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7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 139
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 239
Studies in Anthropology and Environment
K Sivaramakrishnan Series Editor
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Te Kuhls of Kangra Community-Managed
Irrigation in the Western Himalaya
by Mark Baker
Te Earthrsquos Blanket raditional eachings
for Sustainable Living by Nancy urner
Property and Politics in Sabah Malaysia
Native Struggles over Land Rights
by Amity A Doolittle
Border Landscapes Te Politics of Akha
Land Use in China and Tailand
by Janet C Sturgeon
From Enslavement to Environmentalism
Politics on a Southern African Frontier
by David McDermott Hughes
Ecological Nationalisms Nature Livelihood
and Identities in South Asia
edited by Gunnel Cederloumlf
and K Sivaramakrishnan
ropics and the raveling Gaze India Land-
scape and Science ndash
by David Arnold
Being and Place among the lingit
by Tomas F Tornton
Forest Guardians Forest Destroyers
Te Politics of Environmental Knowledge
in Northern Tailand by im Forsyth
and Andrew Walker
Nature Protests Te End of Ecology
in Slovakia by Edward Snajdr
Wild Sardinia Indigeneity and the Global
Dreamtimes of Environment alism
by racey Heatherington
ahiti Beyond the Postcard Power Place
and Everyday Life by Miriam Kahn
Forests of Identity Society Ethnicity
and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin
by Stephanie Rupp
Enclosed Conservation Cattle
and Commerce among the Qrsquoeqchirsquo
Maya Lowlanders by Liza Grandia
Puer ea Ancient Caravans and
Urban Chic by Jinghong Zhang
Andean Waterways Resource Politics in
Highland Peru by Mattias Borg Rasmussen
Conjuring Property Speculation and Envi-
ronmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
by Jeremy M Campbell
Forests Are Gold rees People and Environ-
mental Rule in Vietnam
by Pamela D Mc Elwee
Centered in anthropology the Culture Place and Nature series encompasses new interdis-
ciplinary social science research on environmental issues focusing on the intersection of
culture ecology and politics in global national and local contexts Contributors to the series
view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspec-
tives of various cultural systems
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Seattle amp London
Jeremy M Campbell
Conjuring
Property
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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copy by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Warnock Pro a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical
including photocopy recording or any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher
wwwwashingtoneduuwpress
--
[[to come]]
Unless otherwise noted all photographs are by the author
Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesmdash
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ndashinfin
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Studies in Anthropology and Environment
K Sivaramakrishnan Series Editor
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Te Kuhls of Kangra Community-Managed
Irrigation in the Western Himalaya
by Mark Baker
Te Earthrsquos Blanket raditional eachings
for Sustainable Living by Nancy urner
Property and Politics in Sabah Malaysia
Native Struggles over Land Rights
by Amity A Doolittle
Border Landscapes Te Politics of Akha
Land Use in China and Tailand
by Janet C Sturgeon
From Enslavement to Environmentalism
Politics on a Southern African Frontier
by David McDermott Hughes
Ecological Nationalisms Nature Livelihood
and Identities in South Asia
edited by Gunnel Cederloumlf
and K Sivaramakrishnan
ropics and the raveling Gaze India Land-
scape and Science ndash
by David Arnold
Being and Place among the lingit
by Tomas F Tornton
Forest Guardians Forest Destroyers
Te Politics of Environmental Knowledge
in Northern Tailand by im Forsyth
and Andrew Walker
Nature Protests Te End of Ecology
in Slovakia by Edward Snajdr
Wild Sardinia Indigeneity and the Global
Dreamtimes of Environment alism
by racey Heatherington
ahiti Beyond the Postcard Power Place
and Everyday Life by Miriam Kahn
Forests of Identity Society Ethnicity
and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin
by Stephanie Rupp
Enclosed Conservation Cattle
and Commerce among the Qrsquoeqchirsquo
Maya Lowlanders by Liza Grandia
Puer ea Ancient Caravans and
Urban Chic by Jinghong Zhang
Andean Waterways Resource Politics in
Highland Peru by Mattias Borg Rasmussen
Conjuring Property Speculation and Envi-
ronmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
by Jeremy M Campbell
Forests Are Gold rees People and Environ-
mental Rule in Vietnam
by Pamela D Mc Elwee
Centered in anthropology the Culture Place and Nature series encompasses new interdis-
ciplinary social science research on environmental issues focusing on the intersection of
culture ecology and politics in global national and local contexts Contributors to the series
view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspec-
tives of various cultural systems
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 439
Seattle amp London
Jeremy M Campbell
Conjuring
Property
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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copy by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Warnock Pro a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical
including photocopy recording or any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher
wwwwashingtoneduuwpress
--
[[to come]]
Unless otherwise noted all photographs are by the author
Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesmdash
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ndashinfin
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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983223
juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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983223
ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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for Sustainable Living by Nancy urner
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Native Struggles over Land Rights
by Amity A Doolittle
Border Landscapes Te Politics of Akha
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and Identities in South Asia
edited by Gunnel Cederloumlf
and K Sivaramakrishnan
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scape and Science ndash
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Being and Place among the lingit
by Tomas F Tornton
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Te Politics of Environmental Knowledge
in Northern Tailand by im Forsyth
and Andrew Walker
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in Slovakia by Edward Snajdr
Wild Sardinia Indigeneity and the Global
Dreamtimes of Environment alism
by racey Heatherington
ahiti Beyond the Postcard Power Place
and Everyday Life by Miriam Kahn
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and Stereotypes in the Congo River Basin
by Stephanie Rupp
Enclosed Conservation Cattle
and Commerce among the Qrsquoeqchirsquo
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Urban Chic by Jinghong Zhang
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Conjuring Property Speculation and Envi-
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by Jeremy M Campbell
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Centered in anthropology the Culture Place and Nature series encompasses new interdis-
ciplinary social science research on environmental issues focusing on the intersection of
culture ecology and politics in global national and local contexts Contributors to the series
view environmental knowledge and issues from the multiple and often conflicting perspec-
tives of various cultural systems
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Seattle amp London
Jeremy M Campbell
Conjuring
Property
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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copy by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Warnock Pro a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical
including photocopy recording or any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher
wwwwashingtoneduuwpress
--
[[to come]]
Unless otherwise noted all photographs are by the author
Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesmdash
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ndashinfin
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Seattle amp London
Jeremy M Campbell
Conjuring
Property
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copy by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Warnock Pro a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical
including photocopy recording or any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher
wwwwashingtoneduuwpress
--
[[to come]]
Unless otherwise noted all photographs are by the author
Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesmdash
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ndashinfin
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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983223
In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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copy by the University of Washington Press
Printed and bound in the United States of America
Composed in Warnock Pro a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach
All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical
including photocopy recording or any information storage or retrieval
system without permission in writing from the publisher
wwwwashingtoneduuwpress
--
[[to come]]
Unless otherwise noted all photographs are by the author
Te paper used in this publication is acid-free and meets the minimum
requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciencesmdash
Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials ndashinfin
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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983223
pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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983223
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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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983223
reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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983223
focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of
property would embody in some respects the most remarkable
portion of the mental history of mankind
Lewis H Morgan Ancient Society ()
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Foreword by K Sivaramakrishnan ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xv
Abbreviations xix
Real Estate in Wild Country
Frontier Capitalism and Figuring the State
Te Labors of Grilagem
Speculative Accumulation
Living Proleptically in the Environmental Era
Regularization and the Land Question
On Property and Devastation
Notes
Glossary
Bibliography
Index
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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x 983223
Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion 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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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ix
Te importance of this book is to be found both in its novel theoretical
contributions to the anthropology of futures and in the ethnographic study
of land futures in Brazilian Amazonia Land broadly conceived and the
property in it more specifically is a topic of great contemporary interest
internationally due to land grabs by sovereign wealth funds and powerfultransnational corporations the crisis in agriculture and the world food sys-
tem and the rapid increase in land conversion for nonagricultural uses to
generate energy build infrastructure provide housing and support service
industries
At the risk of being somewhat dramatic it is possible to suggest though
that much of the recently burgeoning scholarship on land grabs around
the world especially in sub-Saharan Africa Asia and Latin America pays
little attention to actual and imagined property rights Scholars have rightlycautioned from a variety of perspectives that the use of and profit from land
may have little to do with the exercise of property rights in any orderly sense
But struggles over land nevertheless are also always struggles over property
Jeremy Campbell is at pains to clarify that property in his usage is not merely
something held by record of ownership or right to use but is crucially an
idea a connection between present struggle and future visions of wellness
success prosperity and identification with communities of aspiration It is
this essential set of points that animates a fine ethnographic examination of
the imagination establishment trade and invention of property rightsmdashand
property futuresmdashprovided in the pages of this book
Campbell argues that as colonists big and small rich or poor juggle
the definition and claiming of property they actually produce the state
and market relations that in turn shape the future of landed property in
the Brazilian Amazon It follows that these practices provide important
windows into land deals but much more as wellmdashnot least the makingof identities communities government programs and commercial activi-
tiesmdashand therefore merit an examination that does not end with dubbing
them odious speculative the nefarious working of frontier societies
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Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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983223
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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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983223
focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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983223
juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Most studies conducted in Amazonia in the last twenty-five years have
been preoccupied with indigenous and forest people and for good reasons
In these studies colonists have often come out as unsympathetic stick fig-
ures the interlopers and vanguard of various kinds of forces of predation
and exploitation but they are ultimately seen as agents of the market or the
state Campbell humanizes the predicament of the colonist He discusses
in detail how they come to settle what they dream about and what their
anxieties are Tey struggle to make agriculture and animal keeping viable
vocations in an area unfamiliar to them and in which the land market has
been made highly unstable by rampant speculation and fickle government
policies for development and later conservation and now sustainable gov-
ernance in the AmazonIn this careful account colonists may not become sympathetic figures
but they do emerge as complex human subjects whose role on the leading
edge of projects driven by states or financial institutions is inevitably one of
absorbing risk and outlining opportunities that may lie ahead Tis creates
a space for colonists to lead the imaginative revolution and also to call up
the government to act nimbly in a shifting terrain Campbell is aware that
advance parties can be forsaken or can lose their way but they inevitably
carve out directions on the landscape that cannot be ignored even if theyare difficult to decipher
Along the way Campbell provides a novel account of colonization by
smallholders a land grab if you will that is given shape and meaning on the
ground by the conflicted and changing assumptions of many petty opera-
tors as much as it is a product of the working of grand schemes of govern-
ment and the large forces of corporations and wealth funds Tis allows him
to retheorize enduring topics of interest in the social sciences to do with
state formation the differentiation of social classes during processes of land
settlement and conversion for economic activity and the meaning of labor
in farm pasture and forest
K Sivaramakrishnan
Yale University
January
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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983223
pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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983223
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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xi
In the first decades of the twenty-first century the worldrsquos largest remain-
ing tropical biome is under formidable pressure from a range of forces
calling for ldquodevelopmentrdquo Plans for hydroelectric projects roads coloni-
zation schemes and oil and gas pipelines ring the Amazon Basin fromGuyana 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 people have been mur-
dered with another three thousand receiving death threats in the Brazilian
Amazon (CP ) Indigenous peoples have organized valiant defenses
of their lands through international campaigns and coordinated marcheson 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 Amazoniamdashstudded with ambitious megaproj-
ects such as the Belo Monte dam in Brazil or the Camisea Gas Project in
Perumdashmarks a return to an earlier era of incursions From the late s
through the s Amazonian states built highways financed massive
mining projects and dislocated thousands of native peoples in the name
of modernizing the forest Tese efforts abated however due to pressures
from an emerging environmental movement in Amazonia and the success-
ful internationalization of the indigenous rights struggle By develop-
ment 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 theascendance 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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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xii 983223
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 (ie state) super-
vision of resources Tis shiftmdashwhich has been repeated on other resource
frontiers globallymdashfigures private property as the intervention that will
stanch disputes over territory and runaway deforestation Te contem-
porary development imaginary proposes an ownership society in which
individuals trust in the integrity of property and are able to realize returnson their investments in environmental goods and services Propertyrsquos use-
fulness 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
Te problem with the ownership model however is that property already
exists in the Brazilian Amazon a surfeit of it in fact Since the s 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 counter-claims Whatrsquos 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 fol-
lows 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 incorpora-
tion into the market Te statersquos 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 Tough Amazonia
represents the hope of agrarian reform for landless migrants in the region
crafty speculators and rich land grabbers are busily subdividing lands inanticipation of future regulations
Te culture of colonial settlements in Amazonia has received little atten-
tion in the anthropological literature However there is much value in an
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
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983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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983223 xiii
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 civiliza-
tion colonists seem to pursue a ldquomongrel existence clustered around
temporary landing strips and edging newly cut roads [in towns] that each
