Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Amazonia
Research seminar with Nicolás Cuvi, Research Professor at FLACSO Ecuador, who is a guest researcher 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, Nicolás will draw upon a chapter in preparation for the forthcoming Handbook of Amazonian History (Eds. Rafael Chambouleyron and Mark Harris, Oxford University Press).
Title: Making, Unmaking, and Remaking Amazonia
Abstract: Before the sixteenth century, the Amazon was a densely inhabited, highly diverse biocultural biome, shaped by millennia of intricate human and non-human entanglements. This seminar explores the long-term history of this socio-ecological system through three phases. First, it examines the "Making" of the Amazon, highlighting the deep historical co-production of its biocultural landscapes. Second, it dissects the systematic "Unmaking" of the region, tracing the extractivist vectors that have operated since European contact, by summarising examples of the centuries of ecosystemic and epistemic dispossession, from early imperial extraction to contemporary agribusiness. In this Unmaking, the Amazon has been subjected to a relentless process of dual colonial emptying to construct a tameable terra nullius: a semiotic depletion that erased local ontologies, languages, and knowledge, and a material depletion driven by demographic collapse and the metabolic reorganization of the territory. Finally, the talk explores the "Remaking" of the biome by emphasising the persistent resistances, agencies, and adaptation strategies of Indigenous and local communities (and of studies on the Amazon) that highlight possible pathways to a resilient future.
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).