Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 18001856,
by David Arnold
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Conjuring
Property
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Speculation and
Environmental Futures in
the Brazilian Amazon
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Jeremy M. Campbell
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1918171615 54321
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[[to come]]
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The paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.481984.
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Contents
Foreword by K. Sivaramakrishnan ix
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Prefacexi
Acknowledgmentsxv
Introduction:
Real Estate in Wild Country 3
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Abbreviationsxix
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3 Speculative Accumulation 93
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Index223
Bibliography213
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Notes199
Glossary211
Foreword
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K. Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January 2015
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In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the worlds largest remaining tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for development. Plans for hydroelectric projects, roads, colonization schemes, and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin, from
Guyana to Peru. In Brazil, the nation with the largest share of Amazonia,
a brief decline in deforestation rates earlier this century has lately yielded
to increased conversion of forests into pastures and soy fields. A familiar
corollary to environmental destruction is the social upheaval that results
from disputes over rural territories: since 2000, 447 people have been murdered, with another three thousand receiving death threats, in the Brazilian
Amazon (CPT 2014). Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marches
on regional cities, but the news of clashes between natives and encroaching
miners, loggers, and colonists shows no sign of stopping.
For observers of the region, the contemporary emphasis on a muscular
development apparatus in Amazoniastudded with ambitious megaprojects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumarks a return to an earlier era of incursions. From the late 1960s
through the 1980s, Amazonian states built highways, financed massive
mining projects, and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest. These efforts abated, however, due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the successful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle. By 1992, development had shifted toward smaller and more inclusive projects that added a
social and environmental calculus to economic growth. An emphasis on
grassroots participation continues, even as large-scale investments have
returned to dominate the scene. What is different this time around is the
ascendance of a neoliberal orthodoxy that emphasizes the participation of
local actors in markets and market-driven activities that have regional or
even global reach. In Brazil, planners use a language of benefits, incentives,
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and rights to create projects they believe will be equally fair and attractive
to native peoples, migratory colonists, and far-off investors.
A key element in the new development orthodoxy in Amazonia is
property: specifically, its deployment as a means to manage territory and
incentivize rational behavior. In the fundamental debate over how natural
resources should be managed or developed, Brazilian policy has turned
decisively toward privatization and away from collective (i.e., state) supervision of resources. This shiftwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallyfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation. The contemporary development imaginary proposes an ownership society, in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returns
on their investments in environmental goods and services. Propertys usefulness lies, in part, in how it can address the chronic (and utterly local)
problem of tenure ambiguity while also linking Amazonian territories to
broader (global) streams of investment and systems of government.
The problem with the ownership model, however, is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon; a surfeit of it, in fact. Since the 1970s, waves
of colonists to the region have staked out positions on public lands, often one
on top of the other, resulting in a thicket of overlapping claims and counterclaims. Whats more, colonists have devised their property claims largely in
the absence of the state agencies that would definitively recognize them. As a
result, throughout much of rural Amazonia, peasants and large landholders
have improvised a vernacular system for holding, claiming, and selling lands
that operates largely beyond official sanction. Highly volatile and prone
to outbursts of violence, this vernacular property system nevertheless follows a certain logic: through forging papers, grooming trails, squatting on
lands, leveraging debts, or working with confederates, colonists turn land
into a protocommodity awaiting recognition by the state and incorporation into the market. The states turn toward privatization thus converges
with the positions many colonists have adopted over the past forty years
with their speculative properties-in-wait. Not every claim is destined to be
honored, however, so colonists jockey for best position. Though Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region,
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands in
anticipation of future regulations.
The culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little attention in the anthropological literature. However, there is much value in an
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account of the habits and frames of mind that colonists share as they carve
villages out of the forest. Self-described as living on the frontier of civilization, colonists seem to pursue a mongrel existence . . . clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads, [in towns] that each
day put out new tentacles (Descola 1996, 1). Improvised and makeshift,
the lives colonists lead nevertheless incline toward permanence.Indeed,
as property stabilizes in Amazonia, the implications for the forests and the
traditional inhabitants of the region are dire. In colonists hands, property
devastates habitats and occludes histories.
