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In their chapter Henning Laugerud and John Odemark relate Danish-Norwegian material to the historiography of the reform and acculturation of ‘popular cultures’ in a British, and broader European context. In particular, the authors are concerned with how the notion of superstitio was deployed to construct religious otherness in reformation polemics, and how reformation polemics contributed to the construction of the intellectual categories and objects of emerging studies of folklore and popular religion. Alexandra Walsham has shown that the British reformation discourse on superstition foreshadowed the study of folklore in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, not least because it was centred on ‘the realm of speech’ seen as ‘the natural habitat’ of superstition. Similarly, this chapter discusses the historical discourses about Catholicism as superstition, and examines the genealogy of one of the constitutive analytical categories of folklore, superstitio, in Denmark-Norway.

In 2010 the New York Times reported that ‘[t]ribes of Amazon Find an Ally Out of “Avatar”’, James Cameron. The alliance was against the building of Belo Monte, a hydroelectricdam in the Xingu River in Brazil. Cameron made a documentary about Belo Monte, A Message from Pandora. Here he states that Avatar becomes real in the struggle against the dam. This appears to confirm U. K. Heise’s observation that the ‘Amazon rainforest has long functioned as a complex symbol of exotic natural abundance, global ecological connectedness, and environmental crisis’. This construal, however, downplays the ‘symbols’ cultural components. In this article I show that the image of an ecological ‘rainforest Indian’ and a particular kind of culture constitutes a crucial part of the Amazon as ‘a complex’ cross-disciplinary ‘symbol’. Firstly, I examine how an Amazonian topology (closeness to nature, natural cultures) is both a product of an interdisciplinary history, and a place to speak from for ethno-political activist. Next I analyze how Amazonian cultures have been turned into ‘ethnological isolates’ representing a set of grand theoretical problems in anthropology, not least concerning the nature/culture-distinction, and how environmentalism has deployed the same topology. Finally I examine how Avatar and one of its cinematic intertexts, John Boorman’s The Emerald Forest, is used as a model to understand the struggle over the Belo Monte. In a paradoxical way the symbolic power of indigenous people in ecological matters here appears to be dependent upon a non-relation, and a reestablishment of clear cut cultural boundaries, where ‘the tribal’ is also associated with the human past. Disturbingly such symbolic exportation of solutions is consonant with current exportations of the solution of ecological problems to ‘other places’.