Ana María Durán Calisto

Caitlin Morrissey 

Ana, what is an Amazon City, and what makes a city an Amazon City?

Ana Durán 

Well, that is an incredibly difficult question to respond when it comes to the Amazon because one thing that I realised reading about it for so many years is that the city in Amazonia does not in any way overlap our expectations of the urban. And I guess that what I would do is refer to cities in three approaches that we tend to use within the theories of urbanism. So we sometimes focus on the aspects of the urban, which in Latin we would call the urbs, which is basically the morphology of the city. The actually-built environment. And of course, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, tend to focus on urbs. They want to see how this phenomenon looks. There’s another approach within urbanism which has to do with the civitas, which comes from citizen. And then the theories of urbanism that focus on the citizen, basically would say, no, the city has nothing to do with the buildings or the form or the morphology. A city without people is not a city. It’s an archaeological site, maybe, but that does not categorise as a city. And so you have urbs, you have civitas. And there’s another approach that is very important and interesting within theories of urbanism, which is the polis, which is basically focusing on systems of power and the relations based on, of course, power relations that are displayed in the urbs, in the city making, and also in the civitas, in terms of how citizens relate to each other. And, of course, those urbanists are focusing on political economy. They’re focusing on governance. They’re focusing on the distribution of power, who gets to have it and deploy it. And then, of course, if you look at urbs, which the archaeologists also focus immensely on urbs, specifically because the archaeologists are scientists and they need to work based on empirical evidence. So what does archaeology have to discuss a city that is not civitas anymore? It does not exist anymore, and that will depend, of course, on the city and where it is located. And there is a certain bias that has to do with the geological and climatic conditions. Cities in deserts, for example, are much better preserved and conserved than cities in a tropical rainforest. So of course, the archaeologist is going to go into a city, and we’ve developed throughout time as humanity, archaeological methods and stratification analysis is probably one of the most basic ones, and it works incredibly well in a context that is drier.

Amazonian archaeology is profoundly interesting precisely because it has had to be, from a disciplinarian methodological perspective, very creative. And I think that archaeology is very revealing of what is a city in Amazonia. And here we get into the ontological question and what anthropologists call the ontological crisis. And I will have to refer a lot to the work of anthropologists and archaeologists because unfortunately, Amazonia is profoundly invisible in the literature of urbanism as a disciplinary field in the west, which is the kind of field that we face as students of the city. And even if we study in Latin America, the pre-Colombian city is profoundly absent. And I’m not even talking about Amazonian cities. That is not even mentioned in the books. I’m even discussing something like that, Tahuantinsuyo, you know, the great Inca quote-unquote ‘empire’. And I say quote-unquote ‘empire’ because, just like with the word city, I have issues with the word ‘empire’ or ‘province’ or any word for that matter, we should be able to describe these cities in their own Indigenous language because they’re very specific linguistic aspects to describe them, and I feel that in the translation definitely a lot gets lost.

But I think that at this point in my life, what I realise is that there has been a profound ontological misunderstanding between western scholars and these cities that were built by the original peoples of the Americas. And why is this ontological question a very important one? Because it has to do with the way we define city, with what urbs, civitas and polis is to us. And in Amazonia, urbs, civitas and polis is something completely different. I’m speaking about the pre-Colombian period right now. We’ll go into the modern period as well, which is a hybrid of that deep history. But let’s use the palimpsest as a system of organisation of our thoughts because it’s a very long history.

The oldest known, at least from the perspective of consensus, the oldest known city in the Amazon is actually in my little country, in Ecuador, which is this wedge country between Colombia and Peru that should not be separate neither from Colombia nor from Peru from an Indigenous perspective. But unfortunately, it’s been fractured by our nation states which fragmented the Spanish Empire in many, many little pieces to the detriment of the original peoples of the Americas because there are more than 100 original nations that have been fragmented between two, sometimes three, sometimes even four nations. So it’s from their perspective, is profoundly disturbing, that part of the family is on one side and the other one on the other, and the wars and the, you know, the conflicts have caused the separations that very often the centres of power are completely unaware of and probably don’t even care. From my perspective, I think Latin America it’s about time we unify in a common market, in a union, there’s no future for us unless we do so. And I say that, not only from a capitalist, neoliberal perspective, don’t get me wrong. I say this from the perspective of our deep history and from the perspective of the rivers. Okay, but I tend to digress. So I’m going to go track back.

