Unmaking Amazonia
Research seminar with Nicolas Cuví, Research Professor at FLACSO Ecuador, who will be a guest at the Center for Anthropocene history this Autumn.
Time: Fri 2026-10-23 10.15 - 12.00
Location: Large Seminar Room, Teknikringen 74D, Level 5
In his presentation, Nicolas will draw upon a chapter in preparation for the forthcoming Handbook of Amazonian History (Eds. Rafael Chambouleyron and Mark Harris, Oxford University Press).
Title: Unmaking Amazonia Abstract: Before the sixteenth century, the Amazon was a densely inhabited, highly diverse cultural forest—a biome shaped by millennia of intricate human and non-human entanglements. This seminar dissects the systematic 'unmaking' of the region, tracing the extractivist vectors that have operated upon it since European contact. The presentation examines how the Amazon has been subjected to a relentless and ongoing process of dual emptying to construct a tameable terra nullius. First, a semiotic depletion that erased local ontologies, languages and knowledge. Second, a material depletion driven by demographic collapse and the metabolic reorganisation of the territory through the expansion of successive colonial and capitalist frontiers. By mapping some cases of these intertwined trajectories of ecosystemic and epistemic dispossession across centuries—from early imperial extraction to contemporary agribusiness and infrastructure—the talk exposes thehistorical mechanisms that have forced the systemic alteration of the bioculturality of this biome. Biography
Nicolás Cuvi is an interdisciplinary researcher, biologist, science communicator, and environmental historian based in Quito, Ecuador. He holds a PhD in the History of Science.
Since 2010, he has served as a Research Professor at FLACSO Ecuador, focusing his academic work on environmental humanities, urban ecology, environmental ethics, and the history of science within the context of the tropical Andes, the Amazon and Latin America. He is the author of numerous books, book chapters, and articles in high-impact peer-reviewed indexed journals.
Dr Cuvi has extensive experience in international scientific cooperation; he has served as Lead Author and Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth and seventh assessment cycles. He participates actively in the Science Panel for the Amazon and several international scientific societies, including SOLCHA (Latin American and Caribbean Society for Environmental History), INHIGEO (International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences), and ROSA (Network of Andean Socio-Ecological Observatories).