Business territorialization processes in the Amazon: meanings and consequences

Abstract

We propose to investigate the practical and symbolic devices, adopted in the process of implementation of large hydroelectric dams in the Amazon region, which has contributed to the lowering of environmental protection standards and social and territorial rights in force in the country. The structuring agents of the "business territories" resulting from these endeavors seek to produce functional spaces, preceded by deep social cleansing, which express the privatizing and authoritarian nature inherent in these processes of large-scale spatial incorporation. These processes, however, do not come about without contention and antagonism, either between the segments that lead the spatial-social restructuring, or between them and the compulsorily displaced population, which insists on rescuing margins of autonomy from collective living, from cultural repertoires that are not closed and new sociabilities that open up. In these terms, territorial conflict is posited and replaced, not as an "obstacle" but as a question about the very goals and results of the "modernization" and "development" projects. Our proposal is to provide analytical elements and recognition of spaces for the (re)mapping of traditions and resistance in the new conditions posed by the continuous rescheduling of the space produced by large projects already implemented and being implemented in the Amazon.