Paper short abstract:

This presentation analyzes the ways that non-indigenous farmers in Amazonia classify naturally growing "covers" on the ground, including vegetation, but also the covers of the body- hair.

Paper long abstract:

Researchers use remote sensing technologies to classify Amazonian land cover based on geo-spatial properties, with “natural” forested landscapes distinguished from anthropogenic, non-forest covers with clear edges, densities, and patterns. In this presentation, I discuss how non-forest covers are sensed and categorized on the ground. I use the term “covers” to describe the vegetation that grows naturally and which these actors consider non-human or natural. However, I show the ways that people talk about vegetation is similar to how they talk about another type of cover, which grows on the human body—hair. Drawing on research along a deforestation frontier in the Brazilian Amazon, I describe how a range of non-indigenous actors perceive, shape, and judge covers, from agricultural fields at the edge of the forest to urban topiary bushes and lawns to human head and body hair. Comparative analysis across these sites reveals that covers are ranked and ordered, and provides a chance to see more clearly how environmental destruction and human inequality are linked in an overarching conceptual system.