ETHNOTERRITORIAL RECONFIGURATIONS OFSOCIAL CONFLICTS: FROM CULTURAL DIFFERENCE TO POLITICAL FRAGMENTATION (BRAZILIAN AMAZONIA)

Véronique Boyer

doi:10.1590/2238-38752017v724

Abstract

Abstract Despite the constitutional inscription of the territorial rights of indigenous and quilombola peoples, a new kind of conflict has emerged between differently classified populations. This article documents this conflict through the study of a disagreement between 'quilombola' and 'indigenous' populations in central Amazonia. The solutions of various actors reveal doubts concerning the real 'ethnic contrast' between the protagonists. The current organisation in ethnic territories is seen as the most recent instance of a series of socioterritorial reorganisations already adopted by the populations in interaction with diverse bodies. The article reconstructs the shifting alliances between opposed factions, highlighting the modalities involved in their formation. When the rights granted by the State to groups of populations due to their exceptionality come under threat, as at present, it is essential to recognise that the fluidity between legal categories reflects their shared struggle for survival.

Highlights

As an extensive literature has already shown, in terms of its organisation, space can be subject to different and even conflicting appropriations simultaneously, situations where the coexistence of multiple readings of a specific geographic area turns into competition when one of these claims greater legitimacy than the others – as in the case of the sectorizations promoted by the State
In a thought-provoking analysis of populations who were embedded in the same kinship networks but took divergent paths in terms of identity – some becoming Xocó Indians at the end of the 1970s, others recognizing themselves as quilombolas in the 2000s – French emphasizes, like Gallois and Robert, the interdependence between territorialization processes and the dynamics of emergent ethnicity: they were kin, “the demand for land [by the Xocó Indians and by the quilombolas] simultaneously awoke, and was driven by, new assertions of cultural specificity” (French, 2009: 123)
This co-construction of the boundaries of a territory and a group occurs today within a legal framework renewed by the 1988 Constitution, which generated numerous expectations and, subsequently, many frustrations, given that the State’s adoption of a multipolar approach to processing territorial demands – with FUNAI responsible for indigenous peoples, INCRA for quilombolas, and ICMBio for traditional populations – had at least two additional unforeseen consequences: rivalries between state institutions vying for control over the delimitation of their areas of work (Castro, 2012) and conf licts between populations that reformulated pre-existing local feuds in ethnic terms

Summary

Introduction

As an extensive literature has already shown, in terms of its organisation, space can be subject to different and even conflicting appropriations simultaneously (for example, Lefebvre, 1974; Vanier, 2009; Miller, 2011), situations where the coexistence of multiple readings of a specific geographic area turns into competition when one of these claims greater legitimacy than the others – as in the case of the sectorizations promoted by the State.

Results

Conclusion