Abstract
Suriname, considered the most forested country in the world, is home to a variety of Amazonian communities, both of Amerindian and African (Maroon) descent. The shifting cultivation that was required by their Amazonian environment has over the past centuries led to the emergence of intricate schemes to effectively manage common land resources. As this contribution shows, leafcutter ants have importantly served human communities by increasing and indicating levels of soil fertility and recommending the pace of shifting from one plot to the next. Over the past century, extractive activities (gold, bauxite and hydroelectricity) have set in motion a still ongoing process of ‘enclosing’ Suriname’s Amazonian space. Ant eradication programmes implemented in the 1940s and 50s by the Agricultural Research Centre of Suriname departed from a profoundly racialized belief in “essential” characteristics of different Amazonian communities. This contribution argues that ant–human coexistence became an instrumental argument to showcase the alleged ‘primitivity’, ‘ecological destructiveness’ or even the ‘parasitic nature’ of certain Amazonian communities, which aided in their marginalization and eventual resettlement.