Matter, Space, Energy, and Political Economy: The Amazon in the World-System

Stephen Bunker

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2003.241

Abstract

Many authors have attempted co-incorporate the local into the global. World-systems analysis, though, is rooted in processes of production, and all production remains profoundly local. Understanding the expansion and intensification of the social and material relations of capitalism that have created and sustain the dynamic growth of the world-system from the local to the global requires analysis of material processes of natural and social production in space as differentiated by topography, hydrology, climate, and absolute distance betweenplaces. In this article, I consider some of the spatio-material configurations chat have struc-tured local effects on global formations within a single region, the Amazon Basin. I first detail and criticize the tendency in world system and globalization analysis, and in the modern social sciences generally, to use spatial metaphors without examining how space affects the material processes around which social actors organize economy and policy. I next examine thework of some earlier social scientists who analyzed specific materio-spatial configurations as these structured human social, economic, and political activities and organization, searching for possible theoretical or methodological tools for building from local to global analysis. I then review some recent analyses of spatio-material determinants of social and economic organiza-tion in the Amazon Basin. Finally, I show that the 400-year-long sequence of extractive econ-omies in the Amazon reflected the changing demands of expanded industrial production in the core, and how such processes can best be understood by focusing our analysis on spatio-material configurations of local extraction, transport, and production. The Amazon is but one of the specific environments that have supplied raw materials to changing global markets, but close consideration of how its material and spatial attributes shaped the global economy provides insights into the ways other local systems affect the world-system.

Highlights

Incorporating the local into the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for scholars of both world-systems and globalization (Chase-Dunn, 2000, Tomich, 2001, Robinson, 2001)
Examining the effects of the local on the global requires that we consider space as materially differentiated by topography, hydrology, climate, and absolute distance between places
I first detail the tendency in world systems and globalization analysis, and in the modern social sciences generally, to use spatial metaphors to bound or contextualize social processes without considering the effects of space as it impinges on the material processes around which social actors organize economy and Stephen G

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Incorporating the local into the global in analytically compatible ways poses a major challenge for scholars of both world-systems and globalization (Chase-Dunn, 2000, Tomich, 2001, Robinson, 2001). I show how some of the lessons provided by the local configurations of space and matter in the Amazon have informed my colleagues' and my efforts to discover and explain mechanisms that drive the secular material intensification and spatial expansion of the worldsystem. Technological and organizational economies of scale drive the expanded reproduction of capital; the increased absolute space across which the increasing volumes of matter consumed must be transported raises unit costs. I attempt to show that these processes: (1)drive the spatial expansion of raw materials markets, and thereby (2) stimulate development of progressively cheaper, faster technologies and more extensive infrastructure for their transport, and (3) drive the globalization of the world economy. I will argue that globalization can best be understood by focusing our analysis on the secular expansion and intensification of materio-spatial configurations of local extraction, transport, and production. 1· Even transport, the movement of matter through space, is at each moment as local as the location of the vehicle and of the capital sunk in the built environment at each point in the space traversed

SPACE AND NATURE IN MODERN SOCIAL SCIENTIFIC ANALYSIS

TOPOGRAPHY AND HYDROLOGY IN THE EXTRACTION OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS

IMPLICATIONS OF AMAZONIAN EXPORT CYCLES FOR MATERIOSPATIAL ANALYSIS

SPATIAL CONSEQUENCES OF LOCAL DECISIONS TO EