de Janeiro. Some loose copies of
Merrill’s photographs can also be found at the Museu da Imagem e do Som, and
the Belisario Pena’s archive at Fundação Oswaldo Cruz, Casa de Oswaldo Cruz.
27. Amanda Smith’s analysis of the relationship between the way in which
the railway organizes the gaze toward a vanishing point and the teleological
time of modernity inspired this reading. Smith, Mapping the Amazon: Liter-
ary Geography after the Rubber Boom (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press,
2021), 171–72. See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s Landscape and Power for a discus-
sion of landscape and imperial perspective.
28. For a lengthier discussion of Merrill’s photographic equipment, see Pedro
Ribeiro’s essay on the topic in Estrada de Ferro Madeira-Mamoré and his “Dana
Merrill,” in Neeleman and Neeleman’s Tracks in the Amazon.
29. In a diary entry on May 11, 1927, Andrade had already pointed out the
importance of hats in the making of a subject’s image, by describing how chang-
ing his urban hat for a traveler’s cap helped him feel more at ease (O turista
aprendiz, 55). This theme is further developed in his crônica “Guanabara, 3 de
dezembro, 19 horas,” published in the Diário Nacional on December 21, 1928:
“It is extraordinary how conventions gesticulate for us. And others still say that
the suit does not make the man . . . It was enough to put the cap on my head, I
looked in the mirror and there was I traveling. I was at ease” (reproduced in O
turista aprendiz, 257). Hats also helped Andrade compose different characters
for his posed portraits.
30. Andrade mentions his purchase of the hat, and tell us its price, in his June
22 diary entry (O turista aprendiz, 123).
31. Mário de Andrade, “Filmes de guerra,” in No cinema, ed. Paulo José da
Silva Cunha (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2010), 47–50.
276 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

32. Kunigami, “Film and Malaria,” 387–88.

33. See Flora Süssekind, Cinematograph of Words: Literature, Technique,
and Modernization in Brazil (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997),
for a study of the impact of cinema technology on literary form in Brazil.
34. With regard to the atrocities committed against Huitoto communities
during the rubber boom, see chapter 2.
35. Tsing, Friction, 3.
36. Immediately before departing from São Paulo to the Amazon, Andrade
had finished the first draft of what would become his most famous work, the
modernist novel Macunaíma: Um herói sem nenhum caráter (1928), ed. Telê
Porto Ancona Lopez (Paris: UNESCO; Madrid: ALLCA XX, 1996). Macu-
naíma, the hero of the book, whose name he borrowed from the German eth-
nologist Theodor Koch-Grunberg’s account of an Indigenous trickster figure
named Maku/naima, constantly repeats this refrain: “Ai! . . . Que preguiça!”
which translates roughly as “Oh! I feel so lazy.”
37. Mário de Andrade, “Maleita I,” in O turista aprendiz, 418. The two
crônicas, “Maleita I” and “Maleita II,” are published as part of the “Dossiê” sec-
tion of the Lopez and Figueiredo edition of O turista aprendiz, which includes
additional material related to Andrade’s Amazon trip (418–22).
38. André Botelho and Nísia Trindade Lima, “Malarial Philosophy: The
Modernista Amazonia of Mário de Andrade,” in Intimate Frontiers: A Lit-
erary Geography of the Amazon, ed. Felipe Martínez-Pinzón and Javier Uri-
arte (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press), 2019; Nísia Trindade Lima and
André Botelho, “Malária como doença e perspectiva cultural nas viagens de
Carlos Chagas e Mário de Andrade à Amazônia,” História, Ciências, Saúde-
Manguinhos 20, no. 3 (2013).
39. See Jaime Larry Benchimol and André Felipe Cândido da Silva, “Ferro-
vias, doenças e medicina tropical no Brasil da Primeira República,” História,
Ciências, Saúde-Manguinhos 15, no. 3 (2008), for a study of the relationships
between infrastructure projects, the Brazilian Republic’s drive toward modern-
ization, malaria outbreaks, and the institutionalization of the field of tropical
medicine.
40. Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Only Serious Terror in These Regions: Malaria
Control in the Brazilian Amazon,” in Disease in the History of Modern Latin
America: From Malaria to AIDS, ed. Diego Armus (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 27.
41. See Nancy Leys Stepan, Eradication: Ridding the World of Diseases
Forever? (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), for a discussion of the
microbiological revolution that took place at the end of the nineteenth century
and its broad implications for the imperialist prospects of capitalist expansion
in Latin America.
42. Carl Lovelace, “Academia Nacional de Medicina (Sessão em 16 de
Agosto de 1912): Expediente,” O Brazil-Medico: Revista Semanal de Medicina
e Cirurgia 32 (August 1912): 331.
43. Oswaldo Gonçalves Cruz, Madeira-Mamoré Railway Company: Con-
siderações geraes sobre as condições sanitarias do Rio Madeira (Rio de Janeiro:
Papelaria Americana, 1910), 45.
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 277

