Interwoven lives within territories of extraction: Mining, the struggle for land and contested futures in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract

This thesis examines the history and present of the extractive frontier in the Brazilian Amazon, focusing on the interplay between territory, materiality, and conflict within the contemporary Carajás Mining Complex in Southeast Pará. It centres on the life stories of small-scale players—such as wildcat miners, landless people, and urban and forest dwellers—whose lives are entangled with this large-scale mining project. Using techniques of multi-sited ethnography, archival research, and in-depth interviews, this thesis documents how the Carajás mega-project was made possible by harnessing the legacies of environmental and social forms left by previous cycles of extraction. In doing so, it highlights the longue-durée of extractivist projects in the region and how the emergence of this large-scale mining complex relied on more than geological conditions of resource availability. The incorporation of customary forms of property and non-capitalist relations—such as indentured labour, unregulated extraction, pericapitalist sites of extraction, and old elites – has been pivotal to the production of this extractive frontier in ways that reproduce colonial/racialised inequalities. Yet by recreating these social and spatial forms and deepening social and environmental injustices, the Carajás Mining Complex has also created possibilities for the emergence of social struggles that have contested its development, ushering in the rise of social movements that question private forms of nature appropriation, land rights, and an economic model based on extraction. The thesis contributes to work on contested territories of extraction and extractive frontiers within Human Geography, Anthropology, Political Ecology, and Postcolonial and Decolonial studies by documenting the ruptures and continuities of frontier resource-making. It shows how an environmentally degraded and highly deforested part of the Amazon is simultaneously the site of new extractive encroachments and a crucible for grassroots discussions about the politicisation of nature, access to resources, and planetary futures, with implications far beyond the Amazon.