What follows is an ethnography of political economy in formation. In
Amazonia, the land market to come is more important than the market as it
exists today, and the focus here is on how colonists prepare for the development intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatization. Rather than a study of the land trade as such, this book follows how
colonists trade techniques for making the illicit acquisition of land appear
legitimate to one another and to Brazilian authorities. Just as important,
colonists are participating in a robust trade in agrarian identities, shifting
from peasant to producer or environmentalist and back again, depending on the advantage gained. These improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come, while also encouraging deforestation
and the greater concentration of wealth. This is not an optimistic story;
however, describing how local actors anticipate and manipulate official plans
might yet inform the crafting of more nimble socioeconomic policy.
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Acknowledgments
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xv
x v i Acknowledgments
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Sautchuk, Suzana Sawyer, Marianne Schmink, James Scott, Shaila SeshiaGalvin, Glenn Shepard, Jessica Skolnikoff, Michelle Stewart, Terry Turner,
Leah VanWey, Wendy Wolford, and Laura Zanotti. I must also extend special thanks to Heath Cabot, Kregg Hetherington, and Bregje van Eekelen for
providing patient and valuable feedback on manuscript drafts. Paola Prado
provided expert advice on the books images, Daniele Tem Pass skillfully
drew the maps, and Sherry Smith compiled the index.
Thank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlantic, Northeastern University, Vanderbilt University, Temple University, the
University of Maryland, the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, the
University of Wisconsin, and Yale Universitys Program in Agrarian Studies, where I have presented my research. Portions of chapter 3 appear in an
article I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology (Campbell 2014, 23759), and a version of chapter 5 was published in
PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell 2015, 14767).
This book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson, Andrew Mathews, Hugh Raffles, and Anna Tsing. Though
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omissions), the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout.
Far more than a mentor, Anna Tsing has modeled for me a humble yet fierce
determination to pay attention to the world as it is, to learn what wonders it
can teach, and to find a constantly renewing hope in its surprises.
In Brazil, I benefited from the kindness and encouragement of many
individuals and institutions. In Belm, at the Universidade Federal do Par
(UFPA), Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Ncleo de Altos
Estudos Amaznicos (NAEA), an invaluable resource for Amazonianists.
Thanks to Jos Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA, who has been a pioneer in the social studies of land grabbing in the Amazonia. I also received
invaluable support from the researchers at the Amazon Institute of People
and the Environment (Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amaznia,
or IMAZON) in Manaus, including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto. In Santarm, where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amaznia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS), I wish to thank Rosana Costa,
Fernanda Ferreira, and Ane Alencar, as well as ICBS director Cristovam
Sena, who opened his extensive archive to me. Thanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Par (UFOPA), especially Bruna
Rocha, Mauricio Torres, and Florncio Vaz, who are academic and social
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Acknowledgments x v ii
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justice pioneers in the Tapajs region. It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santarm: Steven Winn Alexander, Dra. urea Lucia Alexander, their sons
Arthur and David, and the crew at Amizade and the Fundao Esperana,
especially Nathan Darity and Micah and Lidiane Gregory.
Despite not knowing what to make of me at first, the people of Castelo
de Sonhos embraced me as I came to know their stories. I have interviewed
over three hundred individuals from Castelo over the past decade, and have
spent countless hours hiking through fields and forests, or sharing coffee
or beer, with the resident colonists who hail from all corners of Brazil. It
is a privilege to have been given the chance to try to understand Amazoniaand the changes underway therethrough their eyes. It would be
impractical for me to list the names of all to whom I am grateful here; also
imprudent, as I have taken pains to use pseudonyms throughout this text to
protect informants identities. Let me say that were it not for your generosity, this work would not have been possible. A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arajo, Cristiane Wermuth, and their daughter, Tain, who kindly
supported this work from the start.
I am grateful to K. Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the University of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorial
process. Many thanks also to the two anonymous reviewers who offered
insightful comments on the manuscript. My dear friend Adam Brown did
me the great service of being my writing coach, keeping me on task through
deadlines and offering brilliant advice on style and tone. Deep thanks to my
parents, Kathy and Ron, and godparents Sharon and Patti, who supported
me throughout the years of travel and research. Finally, I wish to thank my
children, Kassandra, Louisa, and Phillip, who have inspired me more than
they can know, and my lovely wife, Madeline, for her endless support and
encouragement. I dedicate this book to them.