Let’s go back to urbs, civitas and polis and why they are so profoundly different in the western ontology, or let’s say, western archaeology and the Indigenous perspective. In the west, archaeology has built its theories, and it has been actually highly impactful in urban theories based on what it encountered in Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean world. So when we think of a city from the urbs perspective, and I’m talking about the pre-modern city here, I’m not talking about industrial cities. That’s a complete rupture in the urban history, and that’s a completely different city. But in terms of pre-modern cities, what you see there is that you have, you know, a unit with a wall. And Mumford talks a lot about this wall that circumscribes the compact city, which does have orchards. I look a lot at agroecology, and I look a lot at agriculture and the urban and the agricultural as part of the Neolithic, you know, and the urban revolution. And these are inseparable aspects that we need to look at, especially in Amazonia. So you have this wall, the compact city within some oil charts that are basically needed in case of war because if the city gets sieged, you better be able to feed yourself within the walls because you’ve been separated from the rural areas beyond and beyond the rural areas, you have the hinterlands. So it’s almost this concentric model of the city, the countryside and the forest, the mountains, anything else beyond them, in terms of the hinterlands, from where you do extract other resources. And then in that sense, in the Amazon the urbs is completely different. I don’t want to generalise because the level of heterogeneity of Amazonian cities is immense. Just to give you a sense of it, right now we speak in Amazonia more than 300 languages, and the linguists estimate that at the time of the Spanish Invasion, there were probably about a thousand or more. So we’ve already lost almost 700. And the architecture is like language. And many architects actually theorise about architecture based on, you know, linguistic and semantic studies. So if we think about it in an analogous way, you can imagine the amount of architectures and city forms that must have existed in the Amazon and exist today actually, because there are incredible Indigenous settlements in the Amazons that are understudied and completely understudied.

But if we think in terms of like principles and patterns, just like in Europe, we can unveil a pattern like Mumford does in terms of this image of the European city that we have in the eye of the brain, and we see when we think of a city, is this compact city with the wall and the rural area beyond. Pretty binary, I would say, in terms of the urban and the agricultural. That’s not the case in the Amazon. And one pattern that I have found not just for Amazonian cities, but I would argue that for the cities of the original peoples of the Americas overall, even if we discuss the Tenochtitlan, which is the Ancient Mexico or the Chancas of the Inca, is that the way they thought about the city. First, there’s never a binary. These are ‘cities’, quote-unquote, this is an urbs and rurbs, I do need to add the ‘r’, that never, ever, ever separated the rural from the urban. They’re completely integrated. And if you connect it to contemporary theories of the Amazon, it’s fascinating because Bertha Becker, for example, is quoted over and over and over again in the literature, this Brazilian geographer who started writing about the cities in the Amazon in the ‘70s, wrote a lot in the ‘80s, ‘90s, all the way into this century. She called it a ‘floresta urbana’ in Portuguese, ‘the urban forest’. So the binary is broken again.

And now contemporary scholars like, for example, Tatiana Schor, who’s at the Inter-American Development Bank, are talking about the ruralisation of the urban and there’s agroforestry in the city. So again, the binary breaks down. So what you see in the Amazon is that it’s impossible to talk about it based on binaries that may function in the west. So that’s very important to understand for the future of the Amazon.

The other thing that is fundamental to understand for the future of the Amazon is that the basic unit of urban formation in Amazonia is an agroecology, is what we in Quechua or Kichwa would call the chakra. It’s a very common word in Latin America, chakra, we all use it, and now we generally use it as a synonym for the orchard, but we need to understand what it really means in Amazonia. It’s a polyculture. I have documented chakras with the Shuar, the Kichwa, the Siekopai and the Waorani, who call them kewenkori or aja. Each culture that I’ve worked with in Amazonia has a word for it. So linguistically, it’s very interesting. And of course, they’re profoundly heterogeneous. I don’t want to essentialise here, but we’re talking about principles and patterns so that we don’t essentialise. And in terms of principles, what you see is that the chakra is a polyculture, and scientists have-- ethnobotanists have been studying these chakras for decades, and many of them have been described for many cultures in Amazonia, and you have say between 50 to 200 ‘useful’, quote-unquote species, very utilitarian approach, of course, from science that has nothing to do with Amazonians. For Amazonians, this is a society of nature. That’s why ontology matters. So I do want to clarify that because the western science speaks about Amazonia in terms that are not sacred and that are not animistic, and that is doing a disservice to Amazonians. And I do want to make that point clear.

So in a utilitarian western fashion, we would say that they have something like between 50 and 200 on average, let’s say 70, 75, 100 species that are useful. Useful for what? The chakra provides, many foodstuffs, the basic staple foods in the Amazon, manioc, baby corn, plantains, papaya, you know, some species have been incorporated, have been brought by the Europeans, sometimes through Asia, sometimes through Africa. Other species have been domesticated in the Amazon, like manioc or cacao for that matter, and they-- or peanuts. So they have their staple foods, but they also have medicinal plants that are continuously used. They also have fibres that they use, whether it’s, you know, for dresses, for textiles, for basketry, for all sorts of cultural artefacts. And they also have the construction materials. So generally, for example, when a child is born in the Amazon, a chakra is born with the child, the materials for his first home. So you grow up with your architecture, so to speak. Resources are treated cyclically, just like, you know, the life cycle of any human and the chakra provides also, you know, perfumes, oils, resins, all sorts of things, rubber is an Amazonian species as well. Tons of species that we use are Amazonian. And at least 25% of the medicines that we have synthesised in, you know, the world of biotechnologies and pharmaceuticals are originally from the Amazon. So these incredibly agrobiodiverse monumental forest, we are realising, because of this unit, is highly anthropogenic. So now we have lots of literature on it. 50 years ago, these anthropologies and ethnographers and ethnobotanists were considered completely insane, but time is proving them right, luckily for Amazonian peoples.