day put out new tentaclesrdquo (Descola ) 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 colonistsrsquo 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 develop-ment intervention that emphasizes property regularization and privatiza-
tion 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 ldquopeasantrdquo to ldquoproducerrdquo or ldquoenvironmentalistrdquo and back again depend-
ing on the advantage gained Tese improvised and illicit transactions are
shaping the property market to come while also encouraging deforestationand the greater concentration of wealth Tis 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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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xv
Despite the ldquolone wolfrdquo reputation of the discipline no anthropologist works
alone As I researched this book I was the beneficiary of the kind sup-
port of many colleagues and strangers Since on my first visit to the
sleepy riverboat town of Santareacutem I have spent over forty months learning
about territorial dynamics in western Paraacute Te research that forms thecore of this study was conducted from through with support
from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and the
Fulbright-Hays Research Abroad Program of the US Department of Educa-
tion Additional support for fieldwork was provided by the Department of
Anthropology and the Center for ropical Research in Ecology Agriculture
and Development (CenREAD) at the University of California Santa Cruz
Continuing research from through was made possible through
the Foundation for the Promotion of Scholarship and eaching at RogerWilliams University and the National Geographic Societyrsquos Committee for
Research and Exploration Fieldwork was conducted entirely in Portuguese
and all translations of quoted conversations and common idioms are my
own
I am grateful to have had many conversations over the years with a bril-
liant set of colleagues and friends at the University of California Roger Wil-
liams University and many other institutions Each of these colleagues has
had a hand in shaping this volume and I appreciate their generous support
Ryan Adams Renato Athias Brenda Baletti Christopher Ball Eve Bratman
Marisol de la Cadena Andrew Canessa Mike Cepek Janet Chernela James
Clifford Rose Cohen Beth Conklin Jonathan Echeverri Juliet Erazo Bill
Fisher Susan Harding Penelope Harvey Adam Henne Jeffrey Hoelle Alf
Hornborg Jason Jacobs Nick Kawa Chris Kortright Doreen Lee Alejandro
Leguizamo Dan Linger Carlos Londontildeo Sulkin Patrick Lundh Kristina
Lyons Marybeth MacPhee David McGrath Cristina Mehrtens FelipeMilanez Brent Millikan Sean Mitchell im Murphy Jessica OrsquoReilly Ben
Orlove Jason Patch Daniela Peluso Autumn Quezada-Grant Richard Reed
Peter Richards Dan Rosengren eal Rothschild Steven Rubenstein Carlos
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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983223
Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xvi 983223
Sautchuk Suzana Sawyer Marianne Schmink James Scott Shaila Seshia-
Galvin Glenn Shepard Jessica Skolnikoff Michelle Stewart erry urner
Leah VanWey Wendy Wolford and Laura Zanotti I must also extend spe-
cial 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 bookrsquos images Daniele em Pass skillfully
drew the maps and Sherry Smith compiled the index
Tank you to the audiences and students at the College of the Atlan-
tic Northeastern University Vanderbilt University emple University the
University of Maryland the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth the
University of Wisconsin and Yale Universityrsquos Program in Agrarian Stud-
ies where I have presented my research Portions of chapter appear in anarticle I wrote for the Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropol-
ogy (Campbell ndash) and a version of chapter was published in
PoLAR Political and Legal Anthropology Review (Campbell ndash)
Tis book has also benefited from the invaluable mentorship I received from
Mark Anderson Andrew Mathews Hugh Raffles and Anna sing Tough
the book is my own (and I take full responsibility for its faults and omis-
sions) the influence of these exemplary scholars can be seen throughout
Far more than a mentor Anna sing has modeled for me a humble yet fiercedetermination 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 Beleacutem at the Universidade Federal do Paraacute
(UFPA) Edna Ramos de Castro provided access to the Nuacutecleo de Altos
Estudos Amazocircnicos (NAEA) an invaluable resource for Amazonianists
Tanks to Joseacute Benatti in the faculty of law at UFPA who has been a pio-
neer 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 Amazocircnia
or IMAZON) in Manaus including the ecologist Philip Fearnside and his
colleagues Brenda Brito and Paulo Baretto In Santareacutem where I affiliated
with the Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (IPAM) and the
Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (ICBS) I wish to thank Rosana Costa
Fernanda Ferreira and Ane Alencar as well as ICBS director CristovamSena who opened his extensive archive to me Tanks also to colleagues
at the Universidade Federal do Oeste do Paraacute (UFOPA) especially Bruna
Rocha Mauricio orres and Florecircncio Vaz who are academic and social
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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983223
wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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983223
In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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983223 xvii
justice pioneers in the apajoacutes region It is certain that I could not have
explored Amazonia without the love and support of my extended family in
Santareacutem Steven Winn Alexander Dra Aacuteurea Lucia Alexander their sons
Arthur and David and the crew at Amizade and the Fundaccedilatildeo Esperanccedila
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 Ama-
zoniamdashand the changes underway theremdashthrough their eyes It would beimpractical 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 informantsrsquo identities Let me say that were it not for your generos-
ity this work would not have been possible A very special thanks is due to
Douglas Arauacutejo Cristiane Wermuth and their daughter ainaacute who kindly
supported this work from the start
I am grateful to K Sivaramakrishnan and Lorri Hagman at the Uni-
versity of Washington Press for all of their support through the editorialprocess 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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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xix
BASA Banco da Amazocircnia SA (Bank of Amazonia)
BNDES Banco Nacional do Desenvolvimento (Brazi lian National Development
Bank)
CAR Cadastro Ambiental Rural (Rural Environmental Registry)
CNJ Conselho Nacional de Justiccedila (National Council of Justice)
CP Comissatildeo Pastoral da erra (Pastoral Land Commission)
EMBRAPA Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaacuteria (Brazilian Agricultural
Research Corporation)
FLONA Floresta Nacional (National Forest)
GA Grupo de rabalho Amazocircnico (Amazonian Working Group Network)
IBAMA Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renovaacuteveis
(Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources)ICBS Instituto Cultural Boanerges Sena (Boanerges Sena Cultural Institute)
ICMBio Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservaccedilatildeo da Biodiversidade (Chico Mendes
Institute of Biodiversity Conservation)
IMAZON Instituto do Homem e Meio Ambiente da Amazocircnia (Amazon Institute of
People and the Environment)
INCRA Instituto Nacional de Colonizaccedilatildeo e Reforma Agraacuteria (National Institute
of Colonization and Agrarian Reform)
IPAM Instituto de Pesquisa Ambiental da Amazocircnia (Amazon Environmental
Research Institute)
ISA Instituto Socioambiental (Socioenvironmental Institute)
IERPA Instituto de erras do Paraacute (Paraacute Land Institute)
MDA Ministeacuterio do Desenvolvimento Agraacuterio (Ministry of Agrarian
Development)
MMA Ministeacuterio do Meioambiente (Ministry of the Environment)
MP Medida Provisoacuteria (Provisional Measure)
MPF Ministeacuterio Puacuteblico Federal (Federal Public Ministry)
MS Movimento dos rabalhadores Sem erra (Landless Workersrsquo Movement)
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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983223
ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
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983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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xx 983223
NAEA Nuacutecleo de Altos Estudos Amazocircnicos (Nucleus of Advanced
Amazonian Studies)
PAC Plano da Aceleraccedilatildeo do Crescimento (Accelerated Growth Plan)
PARNA Parque Nacional (National Park)PDS Projeto de Desenvolvimento Sustentaacutevel (Sustainable
Development Project)
PIN Plano de Integraccedilatildeo Nacional (National Integration Plan)
P Partido dos rabalhadores (Workersrsquo Party)
R983076 Reais Brazilrsquos currency
REBIO Reserva Bioloacutegica (Biological Reserve)
RESEX Reserva Extrativista (Extractive Reserve)SPR Sindicato dos Produtores Rurais (Rural Producersrsquo Association)
SR Sindicato dos rabalhadores Rurais (Rural Workersrsquo Union)
SUDAM Superintendecircncia do Desenvolvimento da Amazocircnia
(Superintendency of Amazonian Development)
ZEE Zoneamento Ecoloacutegico-Econocircmico (Ecological-Economic Zoning)
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Conjuring Property
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Introduction Real Estate in Wild Country
o the best of his knowledge the land that Zeacute currently occupies
along a dusty secondary road in the Brazilian Amazon has been bought
and sold five maybe six times Most of these transactions have been betweenparties who have never seen the parcel using documents with incomplete