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Abbreviations
BNDES
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BASA
CNJ
CPT
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CAR
FLONA
GTA
IBAMA
ICBS
ICMBio
IMAZON
INCRA
IPAM
ISA
ITERPA
MDA
MMA
MP
MPF
MST
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xix
x x Abbreviations
NAEA
PAC
PARNA
PDS
PIN
U
PT
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REBIO
RESEX
SPR
SUDAM
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction
Real Estate in Wild Country
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4 Introduction
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Viewed from above, there are no discernable boundaries distinguishing Zs homestead from those of competing claimants, only the classic
image of a green carpet of trees, stretching out in every direction. What
this vision of untracked wilderness obscures is a tangle of claims lying in
wait: property projections crafted by colonists and speculators out of cash,
forged documents, clandestine redoubts, and a variety of legal principles and
development policies. Colonists are currently preparing for development
reforms with the aim of owning severable lots carved from Brazils vast
public domain. The techniques by which they construct and display their
claims are as varied as the development protocols that mark the history of
colonization in Amazonia; furthermore, colonists have invented their own
methods for making property legible to one another and to the state.
Theres a real future in land here. In property [propriedade], Z
explains, as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate. Noting the
nearby roadwhich many say is soon to be pavedhe adds, Theres no
limit to what is possible on land like this: good for planting, for ranching, for
building wealth.1 As Z speaks, a vision for the future of the region crystallizes, a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political economy but also as a marker of modernity and progress. Z shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state, while encouraging the settlement
and civilizing of the forest, has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia. For Z, who came to the region in search of material improvement, Amazonia is still wild country, where a strange ecology
beguiles and Brazilian law barely applies. Indeed, the reach of government
services, support, or general oversight is ineffective in preventing predatory
land grabbing or wildcat logging and mining. The muddle of property claims
is a function of the states absence, though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Z hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region. Some of us have been here for decades, waiting
and surviving. The state will have to see that, he adds, how weve made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progress.2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political economy in a land with few rules. With them, colonists like Z attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity, to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see Tsing
2013). Just as important, property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear. It simultaneously materializes a culture of territorial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the progress of the plow and the paper
deed. Z, a homesteader who had not purchased a deed, nevertheless had
one: a crumpled forgery that had been artificially yellowed to look authentic.
He explained that he had the document just in case it is what I need to
finally get established here.
This study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life, both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transformation of landscapes. Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government, development, and the future itself in the form of property
reform and recognition. The claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making technologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier. In rural
Amazonia, property is conjuredmade to appear from seemingly nowhere,
as if by magic. These conjurings are made with the belief that they might
be recognized and thereby become the basis of individual wealth, a shared
economy, and a rural way of life. Situated in improvised and fraudulent
practices, property is to emerge with enough appearance of propriety to
legalize the illegal and regularize the irregular.
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early 1970s, nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral 2013, 3). The results of the push into the forest have been
mixed. Though standards of living have improved throughout the region,
indigenous groups have faced genocidal conditions, Amazonian cities have
swelled with migrants whose farms failed, and violence and corruption
have come to define rural land dynamics (see Foweraker 1981). Over the
decades, Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and colonization policies, alternately backing agrarian reform, corporate colonization,
indigenous land rights, environmental protection, and private homesteading. State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demographic void, a national security risk, and a storehouse of lucrative natural
resources. Diverging techniques for claiming land, including filing papers,
burning forest lots, building a homestead, and chasing off the competition,
have accompanied these exogenous development visions. The result is that
frequently in Amazonia, many potentially legitimate but mutually exclusive
claims for the same piece of ground overlap one another.
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Conjuring Property
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6 Introduction
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8 Introduction
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tions that take place in rural zones awaiting regularization. Still, it is clear
that a land boom is currently underway in rural Amazonia, along the vast
stretches of public domain (terras devolutas) where homestead claims and
paper deeds constitute a protomarket of privatized properties. Announced
or anticipated investments in infrastructure and economic development
are fueling the surge in land prices, even in places where tenure confusion
is particularly acute. Speculative cash infusions from residents in Brazils
urban south inflate this Amazonian land bubble, but the viability of real
estate in the region is a matter that can be assured only locally, through the
sleights of hand and anticipatory stances of conjuring property. The question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniahow it is made and recognized,
to whose benefit, and with what economic and sociocultural effectslies
at the heart of this study.
