To browse Academia. From Antiquity to Modernity, the topic of the Amazons questioned the relationships between men and women, triggering a series of anthropological, social and cultural issues.
It is a grandiose political and mythical colonial invention. It is a place that has been and is discursively, territorially, and emotionally conceptualized, managed over the last five centuries by and through various processes of globalization and nation-building that situate the Amazon as a radically exotic alterative to civilization. This relationship spectacularly and simultaneously reproduces both the long-standing modern separation of nature and culture, as well as the gendered, eroticized, racialized, and aestheticized framing of the colonial encounter.
The Amazon is portrayed as a virgin, wild, seductive, treacherous, and cursed land that must be cleared, penetrated, subjugated, fertilized, integrated, civilized, whitened, rationalized, etc. The economies engendered by the different nations that have "cleared" the Amazon were and still are fundamentally thought of as masculine. They are necessarily conceived from outside as heroic frontier expansion resulting in settlement, national reproduction, and urbanization.
Thus charged with a heavy mytho-conceptual load Serje, , the processes through which the Amazon is constantly reinvented and re conceptualized produce a series of specific and diverse intersectional arrangements.
These arrangements are effects of-and implicated in-historical processes of colonial occupation and economic expansion as well as forms of resistance. From the s to the s, social scientists and geographers studied the Brazilian Amazon under the rubric of "frontiers and fronts of expansion" and in terms of the "authoritarian capitalism" Velho, , spearheaded by the alliances constructed between the region's various states and large corporations.