44. Nisia Trindade Lima and Gilberto Hochman, “Condenado pela raça,
absolvido pela medicina: O Brasil descoberto pelo movimento sanitarista da
primeira república,” in Raça, ciência e sociedade, ed. Marcos Chor Maio and
Ricardo Ventura Santos (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 1996); and Nisia Trin-
dade Lima and Gilberto Hochman, “‘Pouca saúde e muita saúva’: Sanitarismo,
interpretações do país e ciências sociais,” in Cuidar, controlar, curar: Ensaios
históricos sobre saúde e doença na América Latina e Caribe, ed. Diego Armus
and Gilberto Hochman (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fiocruz, 2004).
45. The relationship between power, race, and tropical medicine has been
treated by historians in both national and colonial contexts. In Cidade febril:
Cortiços e epidemias na corte imperial (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras,
2017), the historian Sidney Chalhoub shows how, in the name of public health,
authorities demolished buildings and communities that housed the poor and
racialized classes, arguing that these were especially conductive of epidemics.
In Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, and Hygiene in the
Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), Warwick Anderson
examines the construction of the Filipino people as a contaminated race, as “mi-
crobial insurrectos” (2), a view which drove US public health efforts to reform
Filipinos’ behavior.
46. Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race.
47. Cruz, Considerações geraes sobre as condições sanitarias do Rio Madeira,
56.
48. For a lengthier study of the relationship between interspecies contact and
the racialization of the malarial body in medical and news reports, see my forth-
coming article “‘The Flying Ability of the Mosquito Made the Situation Difficult
to Cope with’: Contamination, Containment, and the Biopolitics of the Madeira-
Mamoré Railway,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (forthcoming).
49. Cruz, Considerações geraes sobre as condições sanitarias do Rio Madeira,
53.
50. Cruz, Considerações geraes sobre as condições sanitarias do Rio Madeira,
45.
51. I am inspired here by Neel Ahuja’s use of queer and feminist theory in
his study of disease control and the fear of multi-species entanglements: Ahuja,
Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire, and the Government of Species
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
52. Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experi-
ence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), xvi.
53. Mário de Andrade, “Caras,” in No cinema, ed. Paulo José da Silva Cunha
(Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2010). I thank Keiji Kunigami for this reference.
54. Mário de Andrade, “O homem que se achou” (fotos de Jorge de Castro),”
in Será o Benedito! (São Paulo: EDUC, 1996), 77.
55. Andrade, “O homem que se achou,” 79–80.
56. Mário de Andrade, “Do desenho,” in Aspectos das artes plásticas no
Brasil (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1965).
57. Mário de Andrade, “Fantasias de um poeta,” in Será o Benedito! 80.
58. On this point, I contend that Andrade’s photographic practice and
thought must be distinguished from his thoughts on film. Although both media
278 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

are clearly interconnected—as they are to drawing and writing—the way in

which photography registers time is different from film’s mode of doing so. Not
because photography is on the side of fixity, but because time and the unlimited
field of the photograph are inscribed on immobile material. For a differing per-
spective see Kunigami, “Film and Malaria.”
59. Andrade, “Fantasias de um poeta,” 81.
60. Lima and Botelho, “Malária como doença,” 756.
61. Antônio Cândido, “Literatura e cultura de 1900 a 1945,” in Literatura e
sociedade (Rio de Janeiro: Ouro sobre Azul, 2006), 129
62. Mário de Andrade and Manuel Bandeira, Correspondência, ed. Marco
Antônio de Moraes (São Paulo: EDUSP, 2000), 350.
63. For detailed descriptions of the archives of O turista apendiz at the IEB—
the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the University of São Paulo—see Telê
Porto Ancona Lopez’s presentation for the first edition of O turista arendiz
(São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades, 1976); and Telê Ancona Lopez and Tatiana
Longo Figueiredo, “Por esse mundo de páginas,” in O turista aprendiz, ed. Telê
Ancona Lopez and Tatiana Longo Figueiredo (Brasilia: IPHAN, 2015).
64. Manuel Bandeira had said that the writing on vitórias-régias was not
suitable for a poem, and Andrade followed his friend’s suggestion, turning it
into prose and adding it to the diary. See Andrade and Bandeira, Correspondên-
cia, 351–56.
65. Joaquim de Almeida Leite Moraes’s travel account is titled Apontamen-
tos de viagem de São Paulo à capital de Goiás, desta à do Pará, pelos rios Ara-
guaia e Tocantins e do Pará à Corte: Considerações administrativas e políticas,
and was published in 1883 by Tipografia Gazeta do Povo.
66. Telê Porto Ancona Lopez, “Um projeto de livro,” in O turista aprendiz
by Mário de Andrade, ed. Telê Porto Ancona Lopez (São Paulo: Livraria Duas
Cidades, 1976), 33.
67. The remaining 12 clippings had been placed in dossiers related to the
publication of Andrade’s Obras completas.
68. Andrade planned to, but never did, compile the ethnographic materials
he had collected in the Northeast into a work called Na pancada do ganzá.
69. There are 529 photographs taken in 1927, and 373 in 1928.
70. Lopez and Figueiredo, “Por esse mundo de páginas,” 40.
71. For the 1976 edition of O turista aprendiz, editor Telê Porto Ancona Lo-
pez published the materials from the 1928 trip in the order in which they were
found in the green folder: first, the articles from O Diário Nacional, then the
diary notes. In the most recent edition of O turista aprendiz, published in 2015,
Telê Ancona Lopez and Tatiana Longo Figueiredo did the reverse. They also
included all of the 70 crônicas published in O Diário Nacional, not only the 58
clippings found in the green folder. By publishing the complete series, the editors
considered this as a work in itself, published in the form of a newspaper series,
and not as a possible continuation of the manuscript of O turista aprendiz.
72. In fact, while Lopez’s essays to the 1976 edition repeatedly refer to the
“two ethnographic voyages,” this phrase is dropped from the 2015 edition. Telê
Porto Ancona Lopez, “‘Viagens etnográficas’ de Mário de Andrade,’” in O tur-
 Notes to Chapter 4 ❘ 279