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony. The earliest form
of Western proprietorship in Amazonia was the colonial sesmaria system,
in which the Portuguese crown devolved vast stretches of land as courtly
favors. Largely intact at the dawn of the republican era, the sesmaria system
assured the concentration of land and wealth in the hands of an agrarian
elite in Amazonia. It was not until the 1970s, in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorships national integration plan, that any democratization of land
ownership was attempted in the region, an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times: that Amazonia should become a land without people
for people without land. The dictators populist stance fully ignored the
native populations of the region and heralded an era of colonization in lands
that had been declared public domain.
In practice, Brazils push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuverstermed grilagem locallyrather
than a smooth succession of official plans. Agrarian reform turned out to
be more conducive to the consolidation of wealth than to its redistribution,
and the land without people myth yielded to the reality of a formidable
indigenous rights movement resolved to defend the integrity of native lands.
Violent struggles over land and social justice claimed the lives of activists
such as Chico Mendes and Sister Dorothy Stang, resulting in widespread
condemnation of Brazils colonization policies. Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worlds attention, as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainforest was converted to farmland between 1970 and 2000. Today, 67.1 million
hectares 4 of public lands in Amazonialands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders, international mining outfits, largescale agribusiness, and othershang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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There has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property. Property was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Morgan 1877), and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel, rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (e.g., intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life). Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually, arguing that the seemingly standardized model of private, exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
natural shape that property takes always and everywhere. In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property, ethnographers
have problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle 2005), the normalization of economic models that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield 2008), and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage,
creativity, and personhood (Hann 1998; Strathern 1999; Verdery and Humphrey 2004). Three conceptual tendencies cut across this diverse literature
and inform how I operationalize property here. First, anthropologists view
property as a social construct, not as existing latently in nature, as John
Lockes natural law approach would have it. Second, the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations; the apparent
thing of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems, social distinctions, and public versus private spheres attain. Finally, ethnography reveals the work that
property does: as a lively concept and institution, property becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorized
and through which particular political projects, such as liberalization, are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab 2006).
The work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property. The theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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10 Introduction
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12 Introduction
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14 Introduction
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zonian colonists.8 The reasons for this are many. In North America, Europe,
and Brazil, most students trained in Amazonian ethnography are directed
toward indigenous studies, either by theoretical concerns or as the result of
the imprint of a leading paradigm (e.g., structuralism). Only recently have
anthropologists joined geographers and economists in the systematic study
of nonindigenous Amazonians, contributing ethnographic analyses to the
growing literatures on river-dwelling (ribeirinho) communities, extractivists, and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al. 2009;
Hutchins and Wilson 2010). Still, the social science of colonist communities
is dominated by political scientists and economists, whose treatment of data
runs to the econometric and comparative.
A thorough ethnographic analysis of the values and practices taking
shape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil. To that end, I define colonist communities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after 1970, who continue to maintain meaningful connections with their region of origin, and who aspire to improve
their personal situations and/or transform the region. Defined in this way,
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the literature and as a community apart within the region. Colonist villages and
neighborhoods, while growing in size and influence, are nevertheless visually and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent 1997; Wagley 1953).
This book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics. Though
this is not a story of native Amazonia, it has clear implications for indigenous peoples and politics, especially regarding land. Settlers speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetailing with the Brazilian states neoliberal land management policies, creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples. Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Amazonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives, cultural styles,
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists. In the shifting middle
ground of ecopolitics, where national and international interest in indigenous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planets
future (Conklin and Graham 1995), paying some attention to the colonists
who are at the doorstep of indigenous territories is warranted.
Early twenty-first-century pundits often describe Brazil as a developing
or emerging nation, and colonists arriving in Par, Acre, and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential. They are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lumber where others would find a fragile ecosystem, or acreage for cattle where
others envision an extractive reserve. But these migrants originate from all
corners of Brazil, and pursue a wide range of visions for the Amazonian
frontier. It would be a mistake to assume that their attitudes are uniform.
