ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3433-1265
Date of Award
8-4-2023
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Degree Type
Dissertation
Abstract
This dissertation examines how smallholder farmers, fishers, and agroforesters in Brazil’s Amazon delta succeeded in carving out a position of relative autonomy and social security along an emerging industrial corridor for agricultural and mineral commodities in the eastern Amazonian state of Pará. Drawing on seventeen months of ethnographic fieldwork and research at public and private archives, I demonstrate how contemporary social and environmental justice coalitions in the Amazon have been shaped by the sociological legacy of the aviamento: a system of debt peonage and unequal exchange that structured the relationship between rural workers and merchant elites throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In forwarding a series of arguments regarding the drivers of social and ecological change in the Amazon delta, I suggest that dominant portrayals of the rainforest as either a pristine natural environment or repository of cultural otherness all too often obscure the basin’s centrality as a site of social conflict, labor struggle, and political change, contributing to the persistent invisibility of the region’s rural workers and their contributions to global history.
Language
English (en)
Chair and Committee
Bret Gustafson
Committee Members
Glenn Stone
Recommended Citation
Abel, Matthew, "The Forest and the Factory: Debt, Development, and Community in the Amazon Delta" (2023). Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 3118.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/art_sci_etds/3118