or inaccurate coordinates Strictly speaking all of these dealings have been
illegal as definitive title to the lot has never been issued in fact even the
size and shape of the parcel on which Zeacute (a pseudonym) resides are indefi-
nite Furthermore at least two additional property claims overlap portions
of Zeacutersquos land For his part Zeacute did not purchase the lot when he migrated to
Amazonia from northeastern Brazil in the late s From the perspective
of the landrsquos distant ldquoownersrdquomdashthe investors in Satildeo Paulo or Rio de Janeirowho paid for the lot despite its legal uncertaintymdashZeacute is a squatter with no
claim to the property However it is unlikely that these owners are aware of
Zeacute and it is very probable that they plan to sell the lot as soon as a profit can
be turned Zeacutersquos claim to the place where he has built a clapboard farmhouse
and planted manioc and fruit trees is effectively an act of homesteading
protected by the Brazilian constitution
So long as definitive title is elusive these two worlds can coexist a world
of dodgy but lucrative transactions among absentee ldquoownersrdquo and a world
in which a landless migrant stakes and defends a claim on the ground amid
counterclaims and other tenure ambiguities If however the question of
ownership were ever raisedmdashas an increasing chorus of elites peasants and
government officials in Amazonia are demandingmdashthis improvised system of
multiple overlapping and legally vague territorial claims would be replaced
by a singular and definitive tenure regime Te shape that regime would take
and the kinds of claims that would ultimately win out are anyonersquos guessWhat is clear is that as the Brazilian state embraces new development rheto-
rics of environmental sustainability and social empowerment in Amazonia
property has emerged as a premier site for government intervention
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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983223
In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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Viewed from above there are no discernable boundaries distinguish-
ing Zeacutersquos 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 Brazilrsquos vast
public domain Te 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 stateldquoTerersquos a real future in land here In property [ propriedade]rdquo Zeacute
explains as if he were encouraging me to invest in real estate Noting the
nearby roadmdashwhich many say is soon to be pavedmdashhe adds ldquoTerersquos no
limit to what is possible on land like this good for planting for ranching for
building wealthrdquo1 As Zeacute speaks a vision for the future of the region crystal-
lizes a future predicated on property not only as the basis of a political econ-
omy but also as a marker of modernity and progress Zeacute shares in the feeling
of many colonists that the Brazilian state while encouraging the settlementand ldquocivilizingrdquo of the forest has nevertheless abandoned migrants to their
own devices in Amazonia For Zeacute who came to the region in search of mate-
rial 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 Te muddle of property claims
is a function of the statersquos absence though it is through making property
claims that migrants like Zeacute hope to encourage the establishment of proper
government in the region ldquoSome of us have been here for decades waiting
and surviving Te state will have to see thatrdquo he adds ldquohow wersquove made
the framework [estrutura] for order and progressrdquo2
Property claims are efforts to give shape and regularity to political econ-
omy in a land with few rules With them colonists like Zeacute attempt to build
alienation into land as a commodity to make singularity and severability
viable in the midst of ecological relationships and multitudes (see sing) Just as important property is used as a technique to bring a deferred
colonial future to bear It simultaneously materializes a culture of territo-
rial occupation and performs a settler historical consciousness in which
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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wilderness inevitably yields to the ldquoprogressrdquo of the plow and the paper
deed Zeacute 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 ldquojust in case it is what I need to
finally get established hererdquo
Tis study describes how colonists in the Brazilian Amazon bring property
to life both as a circulating cultural category and as a material transforma-
tion of landscapes Colonists in rural Amazonia are preparing for the arrival
of government development and the future itself in the form of propertyreform and recognition Te claims that they stake are speculations about
the shape of a to-be-recognized commodity as well as world-making tech-
nologies for the fabrication of Brazilian civilization on the frontier In rural
Amazonia property is conjuredmdashmade to appear from seemingly nowhere
as if by magic Tese 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 tolegalize the illegal and regularize the irregular
Since Brazil first encouraged large-scale Amazonian colonization in
the early s nearly one million people have migrated to the region (de
Lima Amaral ) Te results of the push into the forest have been
mixed Tough 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 ) Over the
decades Brazil has promulgated contradictory development and coloniza-
tion policies alternately backing agrarian reform corporate colonization
indigenous land rights environmental protection and private homestead-
ing State and business interests have variously figured the region as a demo-
graphic 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 competitionhave accompanied these exogenous development visions Te 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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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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In a region that many perceive to be stateless migrants are adopting
anticipatory stances while they await future government intervention
regarding tenure confusion Zeacute is one of thousands who since came
to Amazonia to homestead pan for gold set up as ranchers or chase dreams
of a better life Hardly a monolithic category Amazonian colonists reflect
the broader socioeconomic and regional diversity of Brazil and range from
landless peasants who seek to set up small farms to wealthy agribusiness
elites Tose who like Zeacute homesteaded on federal lands in western Paraacute
state found none of the institutional trappings of the Brazilian statemdashno
court no police no agricultural extension servicesmdashthrough which their
fledgling parcels could be recognized or sustained In this vacuum a colo-
nial culture of improvisation has taken root in which violence fraud andwily maneuvers are among the tools that colonists use to bolster their terri-
torial positions Finding no preestablished legibility for property Zeacute learned
from other migrants how to make and transport claims always with an eye
toward future recognition from the state It is from within this vernacular
system of property claims that colonists are currently engaging new fed-
eral efforts to sort out territorial relations in rural Amazonia namely an
economic and ecological zoning (zoneamento ecoloacutegico-econocircmico) scheme
and a tenure regularization program (erra Legal )An ethnography of colonistsrsquo territorial practices reveals an underly-
ing characteristic of colonization in the Brazilian Amazon even as colo-
nists speculate about future dispositions of governance and of capital their
everyday actions regarding property have the effect of bringing the state
and market into being For Amazonian colonists property is a dynamic
category that becomes salient in the making it is conjured through papers
appeals to state officials and the manipulation of landscapes and memories
of occupation Te speculative rush to secure viable claims on property
draws in squatters homesteaders and the well-heeled as each seeks future
recognition and legitimacy to be conferred by the Brazilian state Speculat-
ing colonists root their claims in the purported legitimacy of development
policies but they also adapt their property positions to influence emerging
government programs Te implication of these findings is that the state
far from absent in rural Amazonian settlements is emergent in the ersatz
engagements of colonists with their surrounding environment with oneanother and with the figural metaphors of modernity and development that
they bring with them into the region Analyzing the manifold phenomena
that constitute property speculation (especulaccedilatildeo fundiaacuteria) as a practice
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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pursued by both elites and smallholder peasants in Amazonia casts new
light on colonistsrsquo participation in Brazilrsquos current efforts to install envi-
ronmental governance regimes in the region
Anthropological studies of state power have emphasized discursive
regimes of power and knowledge (Agrawal Ferguson ) or how
states make landscapes and rural societies legible for rule (Scott ) In this
book I posit that to understand state territorialization in a resource frontier
it is also crucial to consider how colonists affect the state and the market
through their own speculations and anticipatory practices Visions of territo-
rial transformation never fully colonize a place nor do colonists act as mere
extensions of state power Here I focus on colonistsrsquo material and discursive
practices of anticipation vis-agrave-vis future regularizations and improvementsby state and market Tese practices congealed in how colonists manipulate
