Ragtime, Clockwork: Community Work, Mobility, and Chronotope Production in Amazonian Communities

Abstract

Inhabitants of Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, routinely move between economic, social, and territorial systems that order community spheres, the Brazilian state apparatus, and global networks. Each of these comes encumbered with temporalities and spatialities that differentially parse space and time. Drawing upon my ethnographic fieldwork, I examine how chronotopes are made, and remade, in a place where community commitments are paramount. Through planning and calculation of urgency and priority, Gurupaenses make strategic choices to achieve calibration between Clockwork and community time. By waiting or leaving, hurrying or lingering, and by choosing the object, mode, and speed of motion, actors independently and communally “flex” time, constructing a Ragtime temporality in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed. In so doing, actors strategically navigate these theoretically incommensurable chronotopes, thus meeting immediate and long-term needs and attending to the social, economic, and political demands of both worlds.

Gurupá, a rural municipality in the Brazilian Amazon, is perhaps best known to anthropologists by its pseudonym, Itá—Charles Wagley’s (1953) “Amazon Town,” star of the eponymous ethnographic classic. This Amazonian port city owes its existence to European histories of Conquest with a capital C; it is the strategic locale where Dutch, Portuguese, French, and English forces fought for control of Amazonia in the early 1600s (Baena 1838; Hemming 1978; Lorimer 1989). Gurupá is the place where the Xingu River brings, along with its black waters, peoples, products, and ideas from the central Brazilian Highlands to the turbid, tan, long-traveled waters of the Amazon River. Here, the dozens of major and hundreds of minor upstream tributaries of the watery giant have gathered their energetic, biological, chemical, and socioeconomic offerings into a single rushing fluvial corridor, bringing the diversity of the Andean slopes and western and central Amazon to a roaring crescendo past the promontory of the Fort of Gurupá, the settlement that has governed this riverine crossroads for nearly 400 years. Here, also, the myriad channels that snake through the Amazon delta, around Marajó Archipelago, come together into a single channel that would have taken sixteenth-century sailors to the fabled Valley of the Amazons, the mysterious backlands laden with riches. So oft mythologized and so seldom visited, Amazonia retains, for most of the world, an otherworldly quality. Gurupá, a key node in the global capitalist trade networks that hunger for its treasures, the so-called drogas do sertão, or drugs of the backlands, is in itself a hinterland. Though Amazonians have interfaced, via a series of mediators of time and space, with consumers in faraway lands for hundreds of years, Amazonia continues to be thought of as a place, and a time, apart.

Taking the municipality of Gurupá as a case study, I examine how notions of backwardness and backland, produced through encounters between foreigners¹ and locals especially in extractivist economic contexts, have contributed toward the production of lasting, and at times conflicting, chronotopic representations of Amazonian reality. I draw upon the notions of the chronotope, as developed by Bakhtin (1981) to designate a semiotic projection of space-time, along with his acknowledgment that this entails particular forms of personhood. Following Agha (2007), I engage with the way that chronotopic images can be formulated and reformulated through social action. These images, which circulate within and outside the region, are differentially taken up, evoked, and negotiated by Gurupaenses—inhabitants of Gurupá—as they move between rural and urban settings. Today, most Gurupaenses continue make a living through extractivist labor, the long history of which has been a crucial feature of Amazonian rural-urban interactions in social, economic, and political spheres. In many such “rurban” nuclei in Amazonia, laboring identities form the basis of powerful social and political organizations that have overturned social orders and shaped present material and metaphorical landscapes.

The rurality of these communities—their location in the backlands and extractivist economies—can be read as backward by both outsiders and in-group members. In other moments, however, these conditions and practices are seen as conducive to the preservation of what Gurupaenses identify as local cultural, economic, and ecological riqueza (richness), as well as to the realization of a “sustainable future,” whatever shape that vision may take. The former, notably, are often expressed in terms of “tradition,” a term that carries not only social but also political and legal weight, in its reference to knowledge, practices, beliefs, and forms of organization that Gurupaenses identify as “ours” (nosso). These contrasting readings, one of a stagnant past and the other of a many-splendored future rooted in the past, are enlivened through chronotopic projections—images of particular types of personhood and entailing formulations of space-time.

As a central economic hub, Gurupá was a likely destination for Wagley (1953), an American anthropologist of the Amazon engaged with the Serviço Especial de Saúde Pública (SESP, Public Health Special Service). The SESP, a WWII collaboration between the United States and Brazil devised to service rural laborers furnishing the Allied effort with rubber (Weinstein 1983), brought Wagley into contact with what he came to call “the problem of man in the tropics” (Wagley 1953). For Wagley (1953), Itá, or Gurupá, was a rural Amazonian town par excellence: a quintessential example of the backwardness that ensues when development stagnates, or perhaps more aptly, when a place of the past is not fully brought forth into modernity. Itá became the lens through which Amazonian rurality—as distinct from indigeneity—would be understood, studied, and taught, for the next fifty years (see Leitão 2017).

The “Amazon Town” projection of Gurupá also presupposes a world beyond its borders where “progress”—in Wagley’s view, a particular form of “modernization” (Pace 2014, 2) characterized by a capitalist economy and Western techno-scientific advancement—occurs in steady, forward motion. I refer to this projection of an imagined, modern, timely world as the Clockwork chronotope, an idealized world of efficiency and productivity that lurks behind the appeals for modernization like the one voiced by Wagley (1953) in his evocation of President Truman’s 1949 inaugural address. Evidence for the stagnant nature of the regional economy, according to Wagley, includes the lack of roads and slow nature of riverine transportation. In opposition to this envisioned exterior or unrealized future, Wagley’s Amazon Town, which would be read by scholars and policy makers for another half century, comes to constitute a durable chronotopic projection of Gurupá as a lingering, lagging relic of the past. These deeply embedded notions of backwardness and hinterland come to constitute the way that institutions like the Brazilian state and the Catholic Church formulate policies and strategies to usher this region into the present.

These same person-place-time projections circulate in Gurupá as specters of plausible pasts and futures, becoming palpable when aspects of the modern brush up against the demands of tradition. However, in contrast with, or in addition to, these etic chronotopic projections, which represent Gurupá as fundamentally distinct and disconnected from modernity, the chronotopic formulations elaborated in Gurupá reflect a keen awareness of the deeply imbricated nature of local and global histories. Gurupaenses speak of past as the tempo dos patrões (time of the patrons), an expression that articulates the (often overbearing) presence of foreigners, an understanding of labor relations, and a grasp of capitalist economies, all of which assert contemporaneity with the outside world. This chronotopic projection situates bondage firmly in the past; however, the struggle is ongoing. The present is expressed as an extension of the time of conscientização (conscience building) and libertação (liberation), specifically from the patron-client (patrão-freguês) regime. In this (present) time, social and political projects embarked upon in the 1970s are in a continual state of advancement toward a future in which the community—a totality of sorts understood locally as fundamentally traditional—becomes modern, sustainable, and independent without losing its richness. These chronotopic projections of past, present, and future worlds have crystallized in the vernacular and circulate alongside the lingering chronotopic images of backwardness and modernization.