Exactly how notions of Brazils emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonists understanding of their activities is an open question, and one addressed in this study. I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsideon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia. Fearnside (2008, 2009) convincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only to
have them confiscated or bought out by loggers and, ultimately, ranchers;
when peasants move on, it is cheaper and easier for ranchers to expand
pastures into the new lots rather than intensifying their production. Fire,
debt, and poverty are the key levers in a machine that is eating up the forest,
but a thorough understanding of the practices, visions, and social relations
of peasants and elites is absent from the analysis. The latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Laurance
et al. 2001). A flexible cultural category in its own right, property should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions.
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Amazonian colonization is scholars reluctance to associate with groups engaged
in questionable or even odious pursuits, such as fraud, theft, deforestation,
and even slavery. Analysts have chronicled the response of grassroots social
movements to the development juggernaut (Baletti 2012; Hall 1998; Sawyer 2004), with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an insurgent citizenship that critiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planning (Hecht 2011: 203). This is important
work that increases the moral imagination of what kind of place Amazonia
can be. However, few have attempted to study those communities, which,
through deed or word, propose the wholesale transformation of Amazonia
into a market of saleable commodities. The diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazils emergence are influential and persistent in their drive to transform the nation. Analytically, we ignore them at our own peril. The social
and environmental changes currently underway in Amazonia are complex
and multiform; access to power and the types of uses to which power is put
must continue to be the focus of fine-grained cultural analysis.
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This ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Par,
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map 1). The
principal city in this region is Santarm, located at the confluence of the
Amazon and Tapajs Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent 1997). The majority of western Pars population lives in or
near Santarm (current pop. 350,000), the size of which has doubled over the
past forty years due to development successes and failures that encouraged
urban migration. In the rural zones of the region, the twenty-first century
finds a mix of traditional extractive economies with the capital-intensive soy
planting and cattle ranching that is pursued by thousands of recent arrivals
from southern Brazil (gachos or sulistas). South of Santarm, ranching
gachos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazils northeast (nordestinos) have built communities hugging the BR-163 highway, a road punched
through upland forests in the early 1970s. In the 1990s, the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazils booming soybean crop, but after its initial construction the thousand-kilometer stretch in Par remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades. It is in this regionthe southwestern corner of the state of Par,
defined by the unpaved BR-163 highwaythat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined.
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor, relatively
few migrants settled in western Par compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marab) and the Acre/Rondnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle 2012). Kayap and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area, and elders still recall the arrival of the bulldozers and first migrants in the 1970s. Discovery of gold in the Tapajs valley
set off the first rush of settlement, especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curu Rivers far to the south of Santarm. Clandestine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests, along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits. The most
successful gold minesincluding Castelo de Sonhos, the key colonist village
chronicled in this studysurvived the malarial infestations and entrenched
violence associated with the gold boom and eventually became villages
with sustained populations (roughly seven thousand people currently live
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in Castelo de Sonhos). In these small settlements, the mood is overwhelmingly colonial: no one has been in the region for long (forty years at most),
many are soon to be on their way to someplace else (like a major city),
and a migrants region of origin correlates strongly with the community
she or he keeps when first encountering Amazonia.
A succession of minor economic booms and busts came in the 1990s
and 2000s, but the population density in western Par remained low and
the reach of government modest. The Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-1970s to encourage settlement, but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors, distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible. Tenure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon in
the late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood 1992). In western Par,
however, tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new development protocol issued by the distant state. Though not immune to landrelated violence, the region remained relatively quietprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR-163 highwaywhile land battles raged
to the west (e.g., in Acre, where Chico Mendes was killed in 1988) and to the
east (e.g., the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajs, south of Belm, in 1996). This
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point when
the Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR-163 highway,
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regions rivers, and regularize
land tenure.9 The colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Par
took the states intentions seriously, and prepared to use the onset of new
development programs to maximize their territorial positions.
In studying how colonists construct property claims in anticipation of
state recognition, I have used methods and asked questions that are rarely
pursued in the study of Amazonian colonization. The status of property
in rural Amazonia is so dodgy, so replete with advantageous trickery, that
many analysts assume the basic shape of land jobbing and real estate speculation without investigating it in detail. While understandable, an approach
that too readily writes off all behaviors concerning property as corrupt or
avaricious might actually serve the status quo. In any event, we stand to
learn little of the sociocultural practices and modes of thought associated with property makingsome of which are key to the normal and
modern functioning of political economyif we see it only as a swindle.
