There exists a widely-shared opinion among anthropologists today that globalization is first and foremost a creative process that allows new cultural forms to emerge through cultural contact, hybridization, diasporas, transnational networks, travel and so on (Inda and Rosaldo 2002). Many ethnographies emphasize the fact that the so-called traditional communities are negotiating, challenging, appropriating and contesting Western cultural products in diverse and meaningful ways (such as Aboriginal peoples watching Hollywood videos). At the same time, it is argued that non-Western societies are establishing new links and connections that skip the West altogether (such as Indian movies consumed in Nigeria). Instead of a gloomy picture of homogenization, culture loss and Euro-American hegemony, sociologists, anthropologists and material culture specialists insist in the bright side of globalism and argue that there is nothing to be worried about in the encounters propitiated by the new means of communication and transportation. After all, cultural contact has been around for a few millennia already and cultures have always been changing under different pressures, influences and sources of inspiration. In the case of material culture studies, the prevailing paradigm has it that there is large room for negotiating and reinscribing in manifold ways apparently homogeneous industrial products (i.e. Coke), as opposed to the dark perspective on modern technology defended by late 19th and early 20th century philosophers – both to the right (Heidegger) and to the left (Benjamin) of the political spectrum (Miller 1987).
With other critics (Graeber 2002), we argue that this is a sanction of neo-liberalism and late capitalism – the forces under globalization. With LiPuma (2002), we think that it is still the West that is imposing itself everywhere and not the other way round (Hernando 2006; González-Ruibal 2006). That under the misguiding appearances of creativity and cultural negotiation, there is a very real process of destruction fostered by the Western world. Neocolonialism (we call it for what it is, rather than superficially ameliorating past transgressions with the prefix ‘post’) is not more natural, creative or acceptable than colonialism. Many anthropologists, sociologists and material culture specialists that have chosen to understand globalization from a cultural point of view seem to have forgotten macro-politics and long-term processes. Archaeology, in our opinion, can offer an alternative view – but also from within, starting from details and fragments. Archaeology focuses on ruin, the abandoned, the decaying, the abject. It exposes genealogies, it is concerned with ‘origins,’ accentuates links, flushes out processes. It excavates beyond the surface, both metaphorically and literally.
In what follows, we study a well-known fact – how consumption in the West translates into a destructive bane in the Third World – from an archaeological perspective. By tracing the genealogies of a piece of furniture or a building material, we uncover the violence that lurks behind everyday, seemingly mundane ‘objects,’ “creatively” consumed by the privileged citizens of the (first) world.

Take a mahogany floor. If we type “mahogany floor” in Google, we get a photograph of a room in a luxurious house somewhere in Massachusetts, with the following caption: “The mahogany floor installed in our daughter’s bedroom”. Mahogany is one of the most valuable tropical woods, extracted from South American and West African rainforests. The list of top U.S. furniture manufacturers that purchase Brazilian mahogany includes LifeStyle Furnishings, L & J.G. Stickley, Inc., Henredon, Ethan Allen and Furniture Brands International. Major importers include DLH Nordisk and Inter-Continental Hardwoods (Cray 2001). There are many ways in which you can create an original, cozy, fashionable home by using mahogany.
During August 2006, we carried out fieldwork with a group of Amazonian hunter-gatherers, the Awá (also called Guajá), who live in the state of Maranhão (NE Brazil) (Cormier 2003). During the last two days in the field we had the opportunity to participate in a police operation aimed at stopping the activities of illegal loggers inside the Indian reservation, a large territory delimited and legalized by the State and protected by the FUNAI (National Indian Agency). Entering the reservation is – theoretically at least – very difficult: several permits issued by the FUNAI and the CNPq (Brazilian Research Council) are needed, to prevent free entry to malicious individuals or interests. This, of course, does not prevent loggers to raze the “protected” forest and endanger its native inhabitants. We documented criminal evidence with photographs and GPS mapping. Actually, our work – a forensic/archaeological mode of documentation – was not too different from what we have been doing among the Awá, following them in their hunting expeditions, and mapping houses, camps and trails. In both cases we applied our archaeological sensibilities and methods to scrutinize the present.