In this article, I examine how such projects are advanced through the negotiation of demands and opportunities afforded by global capitalist and national bureaucratic regimes, on the one hand, and those of community work (trabalho comunitário) and kinship, on the other. These systems come encumbered with spatiotemporal structures, rhythmic schemata not always in step with that project, and necessitate the movement and coalescence of bodies in space and time. As an example, opting to participate in state- or church-sponsored programs can bring funding, aid, and access to technologies but also introduces bureaucratic and reporting requirements that, because of the spatial distribution of settlements, necessitate movement and creative calendrical or chronometric calisthenics if disruptions to community work are to be avoided. Rhythms of agroextractivist production are subject to seasonality and market demands and locations but arise out of community or family beliefs, practices, preferences, and prohibitions, which dictate movement and moments of coalescence and dispersal of bodies.

In fieldwork conducted between 2014 and 2016, I observed how—through a combination of strategic and conscious, as well as momentary and less deliberate, decisions about the order, mode, and speed of movement across and between territories—community members work to bring the daily and annual rhythms of community work into consonance with those of Clockwork regimes. Below, I examine the chronotopic formulations that are called upon, arise, and are produced in making determinations about conduct and movement, particularly when community work is at stake. Often, I found that deadlines or calendrical commitments were flexible, in relation to the importance of accomplishing projects or, quite literally, showing up. Copresence, a way of signaling a commitment to collective projects, was always prioritized over individual goals. Through calculation and calibration, individual or corporate agents can linger longer at key moments or arrive faster at meeting places, effectively “flexing” time to fit their needs. The temporal textures that emerge, sometimes referred to as “hurry up and wait” by foreigners, form what I call Ragtime temporality—a way of stretching and compressing temporal intervals that permit a steady metronomic (Clockwork) rhythm to coexist alongside a more expressive and flexible one that is conceptualized in terms of intervals and marked by encounter. Through this work, Gurupaenses bring into consonance different cultural chronotopes, laying the groundwork for the production of possible futures, and generating, simultaneously, the complex chronotopic formulations of Amazonian communities today.

Chronotopic Dissonance

I had lived in small, rural settlements in Gurupá for five months when I experienced what stands out as the most salient example of disjunctures between what might be called chronotopic expectations or orientations. If, as Agha (2007) suggests, chronotopic projections can morph into metrically configured entextualized forms, like the chronotopes of “tradition” and “modernity,” then such forms or figures indubitably come to structure expectations of social actors. In situations in which participants continually engage in behaviors that reinforce the same chronotopically configured forms of institutionalized life, such expectations, like chronotopic formulations themselves, are rarely perceived (Agha 2007). I suggest, then, that it is precisely when expectations are in conflict that chronotopic formulations become palpable. In Gurupá, a frequent source of friction between community members and foreigners was precisely the way that time was experienced and invoked. Temporal conflicts, which, because of settlement structure, often had concomitant spatial dynamics, occurred when individuals inhabiting Western Clockwork temporalities attempted to coordinate with Gurupaenses.

In Gurupá, personal timepieces are few and far between.² Methods for parsing time are more elastic and are generally brought up in planning encounters. Aside from predictable indices afforded by the position of the sun, or the interferences of the few clock-bound daily rhythms (i.e., the daily speedboat from Porto de Moz that heads downstream around seven and back upstream close to eleven), social commitments are scheduled around the start or conclusion of activities—after church or before going to the field—or through negotiations between the rigors of the task to be accomplished and environmental or bodily affordances—“later, when it cools off,” or “so we can be back in time for lunch.”

What is compelling about these temporal conventions of the quotidian isn’t that they might be indexed or earmarked by biological, environmental, or physical phenomena, but that they establish the commitment to meet. Whatever vagueness is implicit in the temporal dimension is made up for by the specificity of encounter. Tardiness is rarely invoked—at least not seriously—although it was invoked repeatedly by members of my research team who had arrived in medias res. In my fifth month of fieldwork, I found myself a curious spectator as a colleague rattled off the time in ten-minute intervals while we awaited transport.

“I don’t think he’s coming. He’s already forty minutes late.”

“He’ll come.”

“I’m not sure that he will. That’s forty minutes!”

“He’ll come. He said he’d be here, so he’ll come.”

“When?”

“He’ll come when he comes.”

I realized that I myself had felt similar unease and frustration at the early stages of fieldwork; I also found myself disturbed by my colleague’s behavior and attempted to curtail it by explaining the probable causes of delay, but to no avail. By glancing constantly at his watch, pacing impatiently, and peering off the pier at the mouth of the river at regular intervals, my friend was signaling his displeasure, which in turn revealed his belonging to a distinct cultural chronotope (Agha 2007). In Gurupá, such behavior is invariably read as a lack of understanding of local rhythms, a not belonging, or belonging to a wealthy, capitalist world, often signaled by the words Paulista (from São Paulo) or gringo. The designation Paulista is a chronotopically configured social type associated with foreign investment and interference, avarice, and oppression.

Understandably, I was perturbed by his behavior but even more by his suggestion that Sr. Inácio might not come, and that we should find an alternate means of transport. The latter was a near impossibility, but the crucial social error, for me, would be to assume that the earlier agreement to meet was somehow nullified, or nullifiable. In my view—a perspective learned in the field—whatever adventures or detours that may have occurred between the establishment of the meeting point and the moment of encounter were certainly justified, in that they surely must serve to advance community goals. Perhaps he’d been asked to wait in town for someone who would need transport. Perhaps an urgent financial matter or bank lines had delayed an integral part of the transaction—delivering watermelons. Maybe a relative required a visit, a motor needed fixing, paperwork needed printing or notarizing. There were myriad possibilities for delay in Gurupá, but my fundamental and constant disagreement with my colleague was that he would, with certainty, come. Therefore, we should wait.

In my colleague’s perspective, tardiness signified a lack of respect for timeliness and, therefore, backwardness. This view applied as much to the flexibility of meeting times with specific community members as to the frequent delays suffered by major transport vessels, like the ocean-faring ships that still bring people and cargo from the mouth of the Amazon, through Gurupá, to the 2.5-million-inhabitant city of Manaus in the central Amazon. These lamentations echo those voiced by scholars and writers over the failure of industrializing projects like the Madeira-Mamoré Railroad and Fordlândia (Wagley 1953; Coomes and Barham 1994; Garfield 2013; Mello 2016). These were precisely the kinds of perceived stagnation expressed by scholars like Wagley (1953), Meggers (1971), and others whose frustration cast Amazonia as an inhospitable, uninhabitable jungle.

