when we sold god’s eye (alex cuadros)

Where  is the frontline of the greatest conflict on earth, one that has been raging for over five hundred years? If one looks at earth’s history on a wider, geological scale, the one of the Anthropocene perhaps, then this line is to be drawn between the forces who are at war with nature and those who seek to engage in a mutually beneficial feedback loop with nature. The conflict between  those who believe in the idea of the human as part of nature as opposed to those who would place humanity ‘above’ nature’.. (I initially posited the idea of an urbanised concept of civilisation versus the hunter-gatherer model, but given recent archaeological evidence from the Amazon, this division seems outdated and artificial - the ancestors of those who live off the forest as hunter-gatherers might well have belonged to urban cultures before the genocide initiated in 1492).

Cuadros’ book takes us to the heart of one of the last remaining frontiers of this conflict. It tells the tale of a tribe which has lived the last 500 hundred years of history on fast forward. In the 1960s, the Cinta Larga were still an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon. Then the white men appeared, followed by mass extermination through disease, followed by a period of retrenchment on the part of the survivors and adaptation. Those who endured began to fight for their rights and also to ensure that the pillage of the jungle, their home, was something that might benefit their people as well as the imperialist invaders. Firstly in the seventies with the hardwood trade, then in the nineties with the diamond trade. The book delivers a comprehensive overview of this process, where vast sums of money are in play, and nobody wins.

Cuadros touches on the epistemological and existential aspects of the accelerated historical changes that the Cinta Larga have lived through. It’s a tale of bitter fruit and inevitable tragedy. This is reporting from the true Great War, the one that has haunted the edge of our consciousness, a window onto a way of life the world has foregone, another consciousness free of the traps of our supposed civilisation. Which is not to say this might be some kind of utopian perfection, but it represented an alternative, and as the tales of the the Cinta Larga reveal, an alternative whose advantages might well have outweighed the benefits of our chosen way of living.