When we arrived to the area in the tropical forest where the operation was taking place, the policemen were coming back from their first day of work. They arrived with three four-wheel-drive vehicles, several motorcycles and a huge tractor used to make roads in the forest. What they had found was a nice example of “selective logging”, a practice that is devastating the Amazon twice as fast as previously thought (Asner et al. 2005). They had located several camp sites, around 30 people (illegal loggers), many chainsaws and other tools.

We returned to the place the next day, in order to follow the chase and document what had already been discovered. As good archaeologists, we arrived too late to the crime scene. The campsites and roads had been abandoned, some the day before, others during the night after the police raid. Some archaeologists arrive several million years late, others just a few hours – the latter includes garbologists, for example (Rathje and Murphy 1992). That was our case. We dealt with archaeological sites that were less than 24 hours old. But the archaeological nature of those places that we visited cannot be denied.

We followed the main dirt road made by the loggers. It was wide enough for two vehicles in some places, and certainly better than most roads that one can find in this part of Brazil. The road crossed the heart of the Awá reservation: the native village and the FUNAI post were located only 5 miles away as the crow flies the nearest logging spots. At some points along the track, there were heaps of precious wood left behind in a hurry. The route cuts through rivers and creeks indiscriminately, preventing the flowing of fish – a staple food for the Awá.

We visited three campsites stormed by the police the day before, and we discovered a new one. When we arrived there were no witnesses, except one scared peasant. You don’t need many witnesses in the flesh to reconstruct what was going on in those camps, to know how is the daily life of a woodcutter in a dirty hole in the rainforest. It comes as no surprise that Michael Taussig (2004: 39) resorts to Kristeva’s notion of abjection to refer to heat in the tropics: “a thoroughly unrepresentable state of diffuse anxiety, depression, and self-loathing that seems to dissolve your very being”. Humidity and heat during the day, humidity and cold during the night. Immense boredom. The same conversations with the same people. The same beans, the same rice. The same green veil surrounding you every single minute for months. You cannot even see the forest when you are in the forest. You just see green – dark green, light green, dry green, damp green. And a dusty trail when you cut down the trees. You don’t need words, anyway: things themselves are powerful enough. Here, fresh scars in the form of resinous stumps evoke Marlow’s images of the Congo ivory harvest; Conrad’s darkness.

The second campsite, surrounded by dense vegetation, was very close to the river Agua Preta (“black water”). The main structure was a flimsy shack made with thin poles and black plastic sheet.
Some of the items in the campsite:
-Hard hats, chainsaws’ spare parts.
-Gloves, work boots.
-Jerrycans and drums with gasoline.
-A portable stove.
-Some pans.
-A pressure cooker thrown on a dirt floor, its contents – a bean stew – spilled.
-A pile of meat, spread over tree leafs, with flies buzzing around.
-A heap of rubbish (wrappers, cardboard, plastic).
-Charcoal.
-Dishes.
-A fish trap in the nearby river.
-A stray dog, wandering around, scared.
The place stinks.

The second campsite was the largest one. There was a kitchen space made with plastic sheet and poles, a wide room with stools and wooden benches. Finds were plentiful here.
A hasty inventory:
-Large gasoline drums.
-Clothes, blankets and hammocks.
-Pans, saucepans, pots. Rice, beans and meat on a pot over a stove.
-Two bottles of nail varnish.
-A bunch of letters on the kitchen table – written by women and addressed to men.
-Half-eaten watermelons.
-Christmas greeting cards.
-Invoices and bills.
-Pornographic magazines.
-A bamboo cage for turtles.
-DVDs with Brazilian video clips and soap operas.
-Non-biodegradable rubbish inside a cardboard box.
-Dishes, cups, glasses.
-Bags with beans and rice.
-Two dozen eggs in their plastic boxes, some smashed.
-Soap and clothes (T-shirts and jeans) over a washing board in the river.
-A harpy eagle’s wing (Harpia harpyja).
-Stools made of tree trunks.
-A tractor’s wheel.