So they started realising working with Amazonians, planting with Amazonians, documenting, and this is where science plays an incredibly positive role-- they started realising that Amazonia was highly anthropogenic, which means highly cultivated and that has to do with the city because this basic unit of planning, so to speak, which is a chakra with a home or a system of homes, very often collective homes, so even that, we need to switch our western preconceptions, these are not unitary families. These are not mom, dad and kids. This is a collective house, a maloca. And sometimes they’re huge, and you can have 100 people living in one maloca. And so what you have is this maloca, or system of malocas, with a chakra, which is a highly agrobiodiverse ecology. So we’re facing a culture that designs and constructs ecologies, micro ecologies, let’s call them, as a basic unit of planning. Contemporary planners need to understand that the western city in Amazonia has failed systematically. We need to support chakra build-up again. So now you have to imagine thousands of chakras being designed in a larger community, in a larger ayllu, to use Kichwa terms. And I know this is a very colonial thing to do because it’s one of the few languages that the Jesuits considered worthy of being perpetrated into the future and many other languages they thought we don’t need them. Because Amazonia linguistically has been a very multilingual, multiethnic society where intermarriage, alliances and mixtures were desirable and pursued, and even today, the Indigenous movement of Ecuador, for example, and Indigenous movements everywhere fight for what they call the multinational state. Because for them, it is not an issue if there are 10 languages in a region, it is not an issue if these 10 groups have different religious practices, different religious elites, different everything. They can come together. They can intermix. They go to warfare as well. This type of very polycentric, highly heterogeneous system can also be, you know, complicated, sometimes there are frictions as well. No system is perfect or ideal. But I do appreciate the capacity that Amazonians have had historically and even today, for coexisting with difference and not just coexisting with it but considering it desirable because that’s at the core of the diversity at all levels in Amazonia. Because it’s not just biodiversity, it’s linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, religious diversity, and there are underlying principles that bring them all together, like animism, perspectivism and the sacredness of nature.

Greg Clark 

I just want to ask you, Ana, what you’re saying is incredibly rich and indeed beguiling in so many ways. Can you talk a little bit about food, river and the idea of, you know, belief system, imagination? This would be helpful, I think, to hear a little bit about.

Ana Durán

Yeah, this is very important. Okay, and there we go back into the ontological crisis that I was digressing from. The ontological crisis is important because, and here, I have to use western terms to be able to mediate between worlds. For Amazonians, there is no separation between culture and nature, that’s another binary that is profoundly western but makes absolutely no sense in their world. There’s not even a notion of a nation as-- I’m sorry, there’s not even a notion of nature as something separate. And it’s interesting that I unintentionally state the word nation because there is no hierarchical state either, and this is very important in terms of polis.

But again, let’s focus on the relationship with quote-unquote ‘nature’. In Amazonia, there’s no word for nature as that separate other, as that container or abstract entity. It’s a world of enmeshments and entanglements where there’s no hierarchy of beings. So if we imagine, for example, in the ways that pyramid, humans at the top, of course, God above them, humans, unfortunately, in past histories, subhumans have appeared in that hierarchy, and we still haven’t overcome that, animals, plants, rocks. It’s a very hierarchical understanding of nature that has even affected the way in which we create biological taxonomies. In Amazonia, that is beyond understanding. It does not belong to their ontology. In Amazonia, it’s really about these interrelationships between beings that have exactly the same status, from the perspective of the sacredness of life.

Philippe Descola, an anthropologist whose work I profoundly admire and actually changed my life when I was a young student and read his book, which has been translated into English as In the Society of Nature. It’s a book that he wrote based on his ethnographic work among the Achuar, a group that lives between Ecuador and Peru in the Amazon right now. They’re amazing, the Achuar, and Phillippe lived with them, worked with them, and wrote this La Nature Domestique, I think it is in French and in Spanish, they translated it to La Selva Culta. And I say it because I think it’s actually, you know, in each language it has a slightly different connotation, but in English, it’s The Society of Nature and it is useful and I think the translation is great. Whomever translated that book did a great job because what they’re trying to say is that we’re not here facing a society in which the contract is only social, a social contract, so to speak. It’s really a contract among all beings. It’s a society that is not just human. So in the west, when we think about society, or we use the word social, we imagine a human society. And what the scholar is trying to say is, in the Amazon, you cannot do that because the social in the Amazon includes all beings. It includes the parrots, the monkeys that appears, the manioc, the chonta, the sacred plants, the sacred animals, the sacred rivers, the sacred forest, the sacred rocks. They’re all beings. They’re ancestors. They are an intellect, an intelligence, and they’re alive, as alive as you are. And they have rights. So when we speak about the rights of nature, which right now is, I think, an important debate and conversation in the west that is coming from the demands of Indigenous peoples, and we need to be aware of it because these are not western ideas, and we tend to erase Indigenous authors from everything they propose. These are western ideas. These are, I mean, western interpretations of Indigenous ideas. So we put it in our terms. So we say the rights of nature, the beyond the human, the non-human.

