Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two contrasting cases of tropical urbanism: the "garden cities" of southern Amazonia and downtown Sao Paulo, to explore alternative rationalities, marginal bodies, and virtual realities that are overlooked by mainstream cultural evolution and complexity theory.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines emergence and self-organization in human socio-cultural systems in two complex constructed landscapes in Brazil: the southern Amazon (Upper Xingu) and São Paulo. The Amazon example focuses on a variant of pre-Columbian urbanism (or proto-urbanism), "garden cities," with unique properties of self-organization and human-environment relations that contrast with traditional cultural evolutionary models. The novel organization and change experienced in the centuries before and after 1492 are situated within a discussion of current political ecology and the "scramble for the Amazon." The second example, downtown São Paulo, a radically distinctive urban context, further explores how human bodies and "traffic" conform to emergent properties of urban settings, notably subjective and fluid social relations reflected in physical, lived, and virtual realities and unanticipated novelty from original design, urban planning: alternative rationalities. Both cases highlight shortcomings of formulaic theories of cultural and social evolution, rational agents, and normative human bodies and subjectivities in complex adaptive systems (CAS), particularly how certain groups are muted and marginalized, and their histories and agency erased. These highly contrasting examples, linked in terms of geo-politics and knowledge production in the global south, are considered against the historical and socio-political backdrop of the "Anthropocene." It concludes with a consideration of anthropology's place in current issues of global ecology and human rights, as a "meeting place" that seeks common ground for addressing diversity in scale, perspective, and voice, and methodological shifts, from participant observation to observant participation, that characterize contemporary interdisciplinary and multi-cultural research.