The Violent Aporia of Postcolonial Public Life: Environmental Politics and Indigenous Self-determination in the Amazon* (original) (raw)
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Government support for, and indigenous resistance to, development based on the exploitation of natural resources, has become a common source of conflict across the developing world. An investigation of such conflicts within the Brazilian Amazon, beginning with the Empate movement and Chico Mendez, reveals the interdependencies of indigenous and environmental activists with the same globalising forces and processes they aim to resist. Reliance on communication and information technologies, and support from international civil society networks constrains the capacity for grassroots resistance movements to press for the systemic changes required to reduce extractive demands and create alternative pathways for socio-economic development.
IT'S ALL ABOUT POWER:. The Political Economy and Ecology of Redefining the Brazilian Amazon
The Sociological Quarterly, 1999
What happens to rural communities in remote raw materials-rich regions when their definitions of the region's natural resources are confronted with competing and incompatible definitions presented and enforced by external actors? The social constructionist approach in environmental sociology provides an essential counterbalance to environmental determinism, but this article argues that in many contexts social construction is actually a process of the imposition of external actors' material interests over the objections of local groups. New historical materialism, via an interdisciplinary and multimethod research strategy, analyzes the changing definitions and uses of the Brazilian Amazon as a revelatory case study of the political economy and ecology of this process and its consequences for nature, rural communities, and indigenous peoples.
Local Environment, 2018
This article explores the need to recognise and compensate the plurality of environmental justice claims, while paying close attention to the outcomes of the most marginalised groups – cultural and ecological – in political decision-making to avoid vestiges of hegemony. The early history of the Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (MST) serves as a case study in which environmental justice claims clash with indigenous rights claims. In recent decades, the MST has refused settling Amazonian indigenous territories, consistent with the organisation’s Via Campesina platform, which focuses on redistributing the 50% of national territory controlled privately by Brazil’s richest 4%. Yet, in the 1970s and early 1980s, Brazil’s military government pitted landless peasants and indigenous people’s struggles against each other, circumventing land reform potentially disruptive to the country’s de facto colonial fazenda land system. This tactic pressured competing groups – landless peasants and indigenous people – to fight against each other, concluding predictably: the most powerful factions ended up getting their way, conceding less in negotiations than their less-advantageously positioned, marginalised counterparts. When marginalised groups gain concessions in environmental justice struggles, often the goods comprising those concessions come at a cost to marginalised groups with even less political visibility. Hegemonic structures of power remain non-negotiable in the process of alleviating other injustices in perceived zero-sum politics. Such systemic displacement and dispersion of violence in systems built on violence suggests hegemony affects not just to other marginalised groups, but to nonhumans too.
Fighting Back: Indigenous Mobilization in the Ecuadorian, Peruvian and Brazilian Amazon
Progress, as defined by this thesis, is the continuing placement of profits over human beings. The pursuit of progress in Latin America has its roots in the colonial age when elites created a hierarchical system that served only their own interest and marginalized other members of their populations. Progress is particularly negative for indigenous people in the Amazonian region who find themselves giving up their land, resources and in turn their traditional lifestyles for the benefits of outsiders. This framework has manifested itself in several examples: oil exploration and exploitation in Ecuador and Peru, rubber in Brazil and later hydroelectric dams. However, indigenous people have risen up and created multi-faceted movements in response to these challenges. This thesis investigates the formation of indigenous social and political movements from the 1980s onwards in the Amazon regions of Ecuador, Peru and Brazil. In particular, the linkages between indigenous movements, international NGOs and international media have been investigated. The information gathered in this thesis is comprised of interviews in indigenous communities in Ecuador and Peru, indigenous political organizations in Lima, Peru and other secondary research materials. The general conclusion is of the lasting importance of indigenous social movements based in the Amazon and the significance of their goal to create a larger, transnational based movement.
Violence, the state and gendered indigenous agency in the Brazilian Amazon
The aim of this article is to understand feminine and indigenous forms of agency, especially that of the young women living in a specific Amazonian city, and the ways these forms emerge within and against the grammatical frame of insecurity, fear, death, and segregation that is produced by the Brazilian neocolonial project in the Amazon. I am interested in understanding the ways in which these women relate to a frame that places them in an ordinary state of exception between violent death and biological reproduction. I argue that the practices of sexual and economic exchanges between indigenous women and 'white men' are fertile for reflecting on these forms of agency in a frame of colonial contest. Finally, I suggest that these forms of agency indicate an analogy with counter-colonial mechanisms of cultural cannibalism.
The institutionalization of the Brazilian Workers' Party has given rise to new tensions among emerging political actors, historic social movement mediator organizations, and the state. An analysis of the differences in strategies and practices between the Movement in Defense of Renascer and the Prainha Rural Worker's Movement that emerged during the creation of the Renascer Extractive Reserve in the Lower Amazon highlights the fact that the movement's emancipatory impulses indicate a break with the politics-as-usual of the union and the Workers' Party more broadly. An examination of union political discourses and practices that seek to fold these emancipatory impulses back into the dominant logic indicates that the union continues to perform the work of the state—albeit a reconstituted one—both institutionally and effectively. A institucionalização do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) no Brasil tem criado novas tensões entre atores políticos emergentes, organizações mediadoras dos movimentos soci-ais históricos e o Estado. Uma análise das diferenças entre o Movimento em Defesa do Renascer e o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais da Prainha, na Baixa Amazônia, enfa-tiza o fato de que os impulsos emancipatórios do movimento indicam um rompimento com os hábitos políticos de sindicatos e do Partido dos Trabalhadores de um modo geral. Um exame dos discursos políticos sindicais e das práticas que buscam a contenção desses impulsos emancipatórios, e tentam restaurá-los à lógica dominante, indica que o sindicato continua a desempenhar o trabalho do Estado—mesmo que reconstituído—tanto institu-cionalmente quanto efetivamente. In the summer of 2013, the Jornadas de Junho (June Days) protests shocked the Brazilian institutional left and the world, announcing widespread dissatisfaction with the " progressive " government that had until that moment been Brenda Baletti is a postdoctoral fellow at Duke University whose research focuses on how different forms of resistance, emancipatory struggles, and alternative practices of daily community life confront and transform oppressive sociopolitical structures and create possibilities for political change. She is grateful to the many communities of Renascer for allowing her to accompany their struggle. She also thanks Alvaro Reyes, Saiba Varma, the editors and reviewers of Latin American Perspectives, and the organizers and participants in the Ethnographies of the Brazilian State Workshop for comments on earlier versions of this paper.