There’s another famous anthropologist who also worked in Ecuador, actually grew up there. He’s a child of the Second World War. His family migrated to Ecuador during the Nazi-era. And the grandmother of these anthropologist was very interested in Indigenous peoples, so he grew up sort of surrounded by artefacts and going to the Amazon. And eventually wrote a book, which I think is another fabulous mediator between the west and Amazonia, which is titled How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. So, again, another, again, he’s iterating, and it’s a very dense, very complex book, but I think he manages to get this incredibly complex way of thinking of Amazonian peoples, you know, to the west that has had such a hard time understanding Amazonia. He’s basically talking about this intelligence, this intellect, again, the society of nature. Not only humans have the qualifications or the talent to think in the society of nature. Everybody thinks. Everybody participates. Everybody’s in the intellect, everybody learns. And this is something that, you know, has caused I would say, what would be the word in English? Burla, you know, Amazonians have been, and I would say that the Native Americans, or the original peoples and nations of the Americans in general, have been made fun of by the west. But suddenly, in the 21st century, you know, we’re all talking about the rights of nature, suddenly we have Gaia, which is basically stating what they’ve always said. Suddenly, you know, we are-- we know through DNA, and I loved the fact that you guys posed DNA as a topic because that is really expressive of how Amazonians think. We know through DNA that nature is basically a system of knowledge, brilliant system of knowledge, all this information, all this knowledge is embedded in DNA. And it’s continuously being reshaped by environmental changes, by changes in-- by social changes, by cultural changes, by all sorts of changes. And knowledge in the Amazon works that way as well. So Amazonians tend to prefer knowledge that is orally transmitted, that has also been profoundly underestimated by the west who prefers fixed, you know, archived in knowledge. Because they say that each generation, and here, I should quote, I’m referring to Davi Kopenawa’s book The Falling Sky. He says we like to think of knowledge as something that is also alive, like everything. So why fix it? Each generation should be able to, once again, mutate it, mould it to respond to new circumstances. So knowledge is considered also in a very dynamic living way. And they always speak in the courthouses when they’re fighting against oil companies and mining companies and agribusiness, that the territory is alive, that why does the west treat it as a resource, as a dead resource?

So for them, it’s horrifying that we would kill a river. Because for them, the river is, you know, completely alive, it’s the ancestors under a new form. So we need to get into the animism understanding of nature, the animistic understanding of nature in the sense that everything is animated and the energies flow, and they may acquire a different physical, formal manifestation, but they remain a substance that is also, you know, dynamically being reshaped. So, for example, a jaguar is not seen as an animal without a soul and without an intelligence. It’s seen as part of the society of nature. And that jaguar may be a grandfather, a grandmother, an ancestor, or a powerful spirit of sorts. So the relationship with that jaguar is obviously going to be very different from a relationship that you would establish if you just perceive it as an animal that feeds you as a resource, as foodstuff.

So it’s hard to understand the Amazonian City unless we understand how Amazonians think about the territory as a living territory. The city is cultivated more than anything else. So when we’re looking for architectures or monumental architectures in the Mediterranean or Mesopotamian sense, we are not going to find it. We’re not going to find those monumentalities, but we are going to find another type of monumentality, and archaeologists have been writing a lot about it, and this has to do with the urbs component of the Amazonian City.

Amazonians have moved immense quantities of soil, and soil is important in the Amazon, and that is already very revealing because when we talk about Mesopotamian cities, or we talk about Mediterranean cities, or, for that matter, Chinese cities, there are many more civilisations, Egyptian cities, you know, the Hindu Valley cities, we tend to not really think about soil, not the first thing that comes to mind. In Amazonia, it’s the first thing that comes to mind. Why? Because the main index of settlement in Amazonia is Terra Preta, which are the dark soils of the Amazon and Terra Mulata which are brown soils. And this is an important index because one of the main arguments against civilisation in Amazonia in the early days of a modern archaeology in the Amazon, which-- I’m speaking about the days of Stewart and Meggers and environmental determinism, their main argument and their theory is known as cultural ecology which basically states that culture is a by-product of the environment. It’s an adaptive mechanism. So they’re profoundly influenced by evolutionary theory, by Darwin, since we’re, you know, having a conversation with England here, and by Social Darwinism. So culture was perceived as that adaptation. And what the environmental determinist, the theoreticians were saying was that because in the Amazon there are acidic soils that are not fertile, there could have never been intensive agriculture, therefore there could have never been the groundwork to support civilisation. So they discarded civilisation as an option.

But what completely changed that was that some ethno-- well, two things predominantly changed that. One was that ethnobotanists were studying the chakras, the polycultures of the Amazon. And they were like, but wait a minute, the Amazon is profoundly productive. I mean, these nations, are not starving. There’s an abundance that can be achieved through these type of agricultural technologies. And they call them agroecologists. And on the other hand, they started realising, and this is where my, my advisor at UCLA, comes into play, Susana Hecht who was working with Darrell Posey, which are sort of like the, you know, spearheading in a way this way of thinking about the soil and the polyculture. Susana is, among other things, a soil scientist. And she was studying how the Amazonians manage aspects of the forest that have to do with soil generation. So basically, they were biocharring. So she explains how they use this blue fire, as she calls it, which is not the red fire that you see everywhere in the Amazon right now, thanks to agribusiness and the soybean plantations and the African palm plantations. They were not burning the Amazon. They were smoking the biomass, which means that they were biocharring. They’re creating fertile soil on the one hand, this is creating the type of Terra Mulata that we have up to this very day. But they also were composting. They were in their middens; they were managing all the debris of cities. So they managed the waste incredibly well. That’s another thing that we need to learn, in terms of modern Amazonian cities from ancient Amazonian cities, how to manage this waste. And, you know, everything would go into it, bones, fish, bones, shells, leaves, all sorts of things. And the Terra Pretas of the Amazon actually are much more biodiverse in terms of, you know, their microscopic life than their adjacent soils. So Amazonians created a highly fertile, highly biodiverse soil, and this is the foundation of their civilisations, the soil and the chakra. And I’m sorry that I keep on going back to it, but it’s like, literally, the main unit that we need to imagine, you know, accretes incrementally into a monumental ecology.