ista aprendiz by Mário de Andrade, ed. Telê Porto Ancona Lopez (São Paulo:
Livraria Duas Cidades, 1976), 21, 25.
73. Lopez, “Viagens etnográficas,” 15.
74. The chronological view of the movimento modernista that defines a shift
from a universalizing impulse in 1922 to a search for a nationalizing art form
in 1924, thematized by Eduardo Jardim, can be questioned, since some artists,
such as Andrade himself, had expressed prior to 1922 an interest in folk artistic
expressions. However, it is undeniable that 1924 was marked by open efforts
by modernistas to ground their work in the national and colonial experience
of Brazil. The most famous example was Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto da
poesia pau-Brasil” (“Manifesto of Brazilwood Poetry”), published in the news-
paper Correio da Manhã on March 18, 1924. Eduardo Jardim, “O modernismo
revisitado,” Estudos Históricos 1, no. 2 (1988).
75. Fernando Rosenberg, The Avant-Garde and Geopolitics in Latin Amer-
ica (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 1.
76. For a study of Andrade’s engagement with ethnography, see Telê Porto
Ancona Lopez, Mário de Andrade: Ramais e caminhos (São Paulo: Livraria
Duas Cidades, 1972).
77. The so-called 1930 Revolution was a coup d’état that ended the First Re-
public’s (1889–1930) oligarchic regime and brought Getúlio Vargas, who had
lost the election a year earlier, into power. The regime change was celebrated by
Andrade, who had close ties with the Partido Democrático, which supported
Vargas in the 1930 elections. In the first months following the 1930 Revolution,
the provisional government undertook an educational reform and invited An-
drade, along with professor Sá Pereira and composer Luciano Gallet, to come
up with a plan to restructure the Instituto Nacional de Música (National Music
Institute), which wasn’t carried out in the end. In 1932, dissatisfied with federal
intervention in the state of São Paulo and with the new government’s delay in
implementing promised constitutional reform and holding new elections, An-
drade supported the São Paulo insurrection called the Constitutional Revolu-
tion. After re-democratization in 1934, a new optimism and various projects
for reconstruction took shape in São Paulo, incorporating intellectuals who had
been part of the Partido Democrático. In this context, Andrade cofounded and
became the first director of São Paulo’s Department of Culture, within which
he developed an unprecedented project for the democratization of Brazil’s cul-
ture. The first comprehensive study of the participation of intellectuals and art-
ists in the state apparatus after the 1930 Revolution was Sergio Miceli’s 1979
Intelectuais e classe dirigente no Brasil: 1920–1945 (São Paulo: Difel, 1979),
which adopted a sociological approach inspired by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of
an “economy of symbolic exchanges.” Later studies in literature and cultural
history have examined the close relationship between the Vargas regime, its
nationalist and modernizing rhetoric, and the absorption not only of the mod-
ernistas but also of modernist language and aesthetics. See Daryle Williams,
Culture Wars: The First Vargas Regime, 1930–1945 (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2001); Silviano Santiago, “O intelectual modernista revisitado,” in
Nas malhas da letra: Ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 2002); Randal Johnson,
280 ❘ Notes to Chapter 4

