Paper short abstract:

Mobilising novels, entomological studies, and newspapers, this paper examines the origins of the adage, “Either Brazil kills off to the saúva ant, or the ant will kill off Brazil,” as a way to explore the multispecies constitution of Brazilian identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Paper long abstract:

For over a century now, the debate about Brazil’s political and economic challenges as a nation-state has been partly shaped by a multispecies trope: “Either Brazil puts an end to the saúva, or the saúva will put an end to Brazil.” Supposedly formulated by French botanist Auguste Saint-Hilaire, who travelled extensively throughout the country in the early nineteenth century, the adage calls attention to an existential threat to the nascent South American nation posed by a particular ant genus – the Atta leafcutters, held as a pest since the beginning of European colonization. I address the origins of this trope as a way to explore the more-than-human constitution of Brazilian identity. Rather than mere products of symbolization, the trope and other cultural phenomena express “the construction of reality through communicative and bodily processes” (Roscher, 2018: 53) that include nonhuman animals as political actors. I substantiate this claim by examining various kinds of historical sources (novels, entomological studies, and newspapers, among others) through a biosemiotics framework that draws on Eduardo Kohn’s (2013) theory of cross-species semiosis. This helps me show how the ants interpreted massive deforestation, imposing a regime of encounter and communication with Euro-Brazilian humans that would eventually precipitate as an insecticidal, nationalist trope. Covering the country’s history until the 1950s – after which the advent of toxic baits increasingly attenuated the ants’ plunderings – my account furthers an emerging more-than-human approach to Brazilian nation-building by attending to what Herre de Bondt et al. (2023) called nonhuman “acts of denizenship”.