territories documents and histories to produce property claims dispose
rural Amazonian colonists to act as if the state and market had already
ratified their positions Emerging top-down regulatory regimes that aim to
encourage environmental governance and participatory development are
in turn influenced by these vernacular speculations In settler communities
in rural Amazonia colonists are creating the conditions for capitalist accu-
mulation in a region they understand as being before history I argue thatthe category of the futuremdashenacted as a cultural style of frontier occupation
and civilizational anticipationmdashshapes property-making behaviors in the
present while also setting the stage for environmental and sociopolitical
transformations As colonists take up strategic positions they turn property
into a resource for prolepsis of anticipating and forestalling possible objec-
tions by incorporating them into onersquos own stance Concerned that environ-
mental regulations may lead to their territories being expropriated colonists
strive to represent themselves as dutiful environmentally conscious propri-
etors a strategy that may prove effective in legitimizing claims Constructed
prolepticallymdashby meeting parrying and influencing regulations in a manner
advantageous to colonistsmdashproperty becomes a material and conceptual
resource for accumulating power and redirecting state policies on climate
change forest governance and agrarian reform
Over the past decade land prices in Amazocircnia Legalmdashthe official name
for the Amazon region within the Brazilian republicmdashhave risen by percent a rate much higher than the rest of the country3 Tis statistic
refers only to legitimate transactions on which taxes and fees have been paid
to the government a caveat that leaves out the transactions and specula-
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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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 Brazilrsquos
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 Te question
of what becomes of property in Amazoniamdashhow it is made and recognized
to whose benefit and with what economic and sociocultural effectsmdashliesat the heart of this study
Approaching this question is itself a study in irony Te 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 s in the guise of a reactionary
dictatorshiprsquos ldquonational integration planrdquo that any democratization of landownership was attempted in the region an irony that was knotted up in the
slogan of the times that Amazonia should become ldquoa land without people
for people without landrdquo Te dictatorsrsquo 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 Brazilrsquos push into the forest has been characterized by land
grabbing and speculative maneuversmdashtermed grilagem locallymdashrather
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 ldquoland without peoplerdquo 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 Brazilrsquos colonization policies Rapid deforestation also
grabbed the worldrsquos attention as nearly one-fifth of the Amazon rainfor-est was converted to farmland between and oday million
hectares4 of public lands in Amazoniamdashlands that were nationalized by
generals and opened to homesteaders international mining outfits large-
scale agribusiness and othersmdashhang in the balance as Brazil attempts to
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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983223
In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos 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 specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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reform tenure while reducing deforestation and preserving conservation
areas and indigenous territories Approximately claimsmdasha best
guess as records are incomplete and claims-making procedures unevenmdash
overlap each other as their holders anticipate state action (MDA ) Te
history of development planning in Amazonia suggests that unintended
consequences and ironic reversals lie ahead this study is situated from the
perspective of colonists whose attitudes have been shaped by that history
and whose property-making strategies are shaping its future
Tere has been a resurgence of anthropological interest in property Prop-erty was among the first subjects the discipline explored in depth (Mor-
gan ) and more recent inquiries have been inspired by the ascendancy
of novel rapidly globalizing forms of property relations (eg intellectual
property regimes or the patentability of life) Ethnographers have insisted
that property be viewed contextually arguing that the seemingly standard-
ized model of private exclusive ownership so ubiquitous today is not the
ldquonaturalrdquo shape that property takes always and everywhere In renewing the
anthropological tradition of comparative studies of property ethnographershave problematized property in studies of the global emergence of native
land rights discourses (Doolittle ) the normalization of economic mod-
els that stress the rationality of private property (Mansfield ) and the
rapidity with which ownership idioms are shaping debates over heritage
creativity and personhood (Hann Strathern Verdery and Hum-
phrey ) Tree 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
Lockersquos natural law approach would have it Second the anthropological
perspective situates property as embedded in social relations the apparent
ldquothingrdquo of property is made and becomes meaningful only within a social
field in which norms about economic systems social distinctions and pub-
lic versus private spheres attain Finally ethnography reveals the work that
property does as a lively concept and institution ldquopropertyrdquo becomes the
umbrella label under which certain kinds of relationships are categorizedand through which particular political projects such as liberalization are
made ready for export (see Maurer and Schwab )
Te work of Karl Marx casts a long shadow over the anthropology of
property Te theory of history that Marx developed with Friedrich Engels
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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focused on transformations in property relations especially the ownership
of land as a means of production Tough ethnographers have traced the
expansion of property logics into virtual and immaterial spaces the social
functions of landed property remain of special interest Countering the
liberal economists he critiqued Marx stressed that when it came to land
material relations (ie between owners and vassals lords and serfs) were
not ldquomere factsrdquo but expressions of political and social relations that could
be changed Marxrsquos attention to landmdashto the process of enclosure eviction
and the transformation of tenants into ldquofree laborersrdquomdashleads to a critical
rejection of the ideologies that would hold these processes as the inevi-
table functions of economic progress Tis critical discernment between
the material effects of property and the conceptual armature developed to justify those effects is today just as crucial in the analysis of landed property
as it was for Marx
A global land rush is under way in the first decades of the twenty-first
century in which capital and discourses of privatization are framing up
lands for the taking (Borras Jr et al ) Speculation is most acute on
agricultural lands and in zones (such as Amazonia) where legal regimes
are murky and the resident population is politically weak Te global
hegemony of neoliberal political economic thinking has resurrected andis attempting to naturalize the view that private property rights are req-
uisite for ldquorationalrdquo economic calculation on the part of individuals and
states5 Even environmental conservation in this view can be best achieved
through the establishment of private property Garrett Hardinrsquos ldquotragedy of
the commonsrdquo and Harold Demsetzrsquos () managerial economics made
mainstream the idea that communally held resources were retrograde and
ultimately destructive of environmental resources Te modern thing to
do these thinkers posited was to allow market forces and entrepreneurial
labor to transform the commons into valuable resources Private property
regimes would lead simultaneously to economic expansion and environ-
mental conservation since owners would work in their own self-interest to
steward resources efficiently Te field of resource economicsmdashfounded on
the purported virtues of privatizationmdashis currently remaking the political
economic and social landscapes of the developing world Ethnography can
attest to how its practice departs from its orthodoxy6
In this book I pay special attention to an often overlooked quality of prop-
erty its association with temporality as in the role property systems play in
the elaboration of ideas about history the future progress and social devel-
opment Te idea of exclusive private ownershipmdashenforced by a legal and
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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juridical apparatus that includes a bundle of rights police courts cadastres
and tax regimesmdashis a premier marker of Western modernity Confidence in
property and in the pressing need to universalize it emerged as by-products
of colonial encounters with land regimes that could be parsed and labeled
as nonmodern according to the degree to which they matched up with the
Westrsquos own imagined past (see Chakrabarty ) Early ethnology was
complicit in the sorting of foraging horticultural and pastoral peoples as
living fossils based in part on the presence or absence of private property in
these communities Te colonial prerogative not only assumed that its own