In moments when transport arrives “late” in Gurupá, what is invoked is a very literal interpretation of Clockwork chronotopic projections. The term Clockwork invokes precisely the kind of synchronization that was the obsession of a nineteenth-century European imaginary, but which we now know, through the discovery of relativity (Einstein 1961), to be impossible in any physical reality in which anyone can live. I suggest here, admittedly oversimplifying, that a regimented dependence on timepieces (springs and gears) to structure life, commitments, and events, and to dictate movement (speed up, slow down, pause, stop, go), is a consequence of, among other things, railroads, the engines both of nineteenth-century capitalism and its associated imaginaries. Few would argue that the introduction of railroads as engines of trade and transport transformed chronotopes irreversibly, from the establishment of time zones and bizarre time-jumping phenomena (as we realized the physical consequences of the relativity of time and space by covering ground faster in trains than does the sun), to the requirement of increasingly dependable timepieces, and eventually the invention of the atomic clock, and the ultimate discovery that time itself bends under gravity and acceleration (Rovelli 2017). A century and a half later, clocks are set by satellite, often without permission.

In capitalist regimes, such regimentation is driven, more than anything else, by the need to bring goods to certain places “on time.” If the capitalist market chronotope prioritizes the amassment of goods in place and time, or the timely movement of objects to faraway places, the Amazonian community is structured around the regular and reciprocal meeting of bodies. This copresence can happen in extractivist, administrative, celebratory, or quotidian settings, which is often glossed as “participation” (participar). To participate in the community is to be present and committed alongside other community members and do work that maintains and reproduces the community, whether socially, politically, economically, or spiritually.

Time Erasure

Wagley’s Amazon Town was at once an ethnographic image and a policy document that effectively produced the “Amazon Town” as a timeless, backward place. Gurupá, presented as existing in a timeless, pulsing, cyclical rhythm governed primarily by foreign (i.e., external) market forces, is contrasted with Euro-American metrics, values, and timescapes. This move essentializes and dehistoricizes Gurupá, also producing what we now recognize as a false dichotomy of the modern and the traditional. However, perhaps more alarmingly, such implicit comparisons treat the conventions of these (rather dated) Western spatiochronometrics as representations of objective reality itself. In other words, such comparisons assume that modern, capitalist, technologically advanced systems behave in ways that accord with objective nature (as Europeans imagined it before Einstein) and perhaps even posits that metronomic time exists by itself as an independent variable according to which our own lives unfold. The idea that time marches on and that our lives unfold according to its rhythm, an idea that—as Rovelli (2017) reveals—is an invention of Newtonian physics, has not been verified. Instead, modern, advanced physics has shown time and again that time speeds up and slows down in relation to gravity and is, in fact, measurably desynchronized for observers moving sufficiently fast in relation to each other (Rovelli 2017).

This understanding of time, although seemingly inconceivable in our Western, Newtonian understanding of space-time (and clock-time), may be accessible and expressible in distinct systems. I propose that in Gurupá daily time is conceptualized in a manner quite different from Clockwork chronotopic projections. Time is not, as critics might suggest, seen as inessential but rather as a crucial variable that is considered in relation to space, sociality, economics, and history. Such a relational approach to time, if we are to follow the suggestions on loop theory presented by Rovelli (2017), may even more closely represent the universe. Curiously, then, the conception of relational time that emerges from the way that time is expressed and experienced in communities in Gurupá may, in fact, be a better cultural imaginary of time as it is understood by quantum physicists than railroad-capitalist time (in its Newtonian nearsightedness) ever was.

Amazonian Communities

An “Amazon Town” by many accounts, Gurupá is also a centuries-old riverine crossroads with roots in complex colonial processes that inflect its contemporary social and political life. In describing Gurupá as “backwards,” Wagley, like many of his contemporaries, is playing with notions of time and temporality from the outset. Adding to this sensory distortion, Gurupá is presented in the ethnographic present, atemporalized and disarticulated, as a series of domains or spheres of life that exist in perpetuity (Wagley 1953). Further, by referring to the town through a pseudonym, Wagley (1953) annihilates place or the specificity of the unity of location, person, and time (Relph 1976). Hence, Itaenses, or Gurupaenses (inhabitants of Itá or Gurupá) could be anyone, anytime, and anywhere in Amazonia, as long as those places are distant and premodern—neither here nor now—for Wagley and his readers.

I distinguish between Wagley’s (1953) “Amazon Town” and what I call an “Amazonian Community.” The word community deliberately indexes socio-politico-religious entities known as Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEBs), formed across Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s with the advent of Catholic priests oriented by liberation theology (Wagley 1953; Lopes 2013). Built on ideals of action and liberation from social injustice and sin (Oliveira 1991; Magalhães 2009; Lopes 2013), CEBs are found throughout Latin America. In Amazonia, CEBs became a vehicle for fostering participatory civil society aimed at liberation (Magalhães 2009), particularly in the secular dimension, from oppressive labor regimes. Alongside labor unions and other laboring communities in rural Brazil, CEBs participated in struggles for autonomy and land rights (Oliveira 1991; Lopes 2013). Here, the term “Amazonian Community” describes CEB and non-CEB communities currently or formerly active in such struggles. Such communities, which share a history of migration and multiethnicity, patron-client extractivism, and liberation through labor struggles, participate in the elaboration and reproduction of similar chronotopic formulations that situate their extractive activities and community ideals firmly in the present and as engines toward an ever more liberated, independent, and modern future.

Questions of liberation and independence are particularly salient for the communities in which I worked. All three are members of the Associação dos Remanescentes de Quilombos do Município de Gurupá (ARQMG, Association of Maroon Descendants of the Municipality of Gurupá), the juridical entity through which they gained recognition and title in 2000 (Treccani 2006; Brasil 2007). Their distinction as quilombola (descendant Maroon) communities, a subcategory of Traditional Communities (TCs)³ is relevant in two respects. First, recognized TCs can mobilize politically through an independent juridical entity, like ARQMG, for access to government concessions. Second, if corporate identity among CEBs in Gurupá is often framed in terms of liberation, for quilombola communities this is doubly so. ARQMG itself was formed as part of the process of gaining recognition, which rested on narratives of escape from conditions of enslavement, but also as part of a larger local land rights movement spearheaded by the local labor union.⁴ More than a juridical entity, however, ARQMG enshrines the complex of social, political, economic, and familial relationships that bind member communities, ties that are continuously called upon through chronotopic evocations of the tempo dos patrões, their continued path toward liberation, and kinship.

This web of interpersonal, kinship, and corporate relationships, also described by Wagley (1953), dates to at least the 1930s. Today, as before, mobility—among cities, villages, houses, and within territories, between the beira (riverbank) and the centro (center, or interior of landforms)—is part of a way of being in Amazonian communities (Royer 2003; Postigo 2010). It is essential to conducting business—economic or otherwise—and part of the way that spatial and social order are produced: how roads, paths, trails, and routes sediment or dissolve, along with memories, places, and social relations. Kinship and social networks extend across significant geographical areas. In addition to ties formed through marriage and apadrinhagem,⁵ communities are mobilized en masse to other localities by religious festivities, social and political organizing, and seasonal festivals. Contemporary community members’ accounts suggest such networks arose and are reproduced precisely through reciprocal visitation between communities for religious, social, and political events.

