The new Amazon geographies: insurgent citizenship, “Amazon Nation” and the politics of environmentalisms

Abstract

This article reviews the main themes—we are here; this is who we are; insurgent citizenship; Amazon Nation—elaborated in this collection of papers on new Amazonian geographies, and extends their implications to ideas about governmentality and regional identity. The article contextualizes the papers in this issue through understanding Amazonia's role in the structuring of the contemporary Brazilian state through resistance to conventional modernist authoritarian development planning, and the creation of current places and politics through the assertion of new forms of citizenship, identity, governance and the rise of socio-environmentalisms as part of a new “statecraft” from below. Modern Amazonia has reasserted itself by developing a set of alternative epistemes and practices which can be seen, in their language and ideologies, to invoke the idea of the “Amazon nation.” This article emphasizes the cultural underpinnings of these processes in a contested Amazon that is now a major supplier of global agricultural commodities in its deforested landscapes, and pivotal for local livelihoods and planetary environmental services in its forested ones.

Keywords:

• Amazon
• modernist planning
• political ecology
• identity landscapes
• social movements
• governmentality

Notes

1. See Holston (1989, 1999) for discussions about Brazilian modernist planning.

2. This refers to the period when the Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal, radically restructured Portuguese national and colonial policy. He implemented a state charter company (Compania de Grão Para e Maranhão) to organize the trade, subsidized the importation of slaves with which he hoped to overcome the labor scarcity, and exiled religious orders whom, as a sharp anti-cleric, he viewed as monopolizing indigenous labor. Thus began the Directorate which replaced religious orders with secular directors who had power over native labor, beginning another period of major indigenous dislocation He invested in major military forts and infrastructure, and sought to “modernize” Amazonian economies, within the frameworks of the time, through expanding plantation agriculture and colonization (Hecht 2011b; see also Maxwell 1995, 2001).

3. “Exotic” is used here in the sense of non-native or introduced species. Thus pastures depend on cattle introduced either from Asia (Zebu), Africa (Creole) or Mediterranean breeds, on grasses largely initially imported from Africa. Soy is an Asian import; sunflower is part of the soy rotation and is from North America.

4. The papers in this volume point to these differences. Other recent commentators include: Turner and Robbins 2008, Peres and Zimmerman 2001, and Zimmerer 2000, 2006.

5. In this regard, see also Escobar (2008).

6. Details on this project can be obtained from Ford Foundation Brazil: www.fordfoundation.org/regions/brazil. See also: www.novacartografiassocial.com/archovos/pnca.

7. The discussions of REDD are too extensive to address here, but see Borner and Wunder (2008), Borner and Wunder (2010), Chhatre and Agrawal (2009), Grainger et al., (2009), Sandbrook et al., (2010), and Sikor et al., (2010).

8. See Hecht (2011b). Translation from the Portuguese “terra sem historia: observações gerais.”(Tocantins 1966, p. 32)

9. See Hecht 2011b.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Susanna B. Hecht

Susanna B. Hecht is Professor in the School of Public Affairs, Institute of the Environment, Department of Geography, UCLA,, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA