The Lower Tapajós region, a multi-ethnic territory in western Pará, Brazilian Amazon, is home to 13 Indigenous peoples, numerous traditional riverside communities, and several quilombola communities. This area now faces profound ecological and social upheavals due to the rapid expansion of soy plantations and the infrastructure necessary for grain export. In this talk, I examine how tropical forests are transformed into monocultural landscapes, focusing on two critical impacts: the degradation of remaining forests and communities, often leaving them as hollow vestiges or “farces,” and a notable rise in viral contamination, especially hantavirus. I will delve into the pervasive use of agrochemicals as a mechanism of displacement, what I call an expulsion by suffocation, in which local communities are forced to leave their territories, clearing space for soy expansion. This phenomenon echoes the colonial-military vision of an “empty” Amazon, promoting the erasure of complex entanglements of human and more-than-human lives. In short, this is an ethnographic theory about what the process of financialization of the forest means for those who live in the territory, and what transformations it implies for the relationships between people, the forest, and these territories.
February 11, 3pm