Paradoxically, Gurupá is in no way typical of Amazonian towns, in its history or in its historicity. Gurupá was the focus of European commercial interest in Amazonia as early as the 1590s, when it was already tethered to European markets through Dutch trade in tobacco, indigo, and other forest products (Lorimer 1989). Once secured by the Portuguese in 1623 (Baena 1838; Hemming 1978; Kelly 1984), Gurupá became a major center that served the local hinterlands and connected the region to colonizing powers, a function it has retained up to the present day. In Gurupá’s culminating period around 1900, the latter belle epoque fueled by the rubber boom, the city hosted a profligate bourgeoisie that held French champagne balls and laundered garments in Portugal (Wagley 1953; Pace 1998). This once contested port city, which hosted multiethnic communities divided by considerable cultural and wealth disparities for over 400 years, was indeed exceptional in Amazonia.

As Pace (1998) observes, the rubber cycle was but one of many boom-and-bust cycles characterizing the longue durée of colonial and postcolonial Amazonia. During the height of the rubber boom (1880–1911), the Amazonian global economy⁶ was dominated by a form of extraction characterized by patron-client extractivism that, though varied in its instantiations, exploited both humans and landscapes (Weinstein 1983; Hecht 2013). In the twentieth century, such cycles have revolved around timber, fish and shrimp, timbó (a poisonous root exported for use as an insecticide), and palmito de açaí (hearts of the açaí palm), in addition to a second, lesser-known World War II rubber cycle (Wagley 1953; Weinstein 1983; Oliveira 1991; Pace 1998; Hecht 2013; Lopes 2013).

Gurupá has not only participated in these cycles, from early commerce in oleaginous seeds, spices, and salted fish, to rubber and timber in the modern era (Baena 1839; Pace 1998), but also prefigured histories that would later unfold in the larger, and still widely known, riverine cities of Manaus, Santarém, and Tefé. Now forgotten as a political and economic hub, Gurupá featured in all major travel narratives of the Amazon River (Condamine [1745] 1944; Daniel [1776] 1976; Spix and Martius [1821] 1981; Baena 1838; Penna [1874] 1971; Verissimo [1878] 1970; Spruce and Wallace 1908) and bore witness to the various moments of expansion and contraction of economic and political control by colonizing powers, from the Pombaline reforms of 1755 to the advent of the imperial period in 1822 and the establishment of the republic in 1889 (Kelly 1984; Oliveira 1991). Gurupaenses not only suffered the consequences of these top-down reforms but also participated in resistance efforts like the Cabanagem revolt of 1835 (Oliveira 1991; Harris 2010) and labor struggles that transformed land ownership and relations of production over the course of the 1970s and 1980s (Pace 1998). These events and transformations, which characterize the history of Amazonia and rural Brazil, articulated with hinterland populations through the nexus that is Gurupá. Rather than an archetypal and perpetual “Amazon Town,” Gurupá might well be seen, historically, as a microcosm of Amazonia.

The Rubber Chronotope

Wagley’s Amazon Town captured a very specific moment in time: the years immediately following the WWII revitalization of the nineteenth-century rubber trade, along with earlier economic and land-use patterns, as well as attitudes, perceptions, and socioeconomic relationships. The conditions and processes of rubber production and trade, which were dominated by highly exploitative patron-client relationships, had irreversible social, political, economic, and ecological impacts on Amazonia (Wagley 1953; Weinstein 1983; Pace 1998; Garfield 2013; Hecht 2013). As the global rubber market flowed through distinct parts of Amazonia, it fomented the coproduction of local markets, places, and sociopolitical structures germane to local contexts (Hecht 2013). However, reproducibility of certain ecological conditions and consistency in macroeconomic structural demands resulted in regularities in the movement of people and goods, types of personhood, and conditions of mobility and isolation that contributed toward the creation of a cultural chronotope associated with rubber extraction.

The early history of Gurupá has contributed toward a local perception of its own historicity as a once prosperous place that is now forgotten. Unlike many analogous rurban nuclei in Amazonia—city-hinterland pairs created through long- and short-term cycles of extractivist regimes—Gurupá was, at moments, wealthy or productive enough to participate in the transatlantic slave trade (Kelly 1984). Inhabitants of Gurupá continue to identify with African, Dutch, and Jewish forebears, among others. Still, the municipality features important social and economic formations characteristic of small Amazonian rurban nuclei, including a history of exploitative patron-client relationships, a continued reliance on extractivism, a population composed in part by descendants of migrants from the Northeast, and social organization based fundamentally on kinship (Wagley 1953; Weinstein 1983; Guillen 1997; Pace 1998; Garfield 2013; Hecht 2013). Higher-order sociopolitical networks and settlement patterns both derive from the intersection of these historical demographic and economic phenomena.

Most relevant to the history of Gurupá, not only in the academic literature (Wagley 1953; Pace 1998) but also in contemporary discourses of Gurupaenses, are the labor structures created during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and reproduced in subsequent intermittent extractivist cycles. In Gurupá, the struggle (a luta) is ongoing, and political organizing continues to unite laborers across vast distances. The struggle for liberation from powerful landowners, the patrões, a class that came into power during the first rubber boom, created a sense of solidarity among laborers across Brazil and, ultimately, Latin America (Pace 1998). In Amazonia, these histories remain a rallying point and laboring identities powerful currency among travelers and potential hosts. Booms in extractivist cycles still motivate laborers to relocate, sometimes for years. The inevitable crashes in particular industries send them home. Throughout their travels, laborers can often count on this shared history of struggle for aid, housing, and meals. In this way, ties are also often formed in transit, and social networks remain geographically expansive. Among the various processes through which Gurupaenses form identities and connections, those that stem from labor struggles transcend contemporary categories of race and ethnicity.

During the rubber boom, land ownership and access in territories under exploitation were organized almost exclusively through the extractive system, which required spacing of families to account for the spacing of resources. Like most Amazonian trees, individuals in the species Hevea brasiliensis are dispersed in their spatial distribution (Hecht 2013). Accordingly, rubber tappers or seringueiros, along with their families when present, lived in colocações (house sites) distributed across the landscape so as to be situated near two or three nonintersecting estradas, or circuits, of trees (Weinstein 1983; Pace 1998; Hecht 2013). This settlement pattern generated relative isolation between social units and hence a kind of “solitude” that came to be seen as characteristic of the life of the seringueiro (Cunha 2000, 153).

In the majority of circumstances, seringueiros gained access to land and tools for extraction through a system of debt peonage, known as aviamento because of the “loans” through which fregueses (clients) secured goods and sometimes transport, that entrapped families in mounting debt (Weinstein 1983; Pace 1998). In such cases, the land containing the estradas belonged to patrões who controlled the land and all production therein. Although the most common accounts of aviamento portray a system similar to that of sharecropping, sometimes so severe as to be described as a form of enslavement, the system itself could also be built upon, or build, complex systems of social relations among extended families and affinal kin (Hecht 2013). In Gurupá, narratives of the tempo dos patrões tend toward the more severe end of the spectrum, and in the quilombola communities in which my research was sited, references to slavery⁷ apply as often to late nineteenth-century chattel slavery as to patrão-freguês relationships in extractive industries as recently as the mid-twentieth century.

