Between the Material and the Figural Road: The Incompleteness of Colonial Geographies in Amazonia

Abstract

This article asks what happens when the colonial dream of a road does not materialize as intended, and becomes instead a permanent project for distant state managers and rural Amazonian settlers. Roads have featured prominently in Brazil’s development designs, and ethnography along an unpaved road demonstrates how a wide array of actors negotiate the tension between the material challenges of moving in Amazonia and the bold modernist figurations that guide highway construction and territorial planning. Over the past 40 years, the unpaved road has itself become a central but unpredictable player in the plans and practices of colonists as well as in emerging governance projects of the Brazilian state. Colonists’ arrival in the region via what they perceive to be an abandoned and impassable road repositions their prefigured relationships with the histories, narratives, and infrastructures of colonial occupation and state-making. Newly local to a frontier zone not yet ‘connected’ to the rest of Brazil, colonists leverage an intimate knowledge of roadside material conditions in an effort to anticipate and influence future state actions.

Key Words:

• Territorial planning
• Figurations
• Abandonment
• Brazil

Notes

1. Though my focus in this article is on the varied meanings and practices that become enmeshed in roads, it is important to mark from the outset the central role that roads play in debates pitting development vs. environmental conservation in the developing world. Brazil’s Br-163 is currently at the center of such a debate, as detailed below and in Torres’s edited volume (2005). Political and environmental anthropologists have become increasingly interested in how development projects – infrastructure, rural credit and agricultural devices, and natural resource management schemes – work as sites for states and citizens to work out novel forms of ‘environmental subjectivities’ and patterns of governance. Agrawal (2005) has been a leading theorist in this regard in his emphasis on ‘the conduct of conduct’ within development projects that espouse environmental goals. For our purposes, the emerging literature on ‘environmental governance’ reminds us that government’s stated goals – which may emphasize environmental values – often circulate at some remove from the actual sociocultural conditions attaining in any given project’s elaboration; for more on these contradictions see Mathews (2011), Rose (2008), and Wolford (2005).

2. This research was funded in part by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research and a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, awarded by the US Department of Education. I would like to thank Mark Anderson, Douglas Araújo, Madeline Campbell, Janet Chernela, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Penny Harvey, Kregg Hetherington, Hugh Raffles, and Anna Tsing for their support and feedback.

3. Lisansky (1990) and Almeida 1992 provide thorough ethnographic accounts of corporate colonization in Amazonia, though they adopt the analytic term ‘spontaneous colonization’ to emphasize how pioneers left their southern Brazilian farms of their own will, stimulated by the call of cheap land rather than by state promises for agrarian reform resettlement. See Hecht (2011) for an updated discussion of sociocultural diversity in Amazonia in light of twentieth century migration patterns and policies.

4. An interesting and timely debate regarding roads in Latin America that features critical and ethnographic analysis of how roads become enmeshed in a variety of social patterns and rhythms is emerging with regards to the ‘Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America’ (IIRSA). IIRSA is a regional initiative aimed at unifying trade and commerce corridors between Andean/Pacific and Mercosul nations; see Pieck (2011) for a wonderful overview and Harvey (2005) for ethnographic analysis of the effects of infrastructure planning and construction.

5. A pioneering study in the ethnography of roads is Masquelier’s (2002) investigation of Niger’s Route 1, a significant product of, and means of producing, the colonial project of modernization in Niger. Masquelier contends that ‘colonial modernization did not simply erase the past, literally and figuratively “covering” it up with layers of gravel and asphalt:’ the road instead retains traces of the violence and terror of colonial times, expressed through local idioms of haunting and possession associated with travel.

6. All primary material discussed in this paper was gathered in ethnographic interviews and participant observation settings during my 2006–2008 fieldwork in Castelo de Sonhos. I have used pseudonyms throughout this paper (with the exception of the name of the Village, Castelo), and all translations from Portuguese are my own.

7. Heading south from Castelo along the Br-163, up and over the Serra do Cachimbo into densely populated northern Mato Grosso, though comparatively shorter at only 200 km, also required patience and ingenuity.

8. Respectively: Zea mays, Manihot esculenta, Phaseolus vulgaris, and Musa balbisiana. In addition to these edibles, road-gardeners cultivate medicinals such as cat’s claw (Uncaria guaianensis) and ginger (Zingiber officinale), and a variety of fruits such as genipapo (Genipa amaericana) and buruti (Trithrinax brasiliensis).

9. Baletti (2012) discusses the ZEE process in far greater detail, and offers an important analysis of neo-developmental agendas in Amazonia.

10. See Mendoza et al. (2007) for an examination of the ‘participatory stakeholder model’ in the comparison case of southwestern Amazonia.

11. Embrapa is a semipublic corporation that dominates agricultural research and development in Brazil. It employs hundreds of environmental and forest engineers, agronomists, and zoning specialists, and works closely with the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Natural Resource, the federal environmental police and parks service.

12. The official vision for sustainable development along the Br-163 is articulated in the Federal government’s benchmark plan for the region (Brazil 2006), of which Embrapa’s public dissussion workshops were only one facet. See Mendoza et al. (2007) and Fearnside (2007) for discussions and critiques of the stakeholder development model in the Brazilian Amazon.

13. Though government officials acknowledged the roadblock in Castelo, I can find no evidence that a review of the ZEE Br-163 took place with an eye towards Castelenses’s concerns. The ZEE Br-163 has moved forward as a participatory planning document, however, and is the source of guidelines for credit and land regularization along the highway.