“The Dynamics of the Brazilian Literary Field, 1930–1945,” in “Getúlio Vargas

and His Legacy,” ed. Joel Wolfe, special issue, Luso-Brazilian Review 31, no. 2
(Winter 1994); Mauricio Lissovsky and Paulo Sérgio Moraes de Sá, “O novo
em construção: O edifício-sede do Ministério da Educação e Saúde e a disputa
do espaço arquiteturável nos anos 1930,” in Capanema: O ministro e o seu
ministério, ed. Angela de Castro Gomes (Rio de Janeiro: Editora FGV, 2000);
and Mônica Pimenta Velloso, Os intelectuais e a política no Estado Novo (Rio
de Janeiro: Fundação Getúlio Vargas, 1987).
78. For a detailed historical account of Andrade’s participation in the coun-
try’s political life and, more specifically, his work at the Department of Culture
in São Paulo, see Mário de Andrade, Me esqueci completamente de mim, sou um
departamento de cultura, ed. Carlos Augusto Calil and Flávio Rodrigo Penteado
(São Paulo: Imprensa Oficial Governo do Estado de São Paulo, 2015); and Hel-
ena Bomeny, Um poeta na política: Mário de Andrade, paixão e compromisso
(Rio de Janeiro: Casa da Palavra, 2012). For a more focused approach to the
relationship between Andrade’s government post, his photographic production,
and his interest in ethnography, see Martins, Photography and Documentary
Film in the Making of Brazil. In that book Martins also examines Andrade’s
close work with Dina Lévi-Strauss.
79. Andrade also expected to collect some data of ethnographic interest,
even though he does not reveal a research plan as organized as the one he had
planned for the Northeast. It is also worth noting that in 1927 Andrade had just
finished the first draft of his novel Macunaíma, published in 1928, which was
largely based on the Indigenous narratives that Theodor Koch-Grunberg had
reproduced in Vom Roraima zum Orinoco. While Macunaíma presents an ex-
tensive incorporation of ethnographic materials, fictionalized and reelaborated
by Andrade, and collected mostly from his “armchair,” O turista aprendiz con-
tains multiple passages in which what is fictionalized is the ethnographic work
and the ethnographic encounter itself.
80. Very few researchers have examined the peculiarity of Andrade’s Amazo-
nian trip or differentiated it from the later ethnographic voyage. Although not
addressing the question directly, Gilda de Mello e Souza, “O colecionador e a
coleção,” in A ideia e o figurado (São Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades; Editora 34,
2005), makes the insightful suggestion that Andrade’s ethnographic enterprise—
“not as tourist apprentice, following conveniently pre-arranged routes, but as
traveler” (43)—had the effect of providing him with a more stable and calm
terrain than his constant reflections on himself. In this essayistic, quasi-literary
text, Souza does not make clear whether she is differentiating the Amazonian
trip from the other trip, but her insights suggest an interesting route for thinking
about the more complex feelings Andrade expresses when, instead of dedicating
himself to collecting materials about folk dance and music, he himself becomes
the center of the experience being narrated.
81. Andrade defined the 1920s as a time of unbridled pleasure, citing the
“salons, festivals, notorious balls, group weeks spent at opulent farms, Easter
Week in the old towns of Minas, travels through the Amazonas, through the
Northeast, arrivals at Bahia, constant visits to the paulista past, Sorocaba, Par-
naíba, Itu” (Andrade, “O movimento modernista,” 241).
 Notes to Epilogue ❘ 281

82. Alfredo Bosi, História concisa da literatura brasileira (São Paulo: Editôra
Cultrix, 1970), 430.
83. Eduardo Jardim, Eu sou trezentos: Mário de Andrade vida e obra (Rio de
Janeiro: Edições de Janeiro, 2015), 422–23.
84. Paulo Duarte, Mário de Andrade por ele mesmo (São Paulo: Editora
HUCITEC, 1985), 228.
85. Pedro Fragelli argues that Andrade was entangled in a series of para-
doxes stemming from his antinomic approach to aesthetic and politics. Fragelli,
“Engajamento e sacrifício: O pensamento estético de Mário de Andrade,” Re-
vista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 57 (2013).
86. Eduardo Jardim, Limites do moderno: Pensamento estético de Mário de
Andrade (Rio de Janeiro: Relume Dumará, 1999).
87. Fragelli, “Engajamento e sacrifício.”
88. For different views on the scarce photographic production among the
modernistas, see Paulo Herkenhoff, “Fotografia: O automático e longo processo
da modernidade,” in Sete ensaios sobre modernismo (Rio de Janeiro: Funarte,
Instituto Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1983); and Rubens Fernandes Junior,
“Modernity and Photography in Brazil,” in De la antropofagia a Brasília: Brasil
1920–1950, ed. Maria Casanova and M. Victoria Menor (Valencia: IVAM Cen-
tre Julio González, 2000).

Epilog u e
1. For a few examples of recent volumes in the fields of anthropology and
history that develop this debate, see Erica Bornstein and Peter Redfield, eds.,
Forces of Compassion: Humanitarianism between Ethics and Politics (Santa Fe,
NM: SAR, 2011); Richard Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown, eds., Human-
itarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009); and Didier Fassin, Humanitarian Reason: A Moral His-
tory of the Present (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
2. Some prominent examples of these initiatives, which enabled the use of
media as a dimension of cultural activism in identity-based social movements,
are Vídeo nas Aldeias in Brazil and the Centro de Formación y Realización
Cinematográfica–Coordinadora Audiovisual Indígena Originaria de Bolivia
(CEFREC-CAIB) in Bolivia. On Indigenous media-makers, see Faye Ginsburg,
“Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” in Rereading Cul-
tural Anthropology, ed. George E. Marcus (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1992).
3. Tsing, Friction, 5.
4. For sources on Casement’s queerness, see note 15 in chapter 2. There
are fewer studies on Mário de Andrade’s queer sexuality. The most direct ex-
amination of the theme appears in Moacir Werneck de Castro, Mário de An-
drade: Exílio no Rio (Rio de Janeiro: Rocco, 1989). For an excellent discussion
on the relationship between photography, affect, and queerness see Elspeth
H. Brown and Thy Phu, Feeling Photography (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2014).
5. Stoler, Imperial Debris; Tsing, Friction; Gordillo, Rubble.
282 ❘ Notes to Epilogue

6. Michael Greshko, “Fire Devastates Brazil’s Oldest Science Museum,” Na-

tional Geographic, September 6, 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/
science/2018/09/news-museu-nacional-fire-rio-de-janeiro-natural-history/.
7. Anthropologists such as Christopher Pinney, Elizabeth Edwards, and oth-
ers have also alluded to photography’s “indexicality,” the random inclusiveness
(and hence visual excess) of photographic inscription, its fixity of appearance
and yet its instability of meaning, in order to describe photographs as contested
sites of encounter and cultural exchange. Ariella Azoulay, Deborah Poole, and
Kevin Coleman, for example, have shown that photography is a way of seeing
that is never fully controlled by the operator of the camera, nor dictated by the
ruling power.
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Index

