Into the bowels of tropical earth: Leaf-cutting ants and the colonial making of agrarian Brazil
Highlights
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- Leaf-cutting ants have limited Eurasian crops and agricultural practices.
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- Wheat was one of the few exotic crops spared by the ants.
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- Sugar plantations were safe as long as located in the lowlands and in vertisols.
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- Eighteenth-century growth generated forest fragmentation and range expansion for the ants.
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- In the wake of pervasive land-change, it is possible that ant social organization has changed.
Abstract
In
this article, I build upon Warren Dean's hypothesis that if there were
more effective means to combat leaf-cutting ants in the colonial era the
agrarian history of Brazil would have been entirely different. Using
the wealth of scientific research that emerged in the last thirty years,
along with experiential accounts from colonial times, I try to portray
leaf-cutting ants as non-human actors that actively participated in the
drama of the Portuguese colonization of America. Biogeographically
restricted to the Neotropics, leaf-cutting ants and their horticultural
system – underground fungal gardens grown with compost made of freshly
cut pieces of leaves, flowers and fruits – posed a major challenge for
Portuguese farmers, who were completely unfamiliar with those social
insects. The analysis of how the ant activity has shaped the European
croplands – including the native crops grown by Europeans, such as
cassava – casts a new light on certain fundamental developments of the
rural economy, such as the resounding success of sugarcane plantations
and the widespread adoption of the slash-and-burn system. On a higher
level of abstraction, it points to the importance of challenging the
subtle but pervasive notion that New World lands were lifeless and
isotropic surfaces for European colonial settlement. As far as the
actual tilling of the earth is concerned, Brazilian native lands were
not the blank background in colonial cadastral maps, but vibrant
life-sites in whose bosom local and adventitious species and cultures
negotiated their coexistence.
Keywords
- Leaf-cutting ants;
- Brazilian Atlantic Forest;
- Portuguese colonization;
- Shifting cultivation;
- Sugar plantations;
- Colonial period
Copyright © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
D. C. Cabral
is a geographer with a Masters in Social History and a PhD in
Geography. He was a substitute lecturer at the Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro and a visiting scholar at the University of British
Columbia. Currently he holds the position of Geographer at the Brazilian
Institute of Geography and Statistics. He has been working, for the
last ten years, on the environmental history of the Brazilian coastal
forests. His first book, released on October 2014, is Na Presença da Floresta: Mata Atlântica e História Colonial.