Spatiotemporalities generated by these extractive systems were characterized by specific land-use patterns and daily and biweekly rhythms of extraction, trading, and encounter. Houses were distributed across the landscape but always oriented toward the river and the barracão (trading post). The process of rubber extraction required a twice-daily circulation of each family’s estradas, where trees were tapped and left weeping into vessels during the first circuit, and brimming bowls or cans of latex were collected in the second (Weinstein 1983). Afternoons or days of processing required constant, stationary work at home. A patrão of a new territory, generally anchored by a small stream or river, built a barracão at its mouth to control trade and traffic (Cunha 2000; Hecht 2013). While in some cases families were permitted to maintain small gardens, and to fish and hunt for subsistence, in the harshest regimes, seringueiros and their families could extract only latex from their estradas, bound to “purchase” provisions in exchange for product or on loan from the trading post (Weinstein 1983; Pace 1998; Hecht 2013).⁸

Every fortnight, a representative from each colocação would head to the barracão to trade. The periodic convergence on this central place, which punctuated an otherwise solitary existence with moments of sociality, generated a regular, pulsating rhythm for the movement of bodies across the landscape. During the five-month harvest season, days were marked by mobility, most of the time in circuits, like so many hands of a clock, and twice monthly, more like the rushing of blood along arteries toward a beating heart. Regionally, seringueiros, who work as such during a third of the year, converged on colocações and estradas during the harvest season, seeking other labor elsewhere during the off-season (Wagley 1953).⁹

Rubber extraction systems were hegemonic, and hence the tempo dos patrões chronotope is characterized by relationships of political and economic dominance. The eventual overturning of this social order modified, but did not completely disarticulate, these relationships of dominance or the spatial patterning of land use and habitation. Echoes of this system persist today in many Amazonian communities, wherein houses continue to be built some distance apart along rivers in a pattern resembling that of colocações. According to Lopes (2013), such patterning in the community of Santana in Gurupá is a direct legacy of the aviamento system of rubber extraction. Similarly, aviamento continues to be a way to finance family expenses, and people continue to have patrões; the extent to which such relationships continue to be uneven is difficult to gauge, as Gurupaenses continue to assert their liberation from the patrões of the past.

As described in Wagley’s (1953) Amazon Town, Amazonian rubber extraction landscapes experienced economic ebbs and flows annually. At the height of the rubber boom, this rhythm would have dominated the movement of bodies, human and nonhuman, creating a characteristic pulsating rhythm. In Gurupá, time-space dynamics are constituted and regulated by a set of mutual dependencies and commitments to community as a social entity, and community life as an ideal. Though the latter arose in the interstices of, and in response to, the former, the chronotope of the Amazonian community is characterized by different modes, directionalities, and rhythms than that of global capitalist markets.

Calendars and Clocks

Calendars, as idealized constructs that organize time and mark days, parse out the year—however that year is conceived—into segments of varying importance. In Gurupá, the annual cycle is marked not only by extractive cycles but also by social, religious, and administrative calendars, including those that structure community work and those pertaining to other institutions. Determined by community members, always in negotiation with other political, religious, and social entities, these calendars can be calibrated so as to provide optimal and multiple opportunities for the reproduction, maintenance, and renegotiation of social relationships. Governmental and religious calendars, for example, though tied to national and global entities and thus essentially fixed, present a degree of malleability. Members of communities in Gurupá, alongside government agents or church representatives (who may also be community members) establish these three calendars in reference to one another.

Not only are all three calendars coconstitutive but the needs of communities may require flexibility at the state or federal level, which means local decisions sometimes reverberate across a broader geographical range. Similarly, economic rhythms—the frequency, timing, and size of investments—are subject to seasonality and market demands but also to family or individual interests, needs, and capacities. Choices made by community members about what to plant or harvest, how, and when also produce effects within communities and markets at various scales. Gurupaenses, hence, shape spatiotemporal rhythms, locally and at broader scales, carefully calculating their moves between attending to the demands of community calendars and those of national and global entities and markets.

Because of the dispersed nature of settlement, the extent of social networks, and the unreliability of radio and cellular signals in the region, every act of participation in these social, political, and economic processes, including the calibration of calendars, requires travel and face-to-face encounters.¹⁰ In attending to these needs, Gurupaenses make their way across amphibian landscapes that are shaped by natural rhythms and forces, as well as by constant human intervention: the dynamic nature of the landscape demands the latter. The simple act of piloting a boat downstream is transformative, reinforcing the water’s route, but more often than not, active maintenance is part of travel. Hence, in addition to the manipulation of soil, water, and plants for agricultural and extractivist production, landscape use is management and constitutes infrastructure maintenance. This is community work, requires mobility itself, and is more often accomplished by community groups. Participation in community life, from the banal tasks of ensuring accessibility to different reaches of community territories to ensuring individual and collective spiritual health, requires movement, calculation, and coordination.

Movement can take various forms—terrestrial and aquatic, powered by muscle or motor—and can transport objects and bodies individually or in aggregate. Such movement occurs always in relation to—in consonance with, in opposition to, or parallel with—community, governmental, and religious institutions’ calendars and clocks, as well as local seasonal and global economic cycles. In Gurupá, the introduction of new technologies, not only of transport but of subjectivity, has underscored disjunctures between expectations associated with “traditional” and “modern” chronotopes, but strategic navigation of these technologies and subjectivities allows actors to signal belonging to both orders, invoking one or the other. By engaging in specific behaviors vis-à-vis chronotopic formulations, actors “become recognizable to each other as social beings of specific kinds” (Agha 2015, 402). Attending to meetings and community priorities are the crucial nodes where community work is done; actors commit themselves to production of the future modern village chronotope. Vehicles and routes are the mechanisms through which Gurupaenses achieve calibration among the various institutional forces tugging at their clock springs. Through movement of objects and bodies, through circulation and encounter, Gurupaenses create spatialities and temporalities that weave between, or weave together, aspects of distinct, and often dissonant, worlds.

Temporal Rhythms

Tucked along the inner bend of the mouth of the Xingu River and stretching along the Amazon River and into the Marajó Archipelago, the municipality of Gurupá straddles an important and abrupt ecological divide: that between estuarine, low-lying, shifting sediment islands that are subject to tidal regimes; and stable, ancient terraces dominated by impoverished soils and high-canopy forest. Indeed, daily tidal regimes, which advance by an hour each day, and their seasonally variable rise and fall, markedly inflect economic and social rhythms. The flooded or parched nature of channels and floodplains changes the conditions and modes of access to resources, places, and people, limiting movement among or within communities or requiring alternative means of transport and flexibility in social and economic calendars.