Abreu, Regina, 62, 66 Andrade, Oswald de, 227, 279n74

Aguiar e Silva, Antônio Manuel, 47– Andrade Guimarães, Carlos Eugênio
48 de, 48
Ahuja, Neel, 277n51 Anti-Slavery and Aborigines’
Albus, Anita, 140, 141 Protection Society, 12, 19, 85, 98,
Allison, David, 187 102, 113
All Quiet on the Western Front Arana, Julio César, 85, 95, 98, 103–5.
(Milestone), 205 See also Casa Arana
Almeida, Cícero Antônio F. de, 48, 60 Arinos, Afonso, 51
Amaral, Tarsila do, 198, 227 assimilation, 21, 22, 29, 68, 75, 131,
Amaral Pinto, Dulce do, 198, 228 136, 166, 233; Andrade on, 209;
Amarante, Emanuel Silvestre do, 134 Lévi-Strauss on, 8, 130, 158, 161
Amazon rainforest fires, 233–34, 237 Augustine (Saint), 190, 273n7
Andermann, Jens, 7, 48, 50, 70,
252n50 Baldus, Herbert, 170
Andrade, Mário de, 3–4, 5, 7, 8, 21, Bandeira, Manuel, 225
23, 24, 189–99, 201–11, 215–32, Banks, Marcus, 144
235–37, 274n12; captions by, 2, Barbadian employees, 85, 89–90, 95,
4, 15–16, 24, 195, 203, 208, 235; 98, 99, 100, 106–7
Department of Culture and, 24, Barros, Flávio de, 22, 27, 29, 31, 35,
127, 228, 230, 237, 279n77; on 43–62, 136, 240; exhibition by,
drawing, 221–22; Lévi-Strauss 60–61; photographs in Os sertões
and, 128, 147, 273n5; Macunaíma by, 62–63, 69–81
by, 225, 276n36, 280n79; Barthelmess, Richard, 216, 220
photography and, 190–97, 202–8, Barthes, Roland, 14–15, 152, 167
216, 220–23, 226–27, 232, 235, Belo Monte massacre. See Canudos
277n58; textual history of O Campaign
turista aprendiz, 195, 225–27, 229, Bendegó meteorite, 38–39, 42, 238–
278nn71–72. See also modernism 39

301
302 ❘ Index

Benício, Manuel, 41, 49, 51 Casa Arana (J. C. Arana y

Benjamin, Walter, 9, 10–11, 269n49, Hermanos), 85, 89
270n60 Casement, Roger, 5, 12, 16, 17, 19,
Bernucci, Leopoldo, 70 22, 129, 131, 148, 235, 236–37,
Beverly, John, 258n17 257n3; in Africa, 85, 98–99, 102–
Bilac, Olavo, 36 3, 121; Irish nationalism and, 12,
Bishop, Frederick, 89–90 21, 88, 99, 102–3, 112, 235, 237,
Bittencourt, Carlos, 27 260n40; photography and, 84–97,
Boggiani, Guido, 162, 164–65, 168, 107, 114–16, 119–24, 125, 235;
271nn70–71 writing style of, 99, 260n38
Boltanski, Luc, 106 Castro, Jorge de, 220–21, 222
Boon, James, 127, 141, 264n10 Castro Faria, Luiz de, 129, 147, 159,
Bora people, 12, 22, 88, 94, 100, 174, 183, 270n53
101 Cendrars, Blaise, 7, 227
Bororo people, 129, 151, 153, 155, Chaplin, Charlie, 217–18, 220
161, 163, 164, 168–74, 175, 183 Charbonnier, Georges, 139
Botelho, André, 196, 211, 223, Church, George Earl, 190
273n5 Coelho Neto, Henrique Maximiano,
Brady, Mathew, 38 249n31
Brazil Railway Company, 7–8, 199, Coleman, Kevin, 7, 91
212 colonialism, 113–14, 118, 131, 148,
Brizuela, Natalia, 7, 44, 61, 244n3 192
Burroughs, Robert M., 87 Columbus, Christopher, 148
butterflies, 4, 8, 202–4, 208, 217, Congo Reform Campaign, 85, 98–99
226–27 conquistar term, 93–94
Conselheiro, Antônio, 6, 21–22, 27–
Calasans, José, 51, 245n5, 249n28 43, 77–78, 239, 245n5, 248n26;
Campos Johnson, Adriana, 50, 77, drawings of, 37–38; photograph
247n15 of, 28, 31, 34–35, 39–40, 59–60,
Cândido, Antônio, 69, 224, 246n15 63, 64, 77–79, 240
cannibalism, 103, 105, 111, 152 contagion, 211, 225
Canudos Campaign, 6, 11, 21–22, corpses, 11–12, 21–22, 27–35, 39,
27–62, 239–40, 245n8, 248n24, 40, 47–48, 54–60, 79
249n28, 249n31; in da Cunha, Costa Lima, Luiz, 67, 247n15
16, 32, 50–51, 52, 61–81; initial Cravo Neto, Mário, 51
criticism of, 253n64; other novels cropping, 13, 14, 15, 136; Lévi-
on, 51, 246n13; photographs of, Strauss and, 23, 129, 157–58, 180
43–62, 136; survivors of, 51–52 Cruz, Oswaldo, 212, 214–15
captioning, 8, 14, 15–16, 77; Curtis, Heather D., 18
Andrade and, 2, 4, 15–16, 24, 195,
203, 208, 235; Casement and, 96; da Cunha, Euclides, 5, 14, 16, 20–21,
da Cunha and, 63, 70–73; Lévi- 22, 32–33, 131, 135, 235, 236,
Strauss and, 23, 129, 178–79, 246nn13–15; on Conselheiro,
183–84 29, 32, 41, 44, 50–51, 52, 61–81,
Carroll, Lewis, 163 240; on ethical knowledge, 64–69;
Carvalho da Cunha, Bernardo, 239 influence of, 246n13; Rondon and,
 Index ❘ 303