property system was the most advanced it also employed property making
as a strategy of conquest and dispossession (Weaver ) reaties debts
and patents were the technologies through which colonial modernity couldtake root and overwrite preexisting territorialities But beyond propertyrsquos
obvious role in parceling space into ownable lots it also helped frame set-
tlersrsquo sense of time Once established private property outlined a novel
historicity in colonial spaces now lands had histories a lineage of owners
who could set about improving territories and accumulating the fruits of
their labors With property the eternal return of the past could be overrid-
den by a succession of events culminating in the dynamism or messianism7
of industrial capitalismAlong colonial frontiers surveyors and homesteaders effect a creative
destruction marginalizing indigenous peoples while also emplacing modern
ideas of histories and futures Tose ideas of the futuremdashexpectations antic-
ipations and notions of progressmdashare themselves cultural facts that shape
social life in the present and are enmeshed in power relations (Appadurai
) For Amazonian colonists the fluidity of property is both a reminder
that the region is not yet modern and an invitation to stake their own claim
in the future of the place Expectations of modernity (Ferguson ) or
nostalgia for a future that was promised but never materialized (Piot )
become social dramas with material and emotional effects for communities
whose situated understanding of historicity does not comport with material
markers of progress (Lomnitz ) I am interested in how propertymdash
as a condensation of material and ideological effectsmdashbecomes useful for
both creating wealth and elaborating a normative shape for history
A central concern of recent work in political ecology has been to understand
the social and environmental effects of official projects that conjoin develop-
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
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ment with conservation enure regularization in Amazonia is elaborated
as just such a project by bringing the institution of property to order the
theory goes economic and environmental goals will be more easily attain-
able Paige West has shown how official development-cum-conservation
projects can amount to a delicate barter in which governments and nongov-
ernmental organizations (NGOs) give local communities ldquothe things they
see as development in exchange for participation in conservationrdquo (
xiii) Conservation is here revealed as a project in regulating persons more
than an effort to control natural resources Tis point resonates in similar
work by ania Li () and Celia Lowe () who show how projectsrsquo
tendency to distinguish between local and expert knowledge ramifies a host
of political and economic inequalities and reinforces the preeminence ofofficial conservation and development goals over the concerns of ldquoclientsrdquo
Te concept of ldquoenvironmentalityrdquo developed by Arun Agrawal ()
illuminates the subtler power dynamics at play in regulating nature as for-
est communities take up environmental discourses by articulating new
self-asserted identities Te struggle between official and local knowledges
within regulatory encounters is an open and dynamic one Agrawal suggests
in becoming subject to environmental rules local peoples influence these
rules just as their own territorial behaviors are disciplined As governmentsand international organizations have become increasingly concerned with
creating environmental codes a rich literature reveals a staggering diver-
sity of outcomes from top-down managerial schemes to community-based
resource management projects that have empowered locals to secure land
rights (see Brosius sing and Zerner Escobar Mathews )
In the Brazilian Amazon conservation programs began in the s
largely as projects spearheaded and funded by the nongovernmental sec-
tor In recent years state backing and a desire to have programs gener-
ate revenues has brought development and conservation planning into the
picture a scene that often still lacks community representation Studying
the gap between official plans and their practical effects is an important
undertaking in Brazil which boasts some of the most progressive envi-
ronmental legislation in the world but where the reach of regulation and
enforcement is often lacking Colonists in rural Amazonia are generally
skeptical of rules that would limit their ability to farm ranch or pursuelogging But colonistsrsquo responses to environmental governance projects have
been surprisingly diverse rather than simply rejecting regulations colo-
nists have engaged appropriated or even adopted the environmental brief
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983223
In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
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states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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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Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived 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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MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
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in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
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983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
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983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
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territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te 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 ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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In a parallel context racey Heatherington () shows how rural Sicilian
villagers invoked the label of indigeneity to oppose conservation efforts that
they viewed as enclosing common lands In Amazonia private property
becomes the basis for an ldquoownerrdquo identity category that colonists adopt to
rally for or against conservation initiatives Colonists stress how they were
originally encouraged to settle and improve the land and that they are not
the enemies of nature so often caricatured by conservationists Many even
describe themselves as environmentalists and offer detailed explanations
of the environmental benefits of the property regularization they seek
A study of how environmental regulations come into being necessarily
entails a conceptualization of the state what it is and how it can be appre-
hended I agree with Michel-Rolph rouillot () and others who arguethat the state is not a fixed institutional form and that state effects come
to life in a social context that the state neither fully controls nor can come
to know entirely Te effects of state actionsmdashthe enforcement of laws the
promulgation of policy and ideologymdashare no doubt important but the mate-
rial and social spaces in which those effects take shape are contested terrain
(see P Harvey ) Tese contests are not limited to traditional election-
eering Rather the meaning and shape of state regulations are contested in
quotidian acts of resistance appropriation performance and refusal Whenthey appropriate documents or maneuver amid bureaucratic procedures
unofficial actors inhabit the form of the state even as they critique officials
in power (see K Hetherington Watts ) In addition regulatory
encountersmdashwhere property may be recognized or territorial activities pun-
ishedmdashhappen in social fields wherein there is a large ldquopossibility for variable
and conflicting appropriations of concepts and practicesrdquo (Roitman
) As interventions regulations begin with a set of presuppositions about
the nature of politics economics and economic objects and the work that
they do to render spaces and subjects governable is never assured but always
subject to contingencies In Amazonia colonistsrsquo desire for state recognition
does not equate to an eagerness to submit to official rules Instead property
conjurers hope to bend emerging environmental regulations by instantiat-
ing their own political economic norms
ldquo rdquo
Relative to the number and quality of ethnographic studies focused on
indigenous Amazonians there are few accounts of the daily lives of Ama-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3139
983223
states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3239
983223
Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived the malarial infestations and entrenched
violence associated with the gold boom and eventually became villages
with sustained populations (roughly seven thousand people currently live
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3339
MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
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983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3039
983223
zonian colonists8 Te 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 (eg 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 extractiv-
ists and descendants of escaped slaves (quilombolas) (see Adams et al
Hutchins and Wilson ) 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 takingshape among colonists would enrich and inform debates about development
and conservation policy in Brazil o that end I define colonist commu-
nities as communities consisting of those families and individuals whose
history in Amazonia begins after who continue to maintain mean-
ingful connections with their region of origin and who aspire to improve
their personal situations andor transform the region Defined in this way
Amazonian colonists emerge as an understudied constituency in the lit-