But Gurupá seems to straddle another divide, between worlds that move according to different rhythms or temporal schemes. This distinction is not one between past and present, as Wagley, and indeed others, might lead us to believe; instead, it is to be understood in terms of forms of time, regularities, and rules for the motion and meeting of bodies across space and time. Gurupá straddles two chronotopes: that of the Amazonian community, a small, rural, nucleated settlement organized primarily through kinship and agroextractivist activity; and that of global capitalist markets, organized through the accumulation and movement of goods and capital. It is the work of agents, as individuals, community members, or corporate entities, that stitches these disparate time worlds into relative, or apparent, synchrony.

Ecologies, Bodies, and Circulation

One of the clearest disjunctures between contemporary chronotopes of Amazonian communities and capitalist trade systems is that the latter rely on the instantaneous amassment of marketable goods in a single location, a mode of production to which Amazonian resource distribution and seasonality present considerable obstacles. One such obstacle is the distributed seasonality of natural products, which fruit, ripen, mature, or become otherwise available at multiple times throughout the year; in contrast, in temperate production cycles, it could be argued, the late summer harvest is the fattest. The punctuated cycles of production in temperate zones make possible, indeed desirable, the centralizing redistributive systems that run long-distance capitalist economies. Archaeological narratives regarding the emergence of economic inequality rely precisely upon this cyclical narrative of plenty and scarcity. In Amazonia, it could be argued, such pulses make little sense. The wet-dry seasonality of the region causes shrinking and swelling of rivers and lakes and corresponding expansion or contraction of landforms, which means at the same time that some resources become difficult to procure, others become easy prey. This doesn’t mean there are no lean times throughout the year, but rather that production is more distributed. This disparity in seasonal rhythms may, in fact, be one root cause of the abject failure of Amazonian capitalist endeavors like Ford’s tragicomic utopian company town, Fordlândia.

Similarly, the spatial distribution of natural resources in unmanaged Amazonian forests presents a challenge to the chronotopic requirements of capitalist production; the extraordinarily high biodiversity of the region also means that resources to be exploited are rarely found in naturally occurring clusters,¹¹ making it difficult to amass product. These spatial and temporal variables have resulted in conflicts between the productive system and market demand; these conflicts are managed by people through social institutions of patronage or aviamento (credit) that bridge spatiotemporal gaps.

On a regional scale, the aviamento system was a socioeconomic institution that historically permitted laborers to bridge income-free gaps through “loans”¹² from patrons, while allowing patrons to amass sufficient product in a timely fashion so as to meet market demands and justify the costs of export. The aviamento system effectively compresses the production landscape so that patrons can achieve the key component of the capitalist chronotope: the amassment of goods in place and time. Though these patronage systems were infamously exploitative, the form of the aviamento system was a clever solution to chronotopic dissonance between the two worlds. Today, aviamento remains as a social institution that supports laborers and consumers, strengthening ties among neighbors and kin in a region where products, whether local or global, continue to be available sporadically and unpredictably.

But here I am interested in the smaller scale, in the day-to-day negotiations that allow individuals to participate in community social systems while also interfacing with global markets and elements of the Brazilian state apparatus, both of which operate within and reproduce a global capitalist market chronotope. In the quilombola communities of Gurupá, community members’ interest in participating in markets lies unsurprisingly in the access to mass-produced goods and information (clothes, television, cell phones, etc.). Participating fully in the Brazilian state also presents a series of advantages. In particular, due to their status of federal recognition as quilombola, community members stand to gain funding and other governmental support by successfully attending to academic and juridical calendars, as well as timely reporting (which necessitates the movement of bodies) to the bureaucratic state.

A crucial part of participating actively in these communities involves advancing community projects or accomplishing trabalho comunitário, often indexed locally as “o nosso trabalho” (our work). Community work can encompass all conduct that might be called upon to reproduce the community and to advance the chronotopic projects of modernization alongside cultural revitalization. The interplay between the advantages and costs of engaging with federal programs exemplifies the work community members do in advancing such projects. The federally funded Mais Educação (literally “more education”) program funds educators to create and teach curriculum that is culturally or ecologically specific to the region, permitting the codification of traditional knowledge and its annexation into school curricula. At the same time, continuing funding of such programs requires reporting, which then necessitates the development of technologies of communication and technologies of the self that make such reporting feasible. Educators with little training in these technologies, which range from specific kinds of budget tracking and note-taking to use of personal computers, are faced with challenges that are taken up at the community level. In this way, responses demanded from individual instructors incite community-wide response in the form of training workshops. In the meanwhile, the remarkably recent introduction of motors makes possible access to digital technologies simply not available to all community members at home. In order to report, community members must travel, and if the means of travel is not available to one community member, especially within the necessary time frame, another community member is always available to move forward this trabalho comunitário. In such movements, those that provide aid, or who are aided, often express, through a common idiom “somos muito unidos” (we are very united), the solidarity that hearkens back to the tempo dos patrões and projects of self-liberation.

In Gurupá, agroextractivist activities not only sustain these communities economically but also make the landscape and inform aspects of identity as trabalhadores rurais (rural laborers), as people do campo (from the countryside), and even as belonging to particular families or lineages. These types of personhood are germane to the chronotope of the Amazon community, entailing a reaffirmation of traditional lifeways and continued engagement in long-term projects of liberation. Field and forest labor create ephemeral and lasting ecological features that materially change the conditions of existence, also imbuing the landscape with meaning and memory. People might refer to a stand of Brazil nuts as belonging to a great-grandparent, recent and abandoned planting fields bear the marks and names of specific laborers, and sites of ancestors’ field houses are known, visited, and often managed. In this way, actions of planting, harvesting, and tending materialize kinship in living, fixed, and sometimes indelible plant communities. Community reproduction and the production of community identity, kinship, and selves is thus entwined with agroextractivist activity.

In fact, inhabitants of rural Gurupá and other Amazonian ruralities identify what they call vida do campo, or rural life, as categorically different from city life. The former generates a particular time-space configuration or chronotope, which has its roots in earlier extractive regimes, but is above all determined by the positioning, at any given moment, of the individual vis-à-vis the community. Vida do campo is temporally organized by two sets of cycles (which are, incidentally, coconstitutive and interwoven): (1) the community calendar, which is a product of interpersonal social, political, economic, and religious commitments and celebrations, and (2) seasonal agricultural and extractive cycles. The latter are not exclusively ecological but rather are also a product of the historical development of family lineages and of the regional political economy.

The annual agricultural and extractive cycle provides structure, for example, for planting, tending, and harvesting activities best accomplished in parties. These work parties, which may take various forms, may be expedient, or may form part of the community calendar framework if they occur with regularity. For example, a family may host a convidado—a work party and picnic—annually or seasonally for work on a family member’s plot. Alternately, a community may organize work parties (mutirões) as part of a maintenance rota, which can be all-encompassing or gendered. At other times, mutirões may be convened for a specific, but always communal, purpose. These are all opportunities for socialization and for reaffirming social ties. Reciprocal or consistent participation in convidados and mutirões are seen as signs of commitment to the community and to each other and may trump commitments to other calendars, including cycles of study or administrative sessions. As an example, the urgent clearing of a communal production or construction site may cause school delays or cancellations, for which teachers and students will compensate at other moments.