265n14; scholarship on Os sertões, extractivism, 6, 13, 21, 83–84, 128,

246n15, 254n74; Taine’s influence 189, 192, 194, 195, 197, 207,
on, 253n71, 254n73 233–34
Dantas Barreto, Émidio, 247n16,
252n55 Fabian, Johannes, 169–70, 270n63
Daston, Lorraine, 65 face: of Chaplin, 217–18, 220, 221;
Davis, Mike, 245n8 of Conselheiro, 28, 32, 37, 42, 78–
Debaene, Vincent, 144, 146, 151, 79; face painting, 156–58, 162–65,
161, 264n10, 268n44 183, 271n71; malarial faces, 24,
debris, Lévi-Strauss and, 128, 149; 196
photographs of, 11 Fassin, Didier, 95
de Certeau, Michel, 152–53, 158, favelas, 81, 256n102
160 Ferreira da Silva, Denise, 65, 213,
Derrida, Jacques, 190, 266n24, 241n6, 244n4
273n7 Figueiredo, Tatiana Longo, 227
determinism, 32, 65, 213. See also First Republic, 279n77
self-determination Fitzcarraldo (Herzog), 84
deviance, 21, 28, 30 Foot-Hardman, Francisco, 199,
Dewey, John, 19, 101 247n15
Didi-Huberman, Georges, 101, Foucault, Michel, 215
249n29 Fragelli, Pedro, 230
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 101 François, Anne-Lise, 216–17
Freud, Sigmund, 9, 150, 152, 270n60
Echeverri, Juan Álvaro, 259n25
Edwards, Elizabeth, 14–15, 142 Gabara, Esther, 7, 196
ekphrasis, 16, 256n97; in da Cunha, Galison, Peter, 65
22, 29, 80, 81, 88, 244n3 Galvão, Walnice Nogueira, 256n95
empiricism, 64–65, 88, 101–2 gaze: appropriative, 222;
environmental exploitation, 3–4, 5, 8, disinterested, 217–19; embodied,
233–34, 246n14, 274n25 190, 194, 223, 236; ethnographic,
Estado Novo (Vargas regime), 23, 103, 220; expansionist, 7–
197, 229, 279n77 8; historicity of, 236; non-
ethical knowledge, 17, 29, 64–69, instrumental, 217; pedagogies of
87–88, 122, 197, 254n74; defined, the, 4, 8, 10, 22, 87, 88, 119–20,
10 192, 197, 211, 219; scientific, 39,
ethnography, 13, 23–24, 86, 122, 60, 219; subjective, 190. See also
134–35; Andrade and, 227–29, looking
273n5, 280nn79–80; French Geertz, Clifford, 170, 273n5
museums and, 268n44; Lévi- Gielgud, Henry, 92, 101, 107
Strauss and, 127, 146; Malinowski global economy, 5–6, 8, 198, 208
and, 135 Goodman, Jordan, 91–92, 119
ethnology, 126–27 Gordillo, Gastón R., 10, 11, 241n1
evidence, 85–86, 88, 90, 95, 101 Grant, Kevin, 18
evolution, 66, 67–68, 140, 236 Green, Alice Stopford, 102
exoticism, 158, 168, 169, 172, 190, Green, Thomas Hill, 101
206 Grey, Edward, 98
304 ❘ Index