Greg Clark 

Ana, I missed one bit from what you said, which is, how was the soil moved? And why was the soil moved?

Ana Durán

Let’s go back. That’s more architectural. That’s the other type of monumentality. Oh, my God, so much information. So on the one hand, you have these biological, agro-biodiverse monumentality, the forest buildup, but on the other hand, you have more architectural or landscape architectural monumentality, if you wish, which has been described in detail by archaeologists like Erickson here at the University of Pennsylvania working in the Beni with local archaeologists from Bolivia which has to do with moundbuilding, which is another profoundly quote-unquote, ‘Native American’, I should say, First Nation approach because you have moundbuilders in the Amazon. And Anna Roosevelt wrote a beautiful book title, precisely the Moundbuilders of the Amazon. You have moundbuilders in the Mississippi, not very different from the Amazon. You have moundbuilders everywhere. So what we’re discovering, for example--

Greg Clark 

Is it a spiritual activity, or it’s a social activity, the building of the mounds?

Ana Durán

It has to do with everything because everything is, in a way, sacred in this animistic, perspectivistic culture. But it also has to do with let’s call them poetic geotechnologies. Poetic eco-geo-hydro technologies. It’s hard to talk about the Amazon. So sorry. Sometimes I struggle with the words. But for example, some of this earth was moved to create what we know in Mexico as chinampas; in Ecuador or other places as camellones; in Peru Waru Waru which are basically raised fields that are, you know, that are flanked by canals that were used also for transportation. So what you have, and these they understood-- Denevan, William Denevan is very important in this regard because with aerial photography, what he started realising is that these chinampas were all over the place. They had them in Bogotá, in Guayaquil, in Quito, you know, all over Peru, in Bolivia, in Mexico, in other places. So he started mapping. And of course, they’re different, but the principles are the same. So there are macro landscapes, ginormous. I think this is not a small scale of chinampas, for example, in the Beni, Bolivia. So it’s about, you know, these agro-technologies and these are sprinkled with forest islands, which are the mounds. So they move massive amounts of earth to build the mounds because these you know that in Amazonia, it floods, and floods are very extensive because it’s so flat. So they had mounds as part of their flood management system. We’re all talking about climate change. We’re worried. We talk about resilience. Modern cities learn from Amazonians. They were moundbuilders for a reason.

Another model is the bluff model. They lived on bluffs. And this is a theory by Denevan as well. They lived on bluffs precisely because they had to be in a space that was safe from flooding. So they’re moving these immense quantities of earth to create fish wares. They had incredible aquaculture systems. They’re creating ponds, and they’re creating systems to harvest fish. They’re creating systems to make Amazonia an incredibly productive space. And something that we need to keep in mind is that just like with the Inca, and the Inca, the one in Tahuantinsuyo and I like thinking about the Andes and the Amazonians simultaneously because these are not separate things, and these networks were coastal Andean and Amazonian. So what you learn from the Andeans helps you understand Amazonians, and what you learn from Amazonians, help you understand the Andeans. But what you see is that they’re enhancing. And this is polemic. Some people will say, ‘Oh, Ana Maria, you’re idealising. Haven’t you heard about the Maya collapse?’ You know, there’s obviously an immense transformation of the landscape going on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t work, but when it works, we need to pay attention.

And backtracking, where I was heading is that when you look at the one from Tahuantinsuyo, for example, when you look at terracing systems or chinampa systems, you know that they’re occupying the marginal lands because the naturally fertile lands of the floodplains have already been occupied and are already productive. So technology comes into place when we’re pushing those limits. So imagine how expansive these systems were that they occupied such large territories and made them very abundant. It’s because these cultures extended beyond imagination, and that’s another imaginary that’s changing. From ethnography, we have been describing Amazonians as this sparsely settled, you know, small nomadic clans that are running around. And what we are discovering is that the Americas, not just Amazonia, were highly populated for 16th century levels. I’m not talking about the industrial world. I do need to emphasise that. And they had been able to populate such immense expanses of geography because they had incredible technologies. So when you look, for example, at the Arawakan expansion, there are four main linguistic families in the Amazon. One is the Arawakan family. The other one is the Tupí-Guaraní, and the other one is the Gè and the other one is the Carib family. And lots of, you know, within that sub-families but these are the four main ones of many more. I think it’s about a hundred that we still have. But when you look, for example, at the Arawakan expansion, and again, I don’t want to essentialise, there were many differences. It was a very heterogeneous group, but it had underlying principles and a common underlying language, and their expansion is ten times the way Tahuantinsuyo, the Arawaks were in the Upper Xingu, in the upper, you know, in the Madeira-Mamoré, Beni. They were in the Amazonia of Peru, they were up in Colombia, they were in the Caribbean, in the Orinoco, in Florida. The Arawak expansion is ginormous. And we are not aware, you know, as we should, that the Amazon is, in a way, the cradle of civilisation, from the perspective of domestication of plants, the oldest ceramics in the Americas are also from the Amazon. They’re about 80,00 years old, and it was the Amazonians that domesticated tons of plants that supported civilisation in this continent, including some corns that are the species that are at the core of the development of civilisation in Mesoamerica. So it seems that there were movements because they were completely interrelated, North America and South America. And there were movements back and forth. So some of the corns that arrived into South America were re-domesticated by the Amazonians went back, and the productivity was much greater. They really enhanced corn.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Ana, this has been so fantastic. Thank you so much. I wanted to pick up on something that you said right at the beginning, which is I think I heard you say that in the modern time, perhaps post-industrialisation, cities in the Amazon have a hybrid quality. And I just wanted to ask you, what is being mixed, or what is that hybrid quality as you understand it?

