Entangled collectives: riverine people, landscapes, and emerged infrastructures on a climate change background

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article seeks to discuss the associations elaborated by riverine interlocutors between infrastructures and the landscape in which they occur, within the context of climate change in the Brazilian state of Amazonas. Here, we debate the relational character of infrastructures, and how they act as important markers of river seasonality, landscape, people’s existence, and practices from the perspective of the accessed riverine people. This paper’s discussion is supported by qualitative data from semi-structured interviews and field notes from two riverine communities in the Amazonas state: Tumbira and Lago do Catalão. Inspired by authors who dialogue with Social Studies of Science and Technology and discuss infrastructures, their effects, their relational and ontological character, we seek to identify entanglements of landscape and infrastructure, and their implications in the practices and ways of living of riverine Amazonian people. Elements such as gas pipelines, power transmission lines, hydroelectric plants, cargo ships, and highways emerge, affect, and are affected in these entangled landscapes in the eyes of the riverine people. They merge with other entanglements such as the rivers and creeks that perform the riverine landscape and life. Thus, they induce reflections on such relationships and the affectations permeated by fears, wishes, and (dis)trust of their operation.