The phenomenon of convidados and mutirões is widespread in Amazonian communities (e.g., Wagley 1953), where contemporary social and territorial systems are built through kinship and cooperative labor. In general, these involve mobility within communities but may occasionally involve marshaling aid from neighboring communities. The ties that make such integrated action possible are historical, and certainly mediated through kinship, but are likely also a product of practices of mutual aid established in earlier periods. Integrated action across communities may serve multiple communities, like repairing bridges or clearing roads (including aquatic routes); this work may immediately benefit multiple communities or a single community. The latter, in particular, suggests mutual aid practices may have been established long before Amazonian communities as such.

Religiosity and the Community Calendar

Other opportunities to participate in the community include birthdays, Sunday celebrations, and religious festivals or festejos dos santos (feast day celebrations) orchestrated to honor saints important to each community. The history of festejos is tied to the irmandades (brotherhoods), which traditionally have held the responsibility for activities surrounding the celebration of saints, as well as the saints themselves, or more aptly, their images (Wagley 1953; Galvão 1955; Lopes 2013). Festejos, which can last anywhere from three to nine days, are of interest because they necessitate the synchronization of multiple communities’ social and religious calendars. Communities host four festejos each year, and each saint’s irmandade begins planning, saving, and distributing responsibility for the next year’s festivities immediately after the close of the current one, making festejos important structuring elements year-round. Festejos are touted as traditional, and older community members fondly recall the tempo das folias,¹³ in which saint’s day feasts were celebrated without so much oversight, and often, as reported, with better music and dancing. A crucial opportunity for socialization among communities, where apadrinhagem (Wagley 1953) and the meeting of future spouses might occur, festejos have served as community nexuses for the reproduction of religious practices and extended kinship networks as far back as memory extends.

In Gurupá, the same saint may be celebrated in different communities at different times, because they are multiple and because the festivities organized around a feast day trump everything else. School calendars, administrative meetings in town, and anything else that can be locally (re)scheduled gives way to the needs of the religious festivity, to the point that passenger-transport vehicles—from local boats to regional ocean liners—that ferry people up and down the Amazon rearrange routes and schedules to coincide with festivities when they arise. The effect, on a regional, even national scale, is that otherwise reliable temporal rhythms of transport and trade are disrupted, or inflected, by local circumstances.

The temporal demands of the community calendars place pressure on other commitments, like government deadlines and curriculum requirements. In order to attend to these institutional demands, individual agents, or leaders as corporate agents, must find ways to extend or compress time at either end, in order to bring conflicting calendars into synchrony. Community meetings are often held to discuss priorities and generate strategies, which range from summoning bodies or assembling resources to altering the landscape or the school day or week. These actions may compress work or travel time in order to expand time for socialization and celebration, or vice versa. The school day may be curtailed or extended at different times, whichever best serves community goals. This extending and compressing of time might be likened to the use of ragtime in music, where the musician differentiates between two otherwise equal temporal intervals by slightly extending one beat and shortening the next. Ragtime permits the expression of emotive or aesthetic content that is not explicitly conveyed in musical notation, lending a different rhythmic texture to a piece. Importantly, the instruments or voices that are teased into ragtime never fall behind the remaining voices. Such is the nature of ragtime, that it always catches up, always finds synchrony with the metronomic rhythm.

Sociality, Mobility, and Territoriality

Settlement patterns in the rural vicinity of small urban centers like Gurupá vary between linear settlements of houses along a low riverfront interspersed by patches of wooded, managed land and small, nucleated clusters of houses arranged around a handful of communal structures (Browne Ribeiro 2014). In Gurupá, the former arrangement is likely a remnant of the pattern of colocações adopted during the rubber boom, as suggested by Lopes (2013). Communities clustered into vilas (villages) may derive from habitation patterns unrelated to the rubber cycle, as colonial towns, fazendas (plantations), or as their counterpart, the clandestine Maroon settlements formed during oppressive regimes.¹⁴ This dual patterning references and materializes the two pasts from which Gurupá draws its identity: its early colonial past and its history as an extractivist region. If the shape of villages and placement of houses within community nuclei materialize and index their histories, their persisting role as nuclei indexes the overwriting, both figurative and material, of history with the contemporary quotidian. Amazonian communities inevitably reach beyond their village nuclei, spatiotemporally, because inhabitants utilize a territory much larger than that of the village, because networks extend into the city, and also because they extend into the past and the future. My research into territorial dynamics revealed that both community types—whether linear or nucleated—feature a common spatiotemporal pattern of landscape use. Life in these communities is multicentered. That is, life is lived—houses built, work done, and relationships reaffirmed—in multiple places. Many of the families I interviewed had at least one residence established in the centro (center, or interior of landforms), where they might spend days or more than a week at a time. In these communities, mobility between the beira (riverbank), where vilas sit, and the centro is part of the way of being (see also Royer 2003).

How often and how long families spend in the centro depends on seasonality and work schedules but also on personal preference and, importantly, family histories. The families that populated the igarapés (small rivers) fifty years ago now also reside in the vilas, occupying multiple house sites simultaneously. They also continue to manage the same territories used by their ancestors, which are materialized on the landscape as a network of houses, gardens, groves, work sites, trails, roads, and sites of memory. Hence, contemporary modes of territoriality inscribe the present onto the past landscape as in a palimpsest.

These modes of being, which involve cycles of movement between river and center, create a network of paths and places that serve as an alternative, or enhancement, to the riverine system. Further, these houses, gardens, groves, and so forth are often accessible both by land and by river, and the convenience of each mode of access varies with seasonality.

In order to comprehend the significance of this feature of rural life in Gurupá, it is important to understand that life in urban areas, particularly for the wealthy or elite classes that built these centers following the methods and infrastructure of early European colonizers, is always oriented toward the river. In these communities, the river is but one mode of access; terrestrial routes, complemented by swamp bridges and channels cut through igapó (flooded forest), make possible continuous and capricious access to the multiple sites of existence, even when seasonal flooding or drying limits use of certain routes. The pervasive and ancient network of amphibian trails and roads provides not only choices but also opportunities for communal labor (in maintaining these routes) and encounter (in traveling them). The significance of these additional modes and routes of travel is manifold. First, Gurupaenses are not subject to isolation as rivers swell and shrink. Second, this enhanced network of routes multiplies the number of connections possible among places (settlements, houses, field sites, churches) and people, also multiplying possibilities for motion. In this light, the assumption of a riverine orientation elides the depth and dimensionality of spatiotemporal dynamics in Amazonian communities. In Gurupá, this enhanced network has material consequences for sociality and for the advancement of community projects and the realization of envisioned futures.

