Article ID: CBB918477482

Meaningful Clearings: Human-Ant Negotiated Landscapes in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (January 2021)

unapi

This article explores the conflicts between people and Atta leafcutter ants over the meaning of anthropogenic deforestation in nineteenth-century Brazil. As human agricultural settlement advanced, ants followed in its wake, harvesting leaves, flowers, fruits, and other plant parts from crops to supply their underground fungus gardens. In so doing, the ants, as semiotic selves, interpreted what humans had done and acted accordingly, producing historically consequential environmental change in the process. An examination of primary sources such as legislation, travel journals, agricultural manuals, government administrative documentation, and newspapers for human-ant conversations demonstrates how interspecies sense making has fueled social innovations and rearrangements, shaping technical developments, legal-administrative practices, parliamentary discussions, and even local electoral arenas. By taking written documents as surviving structures of embodied, more-than-symbolic conversations, this analysis both takes its cue from, and helps substantiate, what Ewa Domanska has termed a “multispecies co-authorship” approach to human-animal relations. It argues that such a theoretical-methodological stance helps environmental historians account for nonhuman agency by allowing the exploration of animals’ truly creative, rather than merely resistive, behavior.

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Authors & Contributors
Ana María Ochoa Gautier
de la Torre, Oscar
Braddock, Alan C.
Lai, Franco
Dylan Simon
Batten, Bruce L.
Concepts
Nature and its relationship to culture; human-nature relationships
Environment
Environmental history
Historiography
Rivers
Science and culture
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
Medieval
21st century
17th century
Places
North America
China
Brazil
Levant and Near East
England
Sardinia
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