Time Journeys on the Remote Amazonian Frontier: The Javari Basin (Brazil and Peru)

This chapter explores temporal dimensions of travel on the rivers of the Javari basin in western Brazil. Traveling on slow riverboats between the downriver towns and the upriver Indigenous villages could take weeks. When traveling upriver, it was common to have a subjective experience of traveling into the past, because there was no connection to the electrical or telecommunications grids and no access to modern amenities. But Indigenous Marubo people often traveled with the specific purpose of bringing new technologies into the villages, framing this as an effort to ensure that they have a future in the interior villages and not only in the downriver towns. Marubo people thus subverted and reversed subjective associations of time and direction in river travel. A temporal dimension also emerged through personal narratives evoked by riverside sites with specific histories facilitated by the temporary suspension of normal village and town routines during river travel.