When I began the fieldwork for this study in 2006, I committed to a longterm grappling with the world-making qualities of property, and how
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territory, effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and manner that might someday be sanctioned by the authorities. In this space of
subjunctive suspense, colonists crafted novel techniques to frame land into
property, both materially and discursively. My own position in this game
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of method
was a source of ceaseless anxiety. Though I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos, the big guys and the little guys), I worried that I might be
perceived as partial to one faction or the other. Interviews with nearly three
hundred individuals form the foundation of this study, but I would rarely
reach a mutual level of trust with anyone until I had conversed with that
person a half dozen times. Renato Rosaldos description of ethnography as
deep hanging out was never far from mind.
Beyond the private life of property, the signs of which I could only discern under the tutelage of colonists in western Par, I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims. Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsespecially Brazils ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional, and often secret, land claims into solid precepts with which
to engage the state. I attended dozens of meetings and observed long-time
colonists and petty speculators wrestle with Brazilian officials about the
moral exigencies of colonization, land reform, and sustainable development.
Great venues for performance, from the colonists perspective these official
forums were just one more means of publicizing and documenting a claim.
Straddling the line between private and public, information on land sales
over the past several decades was also an important stream of data, collected by supplementing government figures with interviewees accumulated accounts of informal cash, trade, and debt-swap transactions.
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a massive confidence game, and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of fieldworks aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality. Individuals stories and
positions on property remained constantly in flux, leaving little hope of
recording the objective history of territories. On some level, fraud itself
became the constant and truest characteristic of colonists engagements
with property, giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless. The pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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wise have wished to leave concealed. As one claimant explained to me, The
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawor how right and wrongbegins to
exist. What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud, when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regularization and legality? Since all was fraudand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingthere was little to conceal.
Even among rivals, a casual familiarity attained, as when peasants and the
wealthy attended the same celebrations or when hired thugs mingled peaceably with the associates of those they were rumored to have killed.
Even so, throughout fieldwork I struggled to understand why people
talked to me so openly about a topic as sensitive as land tenure. In the
end, I concluded that some colonists told me such candid stories as part of
one of their many strategies for creating paperwork (in this case, a distant
book) that might validate their land claims. Many claimants viewed my
notebook as a corroborating document, a place where stories and facts could
potentially be built up in defense of a property position. While interviewing
colonists, I explained that I would not be comfortable advocating for one
persons property position over another, and that I was able to do little more
than observe. I believe that many informants enjoyed having an opportunity
to converse with me about their relationship to Amazonian lands, while
others continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays. The ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me, and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this volumes ethnographic stories. In doing so, I want to eliminate the possibility
that my words may be used in any future legal disputes over specific parcels.
But I am also troubled by how, in so sanitizing this text, it becomes primarily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters.
As it happens, the property conjuring game in Amazoniareplete as it is
with fraud, deception, and reversals of fortuneis not conducted on a level
playing field. This book relates how a structurally marginalized group of
landless peasants decided to enter the land speculation business only to be
further exploited and eventually disappropriated by elites. My political sympathies are with these peasants, many of whom saw hope for a better future
in the confabulations of forged deeds. As a practical matter, however, I am
afraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corroboration for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazils moneyed classes and landed elites, other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start.
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property speculation in Amazonia, and to show how speculation is embedded in a colonial
social system oriented toward emplacing political economic and historical
norms in country that colonists and officials alike regard as wild, undeveloped, and thoroughly nonmodern. While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsand how, for colonists, property instantiates
the shape of history, the prospect of governance, and the promise of longsought modernitythis book is not intended as an apology for colonization.
Rather, my goal is to show the range of material and discursive labors that
define colonialism as a sociocultural system, and how one of that systems
key institutionspropertyemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions,
luck, fraud, collusion, and creative destruction of the environment. Official
histories of colonization often present the story of property (where it is
considered at all) as a fait accompli. Here my focus is on the contingency of
property, on colonists labors to make it viable enough to usher in a modern
future, and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevitable. Training the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture, including widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples, colonists often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation, and their faith in the
doctrine of improvement. These are points on which I strongly disagree with
Amazonian colonists, but these differences do not negate the importance of
trying to understand their perspectives and analyze the political economic
realities that are currently taking shape for them. Consequently, I avoided
casting my analysis in terms of victims and villainsa common trope in
much writing on Amazoniaas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture.
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