Before the “Ecologically Noble Savage”: Gendered Representations of Amazonia in the Global Media in the 1970s

• Date: 01 March 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988694
• Published date: 01 March 2021
• Author: Sarah Sarzynski
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X20988694

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 237, Vol. 48 No. 2, March 2021, 47–62

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X20988694

© 2021 Latin American Perspectives

47

Before the “Ecologically Noble Savage”

Gendered Representations of Amazonia in the

Global Media in the 1970s

by

Sarah Sarzynski

An analysis of media representations of the Amazon and indigenous peoples reveals

how media producers and filmmakers foregrounded discourses naturalizing gendered and

racialized differences that distinguished the Amazon from the West in the 1970s, a decade

during which the Brazilian military dictatorship promoted development projects in

Amazonia. These representations often sexualized indigenous peoples and the Amazon

itself, portraying them as primitive, cannibal savages, animals or part of nature, or vic-

tims of exploitation. The “Othering” of the Amazon and Amazonians was further elabo-

rated through a discourse of binary oppositions that portrayed Western white men as

explorers and exploiters who dominated the screen, scripts, studies, and development

projects even if they were doomed to fail. By relying on a symbolic system of difference,

global media coverage and films about Amazonia in the 1970s were complicit in legitimiz-

ing authoritarian decrees promoting large-scale development that depicted indigenous

peoples and the environment as obstacles.

Un análisis de las representaciones mediáticas de la Amazonía y sus pueblos indígenas

revela cómo, en la década de 1970, productores y cineastas mediáticos resaltaron discursos

que naturalizaron las diferencias de género y racializadas con las que se distinguían a la

Amazonía del Occidente en una época durante la cual la dictadura militar brasileña pro-

movió proyectos de desarrollo en la región. Dichas representaciones a menudo sexualiza-

ban a los pueblos indígenas y a la Amazonía misma, retratándolos como primitivos,

caníbales salvajes, animales o elementos naturales, o víctimas de explotación. La “otre-

dad” de la Amazonía y los amazónicos se elaboró a través de un discurso de oposiciones

binarias que retrataba a los hombres blancos occidentales como exploradores y explotado-

res que dominaban la pantalla, los guiones, los estudios y los proyectos de desarrollo,

incluso si estos estaban condenados al fracaso. Al confiar en un sistema simbólico de

diferencia basado en oposiciones binarias y estereotipos, la cobertura mediática global y las

películas sobre la Amazonía en la década de 1970 fungieron como cómplices en la legiti-

mación de los tipos de proyectos y políticas llevados a cabo en la región.

Keywords: Amazonia, Gender and sexuality, Stereotypes, Indigenous people, Military

dictatorship

On his first day in office as president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro issued a provi-

sional measure shifting land demarcation from the National Foundation of

Sarah Sarzynski is an associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College and the author

of Revolution in the Terra do Sol: The Cold War in Brazil (2018).

988694LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X20988694Latin American PerspectivesSarzynski / GENDERED REPRESENTATIONS OF AMAZONIA IN THE 1970s

research-article2021

48 LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Indian Affairs to the pro-farming Agriculture Ministry. This move reflects the

Bolsonaro administration’s interest in opening up protected indigenous lands

to mineral and agribusiness exploitation. To justify it, Bolsonaro has equated

indigenous people to “zoo animals” that need to be “integrated” into the nation

(Londoño, 2019). According to Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council’s pre-

liminary report (Conselho Indigenista Missionário, 2019), land invasions of

protected indigenous territories reached 160 in the first nine months of

Bolsonaro’s presidency, twice the number of reported cases in all of 2018.

Accordingly, in the past few years, council reports also show an increase of

violent acts committed against indigenous people.

The Bolsonaro administration’s discourse and policies regarding Amazonia

echo the military dictatorship’s (1964–1985) discourse and policies that encour-

aged large-scale development, environmental destruction, and violence against

Amazonian inhabitants. Both the military dictatorship and the Bolsonaro

administration mobilized arguments of national sovereignty to pursue devel-

opmental policies and programs with little concern for indigenous peoples or

the environment. As the 2014 Truth Commission report (Comissão da Verdade,

2014) explained, military leaders used “the discourse of integration and assim-

ilation to legitimize the usurpation of indigenous lands.” It estimated that 8,350

indigenous people were killed during the dictatorship, detailing cases of geno-

cides and massacres such as that of the Waimiri-Atroari (Amazonas and

Roraíma), whose population fell from 3,000 in the early 1970s to only 350 in

1983 because of development projects pursued on their lands such as the con-

struction of highways and hydroelectric dams, mining, and agribusiness.

A significant difference between the 1970s and 2019 can be found in the

global reception of and responses to these discourses and policies. The global

media and international political leaders have been critical of Bolsonaro’s

Amazonian policies, particularly in light of the forest fires that grasped inter-

national attention starting in August 2019. International nongovernmental

organizations (NGOs) such as Survival International published press releases

before Bolsonaro’s inauguration exposing his long-held racist views about

indigenous people and his promotion of military “integration.” Critiques of

Bolsonaro’s policies in the international media rely on familiar characteriza-

tions of Amazonia describing the rain forest as the “lungs of the world” and

indigenous peoples as the region’s “best stewards.” Such descriptions reflect

the global vocabulary established in the 1980s and 1990s, when tropical defor-

estation, biodiversity, and environmental protection emerged in the interna-

tional mainstream media, portraying Amazonian indigenous peoples as

eco-gurus, saviors, or, as Kent Redford (1991) labeled them, the “ecologically

noble savage” (Conklin and Graham, 1995: 696–697; Dunaway, 2015: 79–95;

Slater, 2002: 144–153; Sturgeon, 2009: 17–52).

While such characterizations may seem like a “good” stereotype, they

oversimplify and essentialize indigenous people, limiting their options to

actions that conform to the myth (Conklin and Graham, 1995). Stereotypes

occur, as Stuart Hall (1997) argues, “when there are gross inequalities of

power, as part of the maintenance of social and symbolic order (us as normal;

them as different).” The myth of the ecologically noble savage, for example,

is a product of white culture that has often been employed to criticize