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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”.