erature and as a community apart within the region Colonist villages andneighborhoods while growing in size and influence are nevertheless visu-
ally and geographically distinct from native or caboclo (mixed white and
Indian ancestry) communities (Nugent Wagley )
Tis book explores how colonist communities attempt to transform
Amazonian territories through the elaboration of property logics Tough
this is not a story of native Amazonia it has clear implications for indig-
enous peoples and politics especially regarding land Settlersrsquo speculative
and often violent strategies for alienating property are currently dovetail-
ing with the Brazilian statersquos neoliberal land management policies creating
greater territorial pressures on traditional peoples Activists and analysts
interested in justice for indigenous peoples and continued vitality for Ama-
zonian forests will benefit from contemplating the motives cultural styles
and territorial strategies of Amazonian colonists In the ldquoshifting middle
groundrdquo of ecopolitics where national and international interest in indig-
enous issues often correlates with globalized concerns about our planetrsquosfuture (Conklin and Graham ) 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 Paraacute Acre and Amazonas
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3139
983223
states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3239
983223
Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived the malarial infestations and entrenched
violence associated with the gold boom and eventually became villages
with sustained populations (roughly seven thousand people currently live
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3339
MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3139
983223
states are partisans of the idea that the nation has untapped political and
economic potential Tey are perhaps predisposed to see board feet of lum-
ber 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 Brazilrsquos emergence as a protosuperpower become
enmeshed with colonistsrsquo understanding of their activities is an open ques-
tion and one addressed in this study I hope to bring critical social analysis
to the fine workmdashdone mostly by ecologists like Philip Fearnsidemdashon the
social drivers of deforestation in Amazonia Fearnside ( ) con-
vincingly describes a vicious cycle in which peasants open up lands only tohave 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 Te latter can enrich
ongoing policy discussions in which ecologists and political scientists are
formulating strategies to mitigate the impacts of colonization (see Lauranceet al ) A flexible cultural category in its own right ldquopropertyrdquo should
not be taken for granted in policy prescriptions
Perhaps another reason for the relative lack of in-depth studies of Ama-
zonian colonization is scholarsrsquo 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 Hall Saw-
yer ) with encouraging accounts of how marginalized communities
articulate an ldquoinsurgent citizenshiprdquo that ldquocritiques conventional modernist
authoritative development planningrdquo (Hecht ) Tis 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 Te diverse backers and beneficiaries
of Brazil rsquos ldquoemergencerdquo are influential and persistent in their drive to trans-form the nation Analytically we ignore them at our own peril Te 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
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3239
983223
Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived the malarial infestations and entrenched
violence associated with the gold boom and eventually became villages
with sustained populations (roughly seven thousand people currently live
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3339
MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3239
983223
Tis ethnography is situated in the western half of the vast state of Paraacute
home to dozens of traditional Amazonian populations and the site of
repeated colonization efforts and development projects (see map ) Te
principal city in this region is Santareacutem located at the confluence of the
Amazon and apajoacutes Rivers and a longtime hub of the provincial riverboat
economy (Nugent ) Te majority of western Paraacutersquos population lives in or
near Santareacutem (current pop ) 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 centuryfinds 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 ( gauacutechos or sulistas) South of Santareacutem ranching
gauacutechos and smallholder migrants mostly from Brazilrsquos northeast (nordes-
tinos) have built communities hugging the BR- highway a road punched
through upland forests in the early s In the s the southern reaches
of this highway corridor in the state of Mato Grosso became the center of
Brazilrsquos booming soybean crop but after its initial construction the thou-sand-kilometer stretch in Paraacute remained abandoned by the authorities for
decades It is in this regionmdashthe southwestern corner of the state of Paraacute
defined by the unpaved BR- highwaymdashthat property speculation and
anticipating development can be best examined
Since the highway proved an unreliable colonization corridor relatively
few migrants settled in western Paraacute compared with the south of the state
(near the city of Marabaacute) and the AcreRondocircnia colonization corridor
(Hoelle ) Kayapoacute and Munduruku are among the most prominent
indigenous groups in the area and elders still recall the arrival of the bull-
dozers and first migrants in the s Discovery of gold in the apajoacutes valley
set off the first rush of settlement especially near the auriferous deposits
along the Jamanxim and Curuaacute Rivers far to the south of Santareacutem Clan-
destine airstrips and hastily constructed settlements soon pockmarked the
forests along with open-air alluvial mines and tailings deposits Te most
successful gold minesmdashincluding Castelo de Sonhos the key colonist villagechronicled in this studymdashsurvived the malarial infestations and entrenched
violence associated with the gold boom and eventually became villages
with sustained populations (roughly seven thousand people currently live
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3339
MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3339
MATO GROSSO
A M
A Z O N A S
PARAacute
J a m a n x i m R
i v e r
C u r u aacute
R i v e
r
X i n
g u R i v
e r
A m a z o
n R i v e r
T a p a j oacute s R
i v e r
B R
- 2 3 0
B R - 1
6 3 H w y
B R - 1 6 3
T r a n s a m
a z o n i a n H w y ( B
R - 2 3 0 )
river
non-paved road
paved road
state border
Amazon Region
200 km1000
SANTAREacuteM
ALTAMIRA
ITAITUBA
RUROacutePOLIS
NOVO PROGRESSO
CASTELO DE SONHOS
Amazon Region and Study Area
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3439
983223
in Castelo de Sonhos) In these small settlements the mood is overwhelm-
ingly 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 migrantrsquos 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 s
and s but the population density in western Paraacute remained low and
the reach of government modest Te Brazilian state nationalized lands
alongside Amazonian federal highways in the mid-s to encourage settle-
ment but in the absence of local land courts or surveyors distinguishing
legitimate property claims proved impossible enure ambiguity became
widespread and increasingly violent throughout the Brazilian Amazon inthe late twentieth century (see Schmink and Wood ) In western Paraacute
however tenure ambiguity continued to compound with each new devel-
opment protocol issued by the distant state Tough not immune to land-
related violence the region remained relatively quietmdashprotected in part by
the seasonal impassibility of the BR- highwaymdashwhile land battles raged
to the west (eg in Acre where Chico Mendes was killed in ) and to the
east (eg the massacre at Eldorado dos Carajaacutes south of Beleacutem in ) Tis
study picks up the story of this underdeveloped region at the point whenthe Brazilian state was signaling its intention to pave the BR- highway
build a series of hydroelectric plants on the regionrsquos rivers and regularize
land tenure9 Te colonists who settled in the rural zones of western Paraacute
took the statersquos 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 Te 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 specu-
lation 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 associ-
ated with property makingmdashsome of which are key to the ldquonormalrdquo andldquomodernrdquo functioning of political economymdashif we see it only as a swindle
When I began the fieldwork for this study in I committed to a long-
term grappling with the world-making qualities of property and how
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3539
983223
it comes into existence as an institution to order territorial social and
even historical relations between the colonists who are active agents in
its creation An initial two-year stint of fieldwork proved insufficient to
track the labors and meanings associated with making property in western
Paraacute I returned to conduct follow-up research on an annual basis between
and tallying a total of forty months of participant observation
and interviews
Research took me into the backrooms of land registry offices
where I perused forged deeds and gained entry into a world fueled by specu-
lative cash transfers from southern Brazil On winding forest trails far from
colonial villages I hiked with the hired hands that did the demanding work
of maintaining parcelsrsquo boundaries I participated in meetings with landlessworkersrsquo associations struggling to make their own claims more visible and
with outsider NGOs who came to the region to educate colonists about
sustainable development In all I found that the story of what might happen
in western Paraacutemdashwhat kind of government and economic growth colonists