Greg Clark 

Ana, just before you do, I think that’s a brilliant question, and what you’ve been saying is just absolutely fascinating and absorbing, and it has a kind of dream-like quality Ana, that takes you into another part of your consciousness. So I’m really enjoying, I’m really enjoying being with you in this different ontological space. But we do need to bring you back to the ontological crisis. And in a way, I think it would be useful if, after you’ve answered Caitlin’s question, you were able to, in whatever way makes sense to you, make the shift into what you’ve been doing for the Amazon team at the IDB, in terms of the literature review, what do we now know? Or what does western science know about the Amazon and not know?

Ana Durán

I'll respond to Caitlin’s question first, and then we move towards thinking about these two literatures, one that focuses on the modernisation of the Amazon and the literature of the archaeologists which is focusing on the pre-Colombian city because these two literatures are not coming together. And that’s one of the conclusions that I’m writing for the IDB, is that we really need to bring these things together, this common history, because it’s highly invisible in the literature, the pre-Colombian Amazonia. And it shouldn’t.

But anyway, in terms of the hybridity, very important question because what you have to do is imagine, and this has to do with ontology as well, imagine an ontology of the urban that expresses itself in a distributed network. And I have to emphasise the notion of distributed and this is a Deleuzean notion that I’m borrowing through a Peruvian archaeologist, actually. And why is the distributed network important? Because these societies were profoundly heterarchical. And this is another word that comes up in the literature of the pre-Colombian cities, which is that this has to do with polis. This has to do with government and governance systems. An heterarchical system is not hierarchical. The west tends to recognise only hierarchical structures. And if it doesn’t, it tends to discard civilisations as not civilised.

Amazonia was highly heterarchical. And it’s called Amazonia for a reason, women could be, you know, the main transmitters of religious power, if you wish. So what you have there, you have to imagine a network where there is hierarchy but it’s highly horizontal. Imagine more like a field of bumps, if we have to think of a geometry for it, as architects sort of tend to do because we need to visualise things. So imagine a field, a distributed network as a field with bumps. So there are, you know, nodes of power. Not everyone has equal power. But again, power is dynamic. It shifts. So you could have a powerful shaman suddenly eating with everyone, like everyone else. But at a certain moment, say, a moment of war, he suddenly acquires a different status because he needs to lead. But at another moment, there’s no need for him to be at any higher status. And it’s a very different political system that maybe in western terms would be participatory or highly participatory democracy. This played against Indigenous peoples during the invasion, by the way. They never imagined a hierarchical state. And going back to the Tahuantinsuyo, and the ontological crisis, not even the Incas were an empire in the hierarchical state sense of the word. Of course, there was a hierarchy; the Inca was a God, had many wives. But again, you need to use the notion of distributed networks and centralised networks to understand this hybridity. When the Incas started to invade other territories. So what you have is the distributed networks of Indigenous systems that still today because they survive in a fractal, smaller scale, fugitive version, as Heckenberger says. And then you have the centralised networks of the west, which come from a mercantilist structure that was established in the 16th and 17th centuries, or from the networks of the Jesuits and other Catholic groups, which also established a centralised network. So these two networks are meeting at some points but you have in the Amazon the hybridity of both. And what’s amazing about the distributed network is that one network doesn’t necessarily destroy or erase the other. So, for example, the Incas would have their enclaves of their centralised network all over the place as they were expanding, but they became in their vision subnetworks, so to speak, of the cacicazgos, as we call them, the chiefdoms, the heterarchies, persisted. They would just overlap at certain nodes. They were interwoven. But Amazonia worked within the logic of the heterarchy.

And what’s fascinating about the word heterarchy, I’ve been reading a lot about it because I became really obsessed with it, as I profoundly dislike both neo-Marxism and neoliberalism because both destroy the Amazon. Both are extractivist and both are asymmetrical. So for me, neither one is a great solution for the future. But heterarchies were fascinating because what I found through a geographer, McCulloch, I think, is her last name and an archaeologist is that these originated this term in artificial intelligence because as they were developing artificial intelligence, scientists were using a hierarchical structure, and it had limits, and it was limiting the capacity of the system. And artificial intelligence was not, you know, was not fully enhanced, until they realised that they needed to work in a heterarchical fashion, which means that these needed to function as a collective intelligence, as a heterarchy in which power is highly distributed. That means that you’re harnessing the intelligence of thousands of nodes. When you have centralised power, intelligence can actually be reduced, and I feel that we’re finally realising that we need to go back to collective intelligence, that centralisation is maybe not the best way to go into the future, and that we, maybe even we need to rethink geopolitics. And from the perspective of the Amazon, as someone who does not believe in the nation states of South America, sorry, but at this point in my life, after so much research, I don’t. They have created political ecologies that are profoundly harmful. And you see it in the borders. You see it on the side of Bolivia and the side of Brazil, the side of Colombia, the side of Ecuador. You see different political ecologies being deployed. And what I think is that we should go back to redefining geopolitics from the perspective of the rivers.

