Land Without Evil: Utopian Journeys Across the South American Watershed [Hardcover]

Richard Gott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1993

All too often, travel writers plunge into seemingly obscure parts of the globe with little knowledge of where they are, whom they are among, or what has happened there in the past. In this trend-breaking anti travel book, Richard Gott describes his own journey through the heart of South America, across the swampland that forms the watershed between the River Plate and the River Amazon. But the story of his expedition takes second place to a brilliant resurrection of the historical events in the area over five hundred years, of the people who have lived there and the visitors who have made the same journey. The land crossed by the Upper Paraguay river once formed the contested frontier in South America between Spanish and Portuguese territory. The Portuguese sent expeditions through it in attempts to reach the Spanish silver mines of the Andes, and the Jesuits (supported by the monarch in Madrid) established strategic hamlets - the famous Indian missions - to stabilize the frontier. But this was not the beginning or end of conflict in the area. Earlier, the Guarani-speaking Indian nations of Paraguay had made violent contact across the swamp with the Quechua-speakers of the Inca empire; later, after the departure of the Spaniards, the nineteenth century witnessed a prolonged period of purposeful extermination of the local peoples. Since the Spanish conquest, the area has seen an endless procession of newcomers pursuing unsuitable and utopian programmes of economic and social development that have inevitably ended in disaster for the local population. Intermingling accounts of his own travels over many years with those Jesuit priests, Spanish conquistadors and Portuguese Mamelukes, together with those of other visitors such as Alcides D'Orbigny, Theodore Roosevelt, and Claude Levi-Strauss, Richard Gott weaves a complex web of narrative that brings to life the almost unknown frontier land of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Both gripping and polemical, Land Without Evil is a significant contribution to our knowledge of South America.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1990, by train, plane, bus, car and motorcycle, Gott ( Guerilla Movements in Latin America ) journeyed from east to west across central South America through the swamps and plains of Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay, on a route marked by old Spanish and Portuguese mission settlements. Rich in the geography and history of this little-chronicled area, this thoughtful, well-researched account details the ravages that European colonists inflicted on populous Indian nations. While he mentions that some of the Jesuit missions, particularly those in the northern section of the region, offered positive cultural and agricultural changes to the indigenous peoples, Gott believes that elsewhere the missionaries were a nearly military force that collaborated with the European invaders. In a final note, he suggests that there is enough documentation available to support a revision of the "archaic and racist view of South American history that has prevailed for so long." Illustrations not seen by PW.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The anger of Amerindians expressed today by such groups as Peru's Shining Path guerrillas becomes clearer after reading Land Without Evil , both a travel book and a resurrection of events of the last 500 years in a little-known corner of South America. The upper Chaco, a watershed of the Amazon and the Paraguay rivers now shared by Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, is today a sad and underpopulated area. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Jesuits established prosperous missions, where they taught the natives European music, art, and architecture as well as reading and writing. After the forced removal of the Jesuits, exploitation decimated the local population, with the nadir reached during the 19th-century rubber boom. Gott, a former Latin American correspondent for the London Guardian , intermingles his description of his travels here with the accounts of previous travelers. He is to be admired for the breadth of his research into the obscure records of Jesuits, explorers, and historians, but it is unfortunate that he was not able to integrate the old narratives into his own text with more skill and sophistication. Nevertheless, this book should be of interest to most public and academic libraries.
- Nancy Padget Lazar, U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Verso Books (March 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0860913988
• ISBN-13: 978-0860913986
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,024,840 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.