This article explores the conflicts between people and Atta leafcutter ants over the meaning of anthropogenic deforestation in nineteenth-century Brazil. As human agricultural settlement advanced, ants followed in its wake, harvesting leaves, flowers, fruits, and other plant parts from crops to supply their underground fungus gardens. In so doing, the ants, as semiotic selves, interpreted what humans had done and acted accordingly, producing historically consequential environmental change in the process. An examination of primary sources such as legislation, travel journals, agricultural manuals, government administrative documentation, and newspapers for human-ant conversations demonstrates how interspecies sense making has fueled social innovations and rearrangements, shaping technical developments, legal-administrative practices, parliamentary discussions, and even local electoral arenas. By taking written documents as surviving structures of embodied, more-than-symbolic conversations, this analysis both takes its cue from, and helps substantiate, what Ewa Domanska has termed a “multispecies co-authorship” approach to human-animal relations. It argues that such a theoretical-methodological stance helps environmental historians account for nonhuman agency by allowing the exploration of animals’ truly creative, rather than merely resistive, behavior.

中文翻译：

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有意义的清理：十九世纪巴西的人与蚂蚁谈判景观

本文探讨了人与阿塔之间的冲突关于19世纪巴西人为砍伐森林的含义的切叶蚁。随着人类农业定居的发展，蚂蚁随之而来，从农作物中收获叶子，花朵，水果和其他植物部分，以为其地下真菌园提供食物。这样，蚂蚁作为符号学的自我，解释了人类所做的事情并采取了相应的行动，从而在此过程中产生了历史性的环境变化。对立法，旅行杂志，农业手册，政府行政文件和报纸等主要来源进行的人类蚂蚁对话研究表明，种间意义的创造如何推动了社会创新和重新安排，塑造技术发展，法律行政实践，议会讨论，甚至是当地的选举舞台。通过将书面文件作为具体化的，而不是符号化的对话的生存结构，这种分析既可以从伊娃·多曼斯卡（Ewa Domanska）所谓的“人与动物关系多物种合著”方法中获得线索，又可以帮助证实这一点。它认为，这种理论方法论立场允许环境历史学家通过允许探索动物的真正创造力而不仅仅是抵抗性行为来解释非人类行为。