So could we think of ourselves in the future from a planning perspective if we managed to finally, for example, integrate South America into one common market, one commonwealth, as we should. And then we start thinking, for example, of Iquitos as the main node down river of the network of the Ucayali, the Marañón, the Napo and the Pastaza, as it was in the past, where these hybrid cities, these hybrid cultures, would meet. So you would have some of them coming down one river, some of them coming down the other, different cultures, different ritual approaches, different heterarchies, but they’re all coming together in one ceremonial node, which is Iquitos. And they would do it. It was always pulsing. And they would exchange knowledge. They would exchange products. They would exchange everything, sometimes wives. And then, you know, go back to their territories. Could we reimagine South America from the perspective of the rivers and up-river cities, down-river cities, Meso river cities? What does that imply for Ecuador, Peru and Colombia and Brazil, for example? If I think specifically from my little perspective of Quito? That would imply that our borders are as fluid as they used to be. That doesn’t mean that people didn’t respect territories. There was a hybrid, also of private property and what you could call in western terms, communal property, although ultimately, there was no property. The earth belongs to itself at a philosophical level. But what if, you know, we had these hybrid like communal territories still preserved in South America, in Indigenous territories, in reservas extractivistas in Brazil, in Quilombos, Because Afro-Indigenous communities are also fascinating, and we also need to look at them. We would have a system in which, yes, just like right now, you know, the Aja is sacred, profoundly respected in some cultures, is associated with women, in some others, it’s not, in some, it’s treated collectively. But you have this space, which is, you know, the sacred space saying culture of the woman who planted it and cares for it and manages it and the house is her house, but it’s communal territory. There are different ways of being in this world, from the perspective of property, from the perspective of power, from the perspective of the city, of an agroecological constellation, interconnected, communing of units of macroecological city making.

We can think about things differently, I feel, and that’s what I’ve learned from Amazonia, the hegemony, the hegemonic way of thinking had limited me to see beyond those standards and Amazonia has taught me that there’s an immense diversity that we’re missing out on. And we shouldn’t continue to do that.

Caitlin Morrissey 

Thank you so much, Ana.

Ana Durán

Oh, thank you both so much for listening. I really appreciate it. You know, Amazonia is my life right now. It’s all I do. It’s all I work on, it’s all I think about. You should see my table. It’s full of the IDB. I haven’t finished. The IDB has been so patient with me. But it’s exhausting mentally to have to, you know, handle 200 pieces of information, but then realising that you can distil it into no more than 15 topics. That’s how redundant it can be.

But in terms of the ontological crisis, I guess I went through it when I started my research for the PhD. I did what all PhD students are expected to do. I did my research design. I had the parameters I was going to investigate so that I would create my database using satellite technologies, using Kobo Toolbox to be able to collectively gather information that would allow me to measure the environmental footprint of a government designed city, Ciudad Millennial in Ecuador, which was done no more than 15 years during the Correa period. And then, on the other hand, I was looking at the chakra system, at the Kichwa settlement system of the Añangu community across the river. So I thought that would allow me to, you know, have a control population, like have an ability. It’s the same river, it’s the same context, they’re, you know, just across each other. One has been designed by the government thinking about ironically inspiring itself in the notion of ecovillage, and the other one has been designed from the perspective of the Kichwa. So that gives me a nice analytical, comparative analysis framework. And I visited both communes, and I went with the team, and we documented everything. I got permission from both to enter. And of course, the one was a carbon form, as Elisa Iturbe calls it. You know, it was a form that has been developed for oil. There were no cars there, but the car was this ghost in the city, and it was like a little patch of suburbia from the US just landed in the Amazon, and it was an ecovillage because there were assumptions like, oh, they’re going to go around with bikes, but this is very muddy. Bikes were not very useful. So, you know, even that collapsed. ‘Eco-village’, from whose perspective? Why? Where? And across the river there was the Añangu commune, who’s actually a very successful commune that has created this interesting hybrid of entrepreneurial, capitalist approach with communal understanding of the world which was fascinating to discover as well in terms of how they’re hybridising these two ontologies that can clash, but can also become something new.

And their system of settlement was quite different. And it was like the house and the chakra, the house and the chakra, the house and the chakra, connected by a road. By working with the Kichwa, the crisis was like, ‘oh my god, what am I doing?’ So I’m following a technocratic approach that, yeah, I will probably graduate, it will get me through school. But this is precisely the approach that has been destroying the Amazon. This is not the way they relate to the land. These are not the concepts that they would use. These are not the methods through which they plan. So I had even a crisis as an architect because the way we tend to design in the Amazon is, you know, we do a GIS system of layers. We learned this from Ian McHarg. It’s a brilliant, fabulous tool. And we, you know, we’ll do the hydrographic layer, the vegetation layer. We’ll just pile up all these resources, topographic layer, cultural layers could be there, data that has to do with health, data that has to do with education, with what have you, and then we’ll come up with a response.

