From Complexity to Monoculture: What Ulrich Schmidel, Cândido Rondon, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Remote Sensing Can Tell Us and Teach Us about the History of the “Western” Brazilian Interior

Three of the most famous and widely documented explorers of the “western” South American interior—Schmidel, Rondon, and Lévi-Strauss—provided extensive descriptions of places, peoples, and forms of landscape transformation. Traveling in some cases centuries, but at least decades apart, these well-trained observers (two of whom were military men, the other an anthropologist) delivered unusually thorough descriptions of the terrains they explored. From the moment of “first contact” (Schmidel) and the early efforts of modernist technical integration (Rondon), to the “last sigh” before the onslaught of modernization (Lévi-Strauss), their accounts offer analysis of significant historical continuity despite major disruptions over approximately 400 years, including massive epidemics, wars, and border redefinitions. These routes were mapped and correlated with descriptions of place, space, and both native and other populations. Recent remote sensing images have been overlaid on these routes, highlighting the stark and definitive “triste(r) tropiques” of simplification and extinction, as well as some persistence in the context of agro-industrial expansion.