could expect or demandmdashwas always a story about the fate of the land itself
and the rights to dispose of it as property By participating in the spaces
where property was being made I could pay attention to the techniques
that colonists used to make it appear By listening intently in open-endedinterviews10 I noticed how concerns about property also announced a host
of ideas about the proper relationship of people to land the role of govern-
ment and the nature of history itself I collected information regarding
colonistsrsquo region of origin the length of time they had been in Amazonia
the range of their economic activities the extent of their relations with other
colonists their tenure status and their hopes for the future What emerges
from this data is a thorough ethnographic examination of a region that is
understood by its inhabitants to be in the midst of a monumental change
Fieldwork is marked by difficulties and misapprehensions for both the
researcher and the community being examined My motives in pursuing this
study were a constant source of curiosity for colonists and early on I became
familiar with a wary suspicion that many had of outsidersmdashespecially edu-
cated North Americans whom many assumed traveled to Amazonia to
preach the gospel of environmental preservation It took me nine months
to convince some of the residents of Castelo de Sonhos that I was in their village to research local history and development politics and that I believed
that their local perspectives were the ones most often left out in debates
on environmental policies If the owner of the local pirate radio station had
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3639
983223
not shown an interest in my work I might still be knocking on doors with
little to show for it But with this support social networks within the village
became intelligible and I could begin to work with confidence and cred-
ibility Still many remained suspicious and I occasionally heard rumors of
my secret work with the US government or my affiliation with Greenpeace
(none of which were true)
Localsrsquo defensiveness about their presence in Amazonia is understand-
able given the all-or-nothing tone of many discussions about the environ-
mental future of the region Regardless of their personal opinions on forest
conservation colonists unanimously cited their rights to develop Amazo-
nia by relating that the Brazilian government had long ago invited them
to the region Besides many addedmdashwhile embracing the idiom of prop-ertymdashAmazonia is ours Interviewees often followed this line of thought
with a reminder that North Americans and Europeans had already destroyed
most of their forests while getting rich I heard many times that ldquothis is the
future that we want toordquo with a dangling ambiguity concerning whether
it was the riches or the destruction or both that colonists were after I sus-
pect that the tensions examined in this bookmdashbetween rich and poor
economic growth and environmental protection and local national and
global perspectivesmdashwill remain unresolved for decades to come in Ama-zonia Indeed it is perhaps better if we refrain from attempting to resolve
these tensionsmdasha strategy often undertaken in policy prescriptionsmdashand
instead attend more carefully to how these debates produce a framework for
understanding and interacting with the world Colonists count themselves
as modern rational actors whose efforts to civilize the Amazon have been
stymied by a weak indecisive government and an international cast of moral
crusaders It is worthwhile to attempt to understand their worldview if for
no other reason than to show its limitations and convenient elisions
Gradually the colonists with whom I spoke and hiked and lived came
to tolerate my presence among them and soon I became privy to the small
and large ways that people relate to land and curate potential claims to it
Informants proved to be surprisingly frank about the improvised fraudu-
lent and sometimes dangerous nature of their activities which ranged from
forgery and dissimulation to blustery threats and land invasions planned
in secret Over the months I came to discern fragile alliances and com-peting factions engaging one another in protracted contests in which de
facto control of land was only one aspect of what was at stake Perhaps the
greater prizemdashmore important than using a parcel of land or defending it
from encroachmentmdashwas the ability to speak for the future of a particular
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3739
983223
territory effectively projecting a claim to ownership in an idiom and man-
ner 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 gamemdash
both in terms of the ethics of research and as a practical matter of methodmdash
was a source of ceaseless anxiety Tough I eventually gained the trust of
both regional elites and poor migrants (groups known locally as grandes
and pequenos ldquothe big guysrdquo and ldquothe little guysrdquo) 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 Rosaldorsquos description of ethnography asldquodeep hanging outrdquo was never far from mind
Beyond the private life of property the signs of which I could only dis-
cern under the tutelage of colonists in western Paraacute I was also interested in
tracking the more public lives of land claims Participating in meetings about
state-backed development projectsmdashespecially Brazilrsquos ecological zoning
and tenure regularization effortsmdashproved an important complementary
methodology by which I could ascertain how colonists transformed their
provisional and often secret land claims into solid precepts with whichto 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 colonistsrsquo 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 col-
lected by supplementing government figures with intervieweesrsquo accumu-
lated accounts of informal cash trade and debt-swap transactions
Studying property conjuring amounts to immersing oneself in a mas-
sive confidence game and on a daily basis I negotiated the limits of field-
workrsquos aspirations to objectiveness and impartiality Individualsrsquo 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 colonistsrsquo engagementswith property giving rise to the widely held belief among colonists that
the distinction between a fraudulent and a legitimate claim was largely
meaningless Te pervasiveness of this attitude enabled an ethnographic
engagement with activities and perspectives that informants might other-
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3839
983223
wise have wished to leave concealed As one claimant explained to me ldquoTe
frauds [as fraudes] are how the lawmdashor how right and wrongmdashbegins to
existrdquo What was the harm in letting a researcher see the particularities of
the fraud when the illicit and the improvised were prerequisite to regular-
ization and legality Since all was fraudmdashand since every player in the land
game could accuse every other of shady dealingmdashthere 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 peace-
ably 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 ofone 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
personrsquos 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 whileothers continued to hold out hope that connecting with a foreign researcher
might ultimately yield powerful results for their property plays Te ethical
implications of this imbalance continue to weigh heavily on me and have
led me to use pseudonyms and nonspecific physical coordinates in this vol-
umersquos 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 primar-
ily a vehicle for more distant reflection on academically interesting matters
As it happens the property conjuring game in Amazoniamdashreplete as it is
with fraud deception and reversals of fortunemdashis not conducted on a level
playing field Tis 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 sym-
pathies 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 amafraid that this book offers little by way of exculpatory proof or corrobora-
tion for those smallholders who joined in the property conjuring perfected
by Brazil rsquos moneyed classes and landed elites other than the synoptic point
that the game was rigged against them from the start
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture
7232019 Conjuring Property Speculation and Environmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon
httpslidepdfcomreaderfullconjuring-property-speculation-and-environmental-futures-in-the-brazilian 3939
983223
My overall aim is to richly describe the phenomenon of property specu-
lation 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 undevel-
oped and thoroughly nonmodern While I attempt to understand property
making on its own termsmdashand how for colonists property instantiates
the shape of history the prospect of governance and the promise of long-
sought modernitymdashthis 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 systemrsquos
key institutionsmdashpropertymdashemerges haltingly from makeshift inventions
luck fraud collusion and creative destruction of the environment Officialhistories 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 colonistsrsquo labors to make it viable enough to usher in a ldquomodernrdquo
future and their concomitant efforts to present it as obvious and inevi-
table raining the ethnographic lens on Amazonian colonists requires
attention to some rather unsavory dimensions of colonial culture includ-
ing widespread racist attitudes toward indigenous peoples colonistsrsquo often
pugnacious suspicion of environmental conservation and their faith in thedoctrine of improvement Tese 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 villainsmdasha common trope in
much writing on Amazoniamdashas I have found that there are events too
important and dynamics too subtle for that framework to capture