Conclusion

Over the course of five months of fieldwork in Gurupá, I came to know a place markedly different from that described by Wagley, in part because time has elapsed, and technological, social, political, and economic changes have occurred—a perhaps obvious observation, but one seldom made about such communities that continue to be seen, as Wagley puts it, as perpetual examples of the “problem of man in the tropics” (1953, 1–19). The specter of backwardness still haunts Gurupá, from the outside as well as the inside. Inhabitants claim that the city has been “left behind” (largada) and express a yearning to bring progress to the city. This perception, I suggest, has less to do with actual deficiencies in Gurupá (though these are not imaginary) than with this lingering semiotic projection of an “Amazon Town” that locates it in the past and beyond the reach of modernity.

I would argue, on the contrary, that significant progress has been made, and that Gurupá is in fact an example of Amazonian rurban reality in modernity, even if it retains a specific historicity. This reality consists of living in the echoes of earlier pronouncements of stagnation and striving toward progress, while simultaneously articulating, through speech and movement, aspects of identity that claim both traditionality and modernity.

This Amazonian community chronotope is a complex web of comings and goings, rushing water, boats, and bodies, and tranquil pools, porches, and pauses, animated by a narrative of past oppression and future liberation. With one foot constantly grounded in old times that are both radiant with tradition and rife with pain, Gurupaenses are experts in the dashing about that accomplishes the work necessary to realize the commonly formulated future characterized by independence and sustainability. “Hurrying up” to catch up with fixed deadlines of the Clockwork-oriented bureaucratic state is balanced with the notion that certain things must take their requisite time and space. For example, when community decisions are reached about budgets, reports, festivities, and political action, the ordinarily long, sleepy, and diffuse hours from two to six can become brisk, methodical paragons of synchronicity. Here, community work is also present, as inhabitants of houses along a mile-long shoreline assemble resources and bodies to achieve the desired goals. The efficiency of these networks and the swiftness of such rhythmic transitions are only possible because of a common understanding of the demands of both orders: the maintenance of relationships, on the one hand, and the conditions of markets and bureaucracies, on the other.

It had taken me months to understand these rhythms and the flexibility of temporal commitments in relation to the importance of appearing. Eventually, I had ceased to notice that certain hours stretched long, while others flew by. Waiting at Sr. Inacio’s house, I cherished the stillness, the time with his wife, the details of the quiet, domestic goings-on. The value of stretching out certain notes at the expense of others lay in the quality of their sound. I was finally positioned to appreciate the conflicts between the Clockwork temporality of the capitalist market world—to which we were certainly beholden while “on the clock” doing fieldwork—and the community-oriented chronotope that prioritized encounter. Sr. Inácio, myself, his family, and other participants were entangled in a Ragtime temporality.

Our friend and collaborator, Sr. Inácio, did come, two and a half hours after the time proposed. We arrived where we needed to arrive, and so did he. Hands were shaken, a parting smile, and no one, to my knowledge, was any the poorer for the time differential. The meeting time proposed was not, in fact, a time set—just a meeting planned. An environs that ensured an eventual encounter. For his part, Sr. Inácio had accomplished crucial, time-dependent tasks that guaranteed his continued participation in a global market economy, while also attending to community needs by ensuring that we—the researchers seen to benefit the community—arrived at our destination. We may have arrived later, but I had the distinct impression that Sr. Inácio sped things up for us. I’m not certain, as I was not keeping track of time.

Located in what many consider “the back of beyond,” Amazonian communities, which do rely on and excel at extractive economies, are understood and portrayed, alternately, as backward or productive. These contrasting readings generate specific kinds of personhood and concomitant relationships to space-time, evoking laziness or efficiency, backward or forward motion. And yet both chronotopic projections situate Amazonians as foils to Western modern capitalist systems, in that they are seen as moving toward or away from modernity. Ultimately, Wagley’s chronotopic formulation of an “Amazon Town” was precisely that: one formulation of a world, as seen through the lens of progress in very specific terms, and one that was very likely an incomplete picture of the actual life rhythms, time-space dynamics, and social processes that permeated this Amazonian landscape, even in the 1940s. The person-place-time projections generated by Wagley (1953) and his contemporaries correspond to durable chronotopic projections that have been circulating, sedimenting, and shifting through time and space in places like Gurupá. Present in daily life, these images are robust, yet nonetheless, they are questionable and resignifiable and can be called upon to incite action.

Quilombola communities, like other Traditional Communities in Brazil, persist as such by continuing to inhabit landscapes and organizing socially and politically in manners qualitatively different from those of surrounding societies (Oliveira 2013). Such communities (re)produce themselves, landscapes, and plant and animal communities in particular ways precisely because of and through the chronotopes they create. Yet, in order to retain their status, they must continually attend to the demands of the Brazilian state and ensure transcultural fluency of contemporary and future community members through exchanges with these political entities and global markets. Thus, it is imperative that members of these traditional communities move efficiently between the economic, social, and territorial systems that order local lifeways and those essential to Brazilian citizenship and economic success in regional markets.

In these shifts, it appears that a crucial difference between the logic of Western Clockwork chronotopes and that of communities in Gurupá—and possibly in other Amazonian communities—may be thought of as a distinction between spending time and reaching time, or between dwelling in time and marking time. If the logic of the railroad holds, then this might be a valuable insight; as trains crossed time zones, they were as often chasing the sun as they were racing toward sunup. As we began to move faster across the landscape, we began to experience corporeally something akin to what Einstein would later call relativity, without having to travel at half the speed of light. In essence, time itself is only the progression of events in sequence and in relation to each other (Rovelli 2017). What is relevant here, in terms of our pragmatic experience of space-time, is that our experience of longer and shorter moments, of longer or shorter hours or minutes, is valid. Clockwork temporality, or the idea that time itself ticks by silently in the background of our lives, marking the evolution of universes through its own regular metricality, is an invention of Newtonian physics (Rovelli 2017), a fable of the past. This notion has advantages in systems that, like capitalist markets, require the efficient consolidation of resources at specific points in space-time. In other words, such systems compel an adoption of Clockwork temporalities and a belief in their naturalized reality; such temporalities function in (and are a function of) capitalist market chronotopes.

In Gurupá, scheduling, routing, and (dis)aggregation of bodies, both human and nonhuman, advance short-term agendas and longer-term community projects. The vehicles and routes that connect communities constitute a web of possibilities for movement and encounter, and the choices made daily by Gurupaenses create the structure and texture of the chronotopes they inhabit. Decisions, reached collectively or individually, do more than inflect the rhythm of life; they weave together a complex tapestry of rhythms and tones. They are composers, dictating the tempo of their pieces, who speed up and slow down, enlist more instruments as needed, making the most of the inherent indeterminacy of time to fit immediate and long-term needs. Through this Ragtime temporality, in which some intervals are stretched and others compressed, actors participate in, and strategically navigate, these theoretically incommensurable time worlds.