Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore how the idea of ‘going native’ is redefined and redeployed to counter European discourses of nature as an economic resource in Arturo Burga Freitas’s Mal de gente, a 1940s novella set in the Peruvian Amazon.

Paper long abstract:

Arturo Burga Freitas's Mal de gente - which bridges the novella, folktale, and ethnographic sketch - is set in the jungles in and around the author's native Peruvian Amazon. At its centre is the story of a young European, Edmund Rice, who, like a number of protagonists of the contemporaneous Spanish American novela de la selva, travels to the region for the purposes of work and ends up falling in love with a local woman and settling permanently in the jungle. The natural world depicted in Burga Freitas's novella is a zone of exploitation, characterised by the European plundering of tropical products, chiefly rubber. Yet countering this assessment of nature is the native Amazonian view of the jungle as a complex space abounding in unseen life, capable of enchanting outsiders and, pivotally, preventing them from leaving. This paper will explore how, in this important text of the 1940s, the idea of 'going native' is redefined and redeployed to counter European discourses of nature as an economic resource. Instead, nature emerges as a powerfully animate realm, and one with which man is profoundly interconnected.