Guana people, 163 198–99, 209–11; sertanejos, 20–

Gunning, Tom, 36 22. See also malaria
Gutierrez, Juan, 43–44, 251n38, Lako, Carlos, 130
251n45 Laqueur, Thomas, 18
Leiris, Michel, 268n44, 269n44
Halluin, Estelle d’, 95 Leopold II, 99
Hardenburg, Walter, 84, 98, 103–4 Léry, Jean de, 148, 190
Hine, Lewis, 19, 102 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 5, 8, 14, 16,
Hochman, Gilberto, 213 21, 23–24, 126–30, 138–87,
Huitoto people, 12, 13, 16, 22, 88, 189, 190, 195, 228, 235–36; on
94, 97, 100, 101, 107–11, 120– art, 139–41, 266n26, 266n28,
22, 208–10; Omarino and Ricudo 267nn31–32, 267nn36–37;
(Arédomi), 113–18, 119, 122; emotional style of, 175, 272n86;
photograph of scarred boy, 91–93, indifference to avant-garde,
95–96, 118 269n49; on memory, 149–52;
humanitarianism, 10, 11, 12, 19, 21, on myth, 141, 151; photography
84, 131, 136; Casement and, 22, and, 23, 126, 128–29, 138, 142–
84, 89, 91, 98–99; history of, 18; 46, 152–87, 235, 239, 269n49,
photography and, 17–19, 243n37; 271n70, 272n75
term usage, 257n3 Lévi-Strauss, Dina, 23, 24, 126, 127,
129, 147, 157, 159, 174, 228,
Ikishima, Artur, 51 270n53
Imbert, Claude, 127, 264n8 Lévi-Strauss, Matthieu, 183, 187,
indexicality (of photographs), 10, 273n89
11, 38, 122–23, 129, 159, 167, Lima, Jorge de, 220
255n85; defined, 259n27, 282n7 Lima, Nísia Trindade, 211, 213, 223
Innes, Alfred Mitchell, 91 Lombroso, Cesare, 118
Ipureu, Roberto, 170–71, 172 looking: modes of, 9; phenomenology
of, 8, 191, 194, 198; politics of, 12,
Jacobs, Carol, 148–49 16–17, 21, 196, 236; practices of,
Jakobson, Roman, 127 6–7, 20
James, William, 101 Lopez, Telê Porto Ancona, 195–96,
Janes, Henry, 93 226, 227
João VI, 238 Louro, José, 130
Lovelace, Carl, 212–13
Kadiwéu people, 8, 21, 128, 129, Lowie, Robert, 272n87
153, 155, 157, 161–69, 171, 172, Lyra, João, 130
174, 175–76; art of, 162–65,
271nn70–71 Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria,
Kaingang people, 8, 160–61 247n18, 250n36; on Conselheiro
Keaton, Buster, 218 and Canudos, 6, 28–29, 30, 33,
Kepkiriwát people, 133–35, 136 35–40, 42–43, 239, 248n26,
Kloppenberg, James, 19, 101 249n31; on photography, 6
Kunigami, Keiji, 196, 205, 211, 223 Madeira-Mamoré Railway, 3–4,
23, 24, 126, 195, 198–206, 214,
labor and laborers, 4, 5, 6, 91, 103, 274n25
274n25; Andrade on, 24, 1951, malaria, 24, 195–96, 210–19, 223
 Index ❘ 305

Malinowski, Bronisław, 135, 144, Nina Rodrigues, Raimundo, 27, 30–

145, 159 31, 36, 42, 254n73
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7 Nogueira, Margarida Guedes (Mag),
Martins, Luciana, 7, 165, 170–71, 198, 228
196, 271n71 Novaes, Sylvia Caiuby, 171
Mauad, Ana Maria, 48 Nunes, Favila, 41
Mauss, Marcel, 160, 269n44, 272n87
Mbaya people, 163 O’Callaghan, Margaret, 87
Mendonça, Lúcio de, 62 Oscar, Arthur, 27, 31, 48
Merquior, José Guilherme, otherness, 15, 16, 22, 30, 42, 68, 80,
267nn31–32 90, 160, 178, 245n4, 270n63
Merrill, Dana, 7–8, 199–202,
274n25 Paternoster, Sydney (Scrutator), 84–
Miranda Curió, José de, 31 85
Mitchell, Angus, 86–87, 118 Pedro II, 38–39, 245n7
Mitchell, Timothy, 113 Penteado, Olívia Guedes, 198, 215,
Mitchell, W. J. T., 56, 80, 81, 256n97 220, 227, 228–29, 231
modernism: Andrade and, 24, 192, Peruvian Amazon Company (PAC),
197–98, 227–32, 279n74; coffee 84–85, 90, 91, 93, 98, 99–101,
aristocracy and, 274n20; da Cunha 103–9, 111, 118–20
and, 70 photography, 4–5, 6–10, 11–17,
modernization (and modernity), 4– 125, 135, 234–35, 239–40;
5, 6, 7–9, 12, 20–21, 24–25, 136, anthropometric, 116, 262n65;
137, 140; Andrade and, 189–90, Benjamin on, 9; death and, 39,
195, 203, 211; Casement and, 84; 249n30; documentary, 102,
contemporary, 233–35; da Cunha 115, 255n85; ethics and, 22–23;
and, 29, 33, 66, 74–75, 80; defined, humanitarian, 17–18; landscape,
241n4; divergent views on, 17; 7; memory and, 9; negative views
homo modernus, 241n6, 245n4; of, 125–26; physiognomy and,
Lévi-Strauss and, 128 35–36; reformist, 18–19; “social
montage, 10; Andrade and, 205, 208; biographies” of photographs,
223; Barthes on, 14–15; Casement 14; Sontag on, 15, 17–18;
and, 122; Lévi-Strauss and, 23, technological developments in, 6,
150 21, 43, 44–45, 87, 125, 250n37;
Morais, Prudente de, 48 temporality of, 4, 9, 13, 14, 15, 17,
morality, 101, 106 135, 150, 189, 195, 221. See also
Moreira César, Antônio, 39, 40–41 captioning; cropping; indexicality;
Morel, E. D., 115, 257n3 and under featured writers
Museu Nacional (Rio de Janeiro), 38, photojournalism, 21, 43, 61, 250n37
42, 133, 147, 237–39 physiognomy, 35–36, 42, 78, 106,
118
Nambikwara people, 129–30, 138– Pinney, Christopher, 138, 144, 145,
40, 147, 153, 159, 164, 174–79, 152, 185
183, 184–85 Poignant, Roslyn, 144, 145
Navitski, Rielle, 37, 61 Poole, Deborah, 12, 262n61
New Imperialism, 99 positivism, 7, 35, 65, 80
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 190, 273n7 Poussin, Nicolas, 141
306 ❘ Index

