Making the Amazon a frontier: where less space is more

ABSTRACT

Frontier-making has always been fundamental for the circulation and accumulation of capital. The perennity of frontier-making is not only due to the demand for minerals, land or other resources, or because frontiers represent fresh market opportunities, but crucially because it operates as compensation for the saturation of the existing capitalist relations in core areas. At the frontier, the conventional sequence of time and space is suspended and reconfigured, allowing room for the decompression of tensions and contradictions. Consequently, spatial frontiers function as a mirror, where the most explicit features of capitalism are vividly exposed. This article examines the meaning and immanence of spatial frontiers, considering them as a laboratory of historical and geographical agency. It entails a reflection upon the necessity, the configuration and the contestation of spatial frontiers, paying particular attention to the economic and territorial incorporation of the Amazon region and the prospects of political resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Agribusiness
• capitalism
• Mato Grosso
• political economy
• resistance
• soybean

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

The papers contains a politico-economics and geographical analysis. No animals, sensitive issues or vulnerable groups were involved in the research. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by the author. The research and the manuscript comply with all ethical standards, especially those put forward by Cardiff University.

Data collection was conducted observing best practice. All sources of third party information were properly acknowledged in the text.

Notes

1 And even beyond the Earth, as there have been serious attempts to bring capitalist relations to outer space, bypassing the 1967 international treaty, in order to mine asteroids and other planets (The Guardian 2015).

2 In his study on territorial conquest and European border disputes, Namier (1942, 69–70) perspicaciously observed that:

One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future. But in fact, when discussing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience, and when trying to gauge the future they cite supposed analogies from the past: till, by a double process of repetition, they imagine the past and remember the future.

3 It reminds us of those destitute people in the north of England who collected pieces of coal from the mining operation to mitigate unemployment and have some fuel, famously described by George Orwell.

All day long over those strange grey mountains you see people wondering to and fro with sacks and baskets among the sulphurous smoke (many slag-heaps are on fire under the surface), prising out the tiny nuggets of coal which are buried here and there. (…) In Wigan the competition among unemployed people for the waste coal has become so fierce that it has led to an extraordinary custom called ‘scrambling for the coal’, which is well worth seeing. (…) Technically it is stealing but, as everybody knows, if the coal were not stolen it would simply be wasted. (Orwell 1989, 93–95)

Additional information

Funding

This study did not receive specific funding (it is basically a reflexive paper based on previous research projects in in the Amazon that tries to expand theoretical, methodological and interpretative approaches).

Notes on contributors

Antonio A. R. Ioris

Antonio A. R. Ioris is Reader in Human Geography and Director of the MSc in Environment and Development; coordinator of the International Research Network Agrocultures on agricultural frontiers in the Amazon Region.