SPAN 597 Amazonian Visions

This seminar will consider the culture, politics, and ecology of the Amazon through a focus on how diverse groups of inhabitants and outsiders have viewed the region and the visual images and practices of visuality through which it has been mediated. Over the semester we will view films, photographs, paintings, and digital works, and we will read literary texts, ethnographic writings, and critical articles on a wide range of topics that will include the following: the use of traditions such as featherwork by contemporary Indigenous artists; Indigenous beliefs regarding minerals such as gold that lie hidden beneath the ground; opera and public festivals in urban Amazonia; GPS mapping projects involving scientists, conservationists, and Indigenous groups; the visual politics of state-led development projects and the construction of infrastructure linked to the extraction of natural resources; anthropological discussions of what is known as Amerindian perspectivism; and shamanic visions and ayahuasca tourism. Among the questions we will ask: What kinds of literary and artistic experimentation have arisen from the challenges of seeing and depicting Amazonia? How do different groups of Amazonians and outsiders conceptualize vision and its relationship to sound and other senses? Historically, what role have specific types of media technologies such as photography and film played in shaping ideas about the region? And how is the way we see the Amazon today conditioned by our increasingly keen sense of its ecological precarity? This class will be conducted in English, and all materials will be available in English. Students in SIP will be expected to use their knowledge of Spanish and Portuguese to access materials in those languages in the original.