Price, Rachel, 78 rubble, 3, 6, 10–11, 241n1

Prosser, Jay, 166, 272n73 Ruby, Jay, 144
Proust, Marcel, 149–50, 151 ruins, 10–11, 54, 57–59, 130, 234,
psychiatry, 35, 42 239–40; “ruin-gazing,” 57, 252n58
psychoanalysis, 150
Putumayo atrocities, 5, 12, 16, 17, Sahlins, Marshall, 265n23
85–112, 118–19; Select Committee Saldaña Rocca, Benjamin, 98
on, 86 salvage anthropology, 116, 122
Sánchez Labrador, José, 162–63
race issues: da Cunha and, 66–68; Santos, Silvino, 104
miscegenation, 30–31, 66–67; Scarry, Elaine, 11, 91
racialities, 19, 245n4; racialization, scars, 11, 22, 84, 88, 89, 91, 95, 101,
6, 22, 64, 66, 214; racial 120
knowledge, 22; scientific racism, seeing. See gaze; looking
30, 36, 118, 236; tropical medicine Sekula, Alan, 40
and, 277n45, 277n48 self-determination, 65–66, 73, 241n6,
railways, 2, 3–4, 5, 7–8. See also 245n4
Madeira-Mamoré Railway Serra do Norte Expedition, 129, 174
reforms and reformism, 18–19, 68 sertão and sertanejos defined, 20–21
Reis, Luiz Thomaz, 130, 136–37 Serviço de Proteção ao Índio (SPI),
representation, 16, 20, 23, 66; Lévi- 130, 136, 147, 161, 263n2
Strauss and, 140, 142 Simonis, Yvan, 267n31
responsibility, 17, 19, 86, 88, 105–6; Sliwinski, Sharon, 18
collective, 13; ethical, 217; moral, Smith, Amanda, 275n27
87, 101; political, 104 social Darwinism, 30, 32, 35
Revolta Armada, 43–44 Sontag, Susan, 15, 17–18, 77, 104
Reyes, Rafael, 103 Souza, Gilda de Mello e, 280n80
Roberts, Charles, 86 Spanish imperialism, 99–100
Robuchon, Eugène, 104–5, 262n52 spectatorship. See looking
Rodriguez Lira, Manuel, 104 Spencer, Herbert, 35, 254n73
Rondon, Candido Mariano da Silva, Stepan, Nancy, 212
130–36, 138, 147, 263n2 Stoler, Ann, 10–11
Rondon Commission (Comissão structuralism, 127, 150, 152, 162,
Rondon), 8, 129–30, 135–38, 159, 173, 267n31
174, 182–83, 263n2 Sweet, Timothy, 56–57
Rosenbaum, Charlotte, 130, 136–37 symbolism, 162–63, 169
Rosenberg, Fernando, 227
Rothenstein, William, 135 Taine, Hippolyte, 32, 65, 253n69,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 182, 236, 253n71
266n24 Taussig, Michael, 87, 95, 99, 178
rubber industry, 3, 5, 12, 13, 17, Tavares, Odorico, 51
20–21, 22–23, 83–84, 120, 187, telegraph lines (and telegraphy), 4,
189, 212; advanced vs. primitive 5, 23, 39, 48, 126, 136. See also
systems, 260n35; in Africa, 98–99, Rondon Commission
102; Casement on, 85, 94, 97, 98– testimonies, 87, 90, 95, 258n17
99, 119 Thomson, John, 115, 117
 Index ❘ 307

Tiriyó people, 133 Vargas, Getúlio. See Estado Novo

top hats, 40, 249n31, 250n34 Vellard, Jean, 129, 147, 174
tourism, 3–4, 24, 146. See also Verger, Pierre, 51
Andrade, Mário Veríssimo, José, 62, 246n15
“trace” concept, 9–10, 12 Vida de uma aldeia Bororo, A
Trachtenberg, Alan, 18–19, 102, (Baker), 170–17
261n44 Vier von der Infanterie (Pabst), 205
trees: Casement on, 94; fires
and, 233; lumber, 194, 208; in Ward, Herbert, 114–15
photographs, 93, 159; scars on, Webb, Sidney, 101
22, 93 Whiffen, Thomas, 90
Tsing, Anna, 6, 8, 11, 189, 235 Wiseman, Boris, 163, 166, 264n10,
Tupi-Kawahib people, 128, 129, 151, 267n31
155, 164, 174–75, 179–82, 183– Wounded Knee massacre, 43
84; Mundé group, 180–82 Wylie, Lesley, 113, 262n64
Tuyuka and Tukano people, 136–37
Zilly, Berthold, 50, 70
Uriarte, Javier, 258n16
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