And Amazonians, the way they design is profoundly collective, and it’s designed with the society of nature, this was a shock to me. You know, the land is part of the conversation. The animals are part of the conversation, the plants are part of the conversation. So generally, planning happens through a ritual, a ceremony, and you prepare for it for months, and you prepare for it through also highly participatory methods because you need to speak to several groups that live in that territory, and you need to speak, especially with the elders, and maybe in an Ayahuasca or a Wausau, there’s always a sacred plant at the centre of the ritual, just like in the west, there’s wine and the grape. That’s not very different. But through the sacred plant, you basically connect to the collective intelligence of the society of nature, not just of people, of human beings, I mean. And through these conversations and visions, you know what the territory wants for itself. And I was like, ‘oh my god, what am I doing?’ Am I contributing one more dissertation that is about a technocratic, resource-based, desacralising approach to the Amazon? Environmental footprint, what does that mean? From whose perspective? It’s an important concept, don’t get me wrong, especially to measure the impact that we have in Amazonia. Or am I going to make a dissertation that tries to make the government agencies, the planning systems understand that we have completely excluded other ways of thinking about this place from the equation and that we need to bring them back. And for which reasons we speak about nature-based solutions. Well, Indigenous peoples have them all. We speak about circular economies. Well, Indigenous peoples had a circular economy. And you could say these about Indigenous peoples everywhere in the world. That doesn’t mean like I’m sometimes interpreted as anti-technology, as a backward thinking, as, you know, she wants to go back to the Stone Age. That’s prejudiced, that is an understanding that excludes civilisation from Amazonia. No, I’m just saying we need to, in contemporary terms, think how we create a new hybrid that doesn’t exclude because that’s precisely the point. This is not about exclusion. This is about interdependencies and interrelationships between difference and diversity that can be enhanced in a collective intelligence that becomes, you know, that becomes-- I don’t know whether the word is empowered, but maybe enhanced again, you know, by this participation.

I don’t think that the standardisation of modernity has been very healthy in Amazonia, and it fails over and over and over again. So we shouldn’t persist in this failure. You know what? I guess that the message is clear in terms of like, we really need to be inclusive and for very many reasons, and we do need to work from a collective intelligence, including the territory, the logic of the river, the logic of the plants, the logic of the animals. We cannot continue to plan without them because look at the fires in the Amazon right now. The amount of videos and images I’ve seen of burning animals, I can’t sleep at night. Painful for me. As painful as seeing humans being, you know, facing another genocide. It’s a genocide. From the Amazonian perspective, it’s an ecocide. These are beings. These are human. As Viveiros de Castro explained through perspectivism, there’s personhood. They have as many human rights as we do. You know, we need to think of them as humans, like Amazonians do because creating this separation has created this you and us, the other and us – ‘it’s okay if you die off, but we need to protect ourselves’. No, it’s not okay. We’re in this together, and all of us, animals, plants, trees, rivers, rocks, all of us, that’s a very strong Amazonian understanding of the cosmos, up and down, intangible, tangible. We have desacralised the world. It was probably needed at a certain point in human history because we come from very dogmatic religious backgrounds, and you see that strongly in Amazonia. We don’t want to go back to, you know, religious wars, fundamentalisms that are terrible. But could we find a more spiritual pathway in the planning of the Amazon where nature is considered sacred, again? Where we stop to think about that tree that we are thinking about toppling, and why and how we do it? Amazonians are very respectful when they topple a tree, they do it-- they need the wood saved for the house, but they’ll ask for permission. There’s a ritual, and then the tree is alive in the house. So they have a very different relationship with the architecture because, again, it’s an animistic relationship. It’s personhood. The house is an intellectual entity too because the spirit of the tree is still there. It’s under-- it’s been reshaped. This energy is maybe under a different form that doesn’t mean that it’s less of an entity than when it was in the forest because there’s no separation between the artificial and the natural. It’s just a new form of the same society. And I feel that that’s the type of ontological shift that we need to try to attempt in the west.

Caitlin Morrissey 

I think your point has come across so clearly in everything that you’ve been saying over the last hour or so. So thank you again for coming on and sharing with us your expertise and all of the work that you’ve been doing. And I very much wish you the best with finishing up your thesis, which you said you were working on at the moment.

Ana Durán

Yes. And thank you, Caitlin, for bringing in the DNA because I’m actually going to talk about this in my dissertation because it did give me a very nice way of bringing signs and ontologies of the Amazon together from the perspective of knowledge and all the knowledge that is actually embedded in these plants. So Amazonians are not crazy when they want to connect with this deep knowledge of the plant, of the DNA of the plant, of the spirit of the plant, they would say. But in the end, it’s different ways of talking about the same thing. The genetics of the plants are much more complex than our own genetic DNA, our own DNA, so being able to connect with that knowledge makes a lot of scientific sense, in a way. So that was a great way of actually putting it together, and I had not thought about it from the perspective of DNA. So thank you both Caitlin and Fernanda and Greg, of course, for this gift of DNA, maybe as a way of bringing these worlds together.