Speaking figuratively, U of C anthropology professor Manuela Carneiro da Cunha says she wears three hats. Taking her literally, one might expect to find a black-velvet beret, a wide-brimmed panama, and a metal helmet hanging in her closet.

These she would alternately don as a French-educated intellectual imparting lessons learned from Claude Lévi-Strauss, as a hands-on expeditioner canoeing through the headwaters of the Amazon, and as an international politico fighting for the rights of South America’s traditional peoples.

At the moment, the helmet would be gathering dust, the panama getting a fresh weave, and the beret resting, slightly tilted, on her auburn-haired head as she compiles the results of a major study of rain-forest conservation issues.

Carneiro da Cunha is spending spring quarter in São Paulo, Brazil, editing the Forest Encyclopaedia. To be published later this year with support from the Brazilian Ministry for the Environment, the Encyclopaedia will include research conducted by Carneiro da Cunha and her international team of anthropologists, biologists, demographers, geologists, and ecologists during a five-year study of the first land area in Brazil to be deemed an extractive reserve.

The concept of an “extractive reserve” was put forth in recent years by groups who have traditionally lived in the rain forests of Brazil and who have sought a socially fair approach to conservation and economic development. Since 1990 the Brazilian government has recognized 11 such reserves, protected lands that remain the living and working sites for 21,000 people. But some policymakers and environmentalists, skeptical that ecological balance can be sustained, have advocated the eviction of the settlers.

Carneiro da Cunha’s pilot project, begun in 1993 with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, seeks to help resolve the question of the conditions under which the forest dwellers can effectively be involved in conservation initiatives. The project has focused on the inaugural reserve covering 5 million hectares of the Juruá River basin in western Brazil. The reserve is home to 6,000 people, mostly families of rubbertappers who extract materials for making rubber by tapping trees dispersed throughout the rain forest, just as their ancestors have done for the last century. If the team of researchers can document that the rubbertappers have been using—and will continue to use—the land in ways that improve their quality of life as well as conserve the area’s biological diversity, the team may be able to help the settlers stay on the reserve and offer a model for similar groups.

Carneiro da Cunha’s pilot project, begun in 1993 with funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, seeks to help resolve the question of the conditions under which the forest dwellers can effectively be involved in conservation initiatives. The project has focused on the inaugural reserve covering 5 million hectares of the Juruá River basin in western Brazil. The reserve is home to 6,000 people, mostly families of rubbertappers who extract materials for making rubber by tapping trees dispersed throughout the rain forest, just as their ancestors have done for the last century. If the team of researchers can document that the rubbertappers have been using—and will continue to use—the land in ways that improve their quality of life as well as conserve the area’s biological diversity, the team may be able to help the settlers stay on the reserve and offer a model for similar groups.

Born in Portugal, Carneiro da Cunha grew up in Brazil the daughter of an engineer father and a psychoanalyst mother. She graduated in 1968 with a degree in mathematics from the Faculté des Sciences in Paris and later attended anthropology seminars led by Lévi-Strauss. Finding his structuralist approach to be a natural extension of her studies in mathematics, she went on to earn her doctorate in anthropology in 1975 from São Paulo’s University of Campinas, later teaching there and at the University of São Paulo.

When Brazil’s military rule ended in the late 1980s, the country began drafting a new democratic constitution. As president of the Brazilian Anthropological Association and a board member of the Brazilian Science Council, Carneiro da Cunha helped lead a coalition of academic institutions that won a constitutional chapter guaranteeing extensive land rights for traditional peoples.

“As an anthropologist, I had a specific expertise on indigenous issues,” she says. “Every anthropologist in Brazil felt a commitment to the people they were working with, and whose problems and claims they could help take to a public arena.”

She also helped rebuild Brazil’s universities as centers of intellectual thought. At the University of São Paulo, she founded a center for the study of traditional peoples. In 1992, she edited the center’s History of Indians in Brazil, a comprehensive documentation of the ties of traditional peoples to certain land areas in the country.

In 1994, Carneiro da Cunha came to the U of C ready to enjoy a “retreat” from intense political activism and a return to more purely academic pursuits. She works with the Latin American Studies Center and teaches courses on the rights of traditional peoples and tangential interests, such as historical representations of images, icons, and idols. Yet she still finds time to get out of Haskell Hall and back into the field. This summer, as she tries to do at least once each year, she plans to travel by plane for two days and by boat for three to the Juruá reserve.

In addition to compiling the Encyclopaedia, which will chronicle the rubbertappers’ use of the land and their knowledge of it, the team plans to release this month a general assessment of the project, offering data on the plant and animal species they have catalogued. Carneiro da Cunha says the initial findings show the rubbertappers have not merely helped to preserve biodiversity but have allowed it to flourish. For example, she says, in just 62 days, the team counted 612 bird species on the re-serve, compared with the record held by a nearby area in Peru, where it took 1,000 days to identify 560 species. The team has also been working to establish ecological monitoring methods, create zones for controlled extraction, develop forest-management training programs, and secure local intellectual-property rights for resources found on the reserve.

“This project was not just for biological science,” says Carneiro da Cunha. “If we can prove that the rubbertappers’ use of the land is successful and that the federal government can spend less money running these areas by letting the traditional peoples manage them, then we have findings that are important for policy.”

Meanwhile, Carneiro da Cunha was recently asked to advise the United Nations Conference for Trade and Development, a permanent Geneva-based body. And she plans to help implement the U.N.’s Convention for Biological Diversity, adopted by 171 nations at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to promote the sustainable use of resources worldwide.

Looks like she’s ready to dust off that helmet.—C.S.