ABSTRACT
Two of the dominant themes – the penalties incumbent on living in the tropics and the passivity of those victimized by living isolated from the outside world – sustain the 'melancholy and modern' thesis as it passes from Levi-Strauss's interest in an indigenous Amazonian world on the wane to that of the backward peasant who awaits salvation at the hands of modernization. In Pace's efforts to transcend the narrow scheme proposed by Wagley, the outcome for Amazonians – as exemplified by the residents of Gurupa – is a tropicalist, Faustisan pact: we may have television, but we will also get Belo Monte Dam. The melancholy connotations of the tropics often rest on ambiguities concerning enclosure and detachment from 'the outside world' as well as the distinctive constraints that the tropics are said to place on human effort. The rubber industry emerged simultaneously with the increasingly coherent accounts of tropical naturalism that commenced with 19th-century study.