Our local guides are happy because they have found a lot of useful things that they can keep. For somebody living in a mud hut in the middle of the tropical forest with no electricity or running water and a day walk to the nearest shop, looting this camp is like going to the mall – but free. Another way of shopping. What they don’t keep is duly burnt by the police.

We keep the chase of woodcutters, following the traces of a large tractor, heavily printed on the dusty road.
After a while, we find another place occupied by the woodcutters. It is a porticoed wooden shack, a typical dwelling for laborers living in cattle ranches. The police enter the place, well protected with their bullet-proof vests and brandishing berettas. There is nobody around and the hut is empty. In the forest surrounding the shack they find chainsaws, bags of beans and rice, crackers, biscuits, watermelons, fruit cans, gasoline, lots of meat in Styrofoam boxes with ice. The loggers planned to be in the forest cutting wood for several months, at least until the start of the heavy rains in early January. The place must have been abandoned only a few hours before we arrived. A bewildered peasant is found hiding in the forest.

We lose the tractor’s tracks in an intersection. The machine was probably loaded on a truck and taken away. We follow the road presumably used by the truck until we enter a large, barbed-wire-fenced ranch. The ranch occupies thousands of hectares, part of them in the Indian reservation, part on the Gurupi national biological reserve. There are hundreds of cows grazing in the meadows that were a precious rainforest only four or five years ago. The place is planted with cepim, a tough grass that prevents the forest from growing again. We ask the laborers about the owner and they tell us that this is a fazenda do Rui (Rui’s ranch), an absentee landlord living in Espírito Santo, a couple of thousand miles away from this place. Yet concerning a truck or a tractor: no evil seen, no evil heard, no evil spoken. Without land or property of their own, their frail survival depends on not knowing.

Warlord capitalism – Kurtz’ capitalism, deep inside the Congo – simply melts into the air. Genealogical links are severed, nobody knows the whole story: the ties are broken between the ranch in the rainforest and the clean, urban world of the landlord and the timber merchant (who are obviously in connivance). Other links are likewise dissolved: those between the Indians and the woodcutters (the Indians are mythical beasts for the loggers, who have never seen them, but fear them nevertheless); between the miserable woodcutters and the timber merchant; between the landlord/timber merchant and the owners of the original, cozy, fashionable home somewhere in Massachusetts. We have to restore these links. Catachresis – seemingly bizarre juxtapositions – is an attempt to skip the gaps in broken genealogies: look at the mahogany floor adjacent to the heap of rubbish burning in the forest! The exquisite and the abject. This is the return of the repressed: a glimpse into the Real, as Žižek would put it, that we have excavated for you to know.
Behind the warm reddish hues of the mahogany floor in your daughter’s bedroom there is a pot of rotting beans dropped over a dirt floor, flies buzzing over stinking meat, a harpy eagle killed for pleasure, pornographic magazines on a miserable kitchen – and misspelled letters of love.

There are 38 hunter-gatherers striving to survive in a half-devastated rainforest, a few absentee landlords and timber merchants, hundreds of impoverished laborers. Of course this is much more disturbing than the comfortable Western reality of consumer choices, re-inscription of industrial goods, negotiation of identities, and so on that “critical” material culture specialists offer us time and again. They won’t dig under the exotic mahogany floor to find skeletons, rubbish, the detritus, the stink of petrol, the illegal scars of the forest. This is archaeologists’ work: Archaeologists who seek in other (dark, hidden, silenced) spaces, and not only in other times, the genealogy of their privileged society.
Acknowledgements
The Awá project is co-financed by the Vice-Presidency of Institutional Relations and Development Cooperation of the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Spanish Historical Heritage Agency (IPHE). Apart from the authors of this essay, the research team is composed by anthropologists Elizabetha Beserra Coelho and Eliane Cantarino O’Dwyer (Brazil) and archaeologist Gustavo Politis (Argentina). The authors want to thank the FUNAI officers and the Policia Militar Florestal de Maranhão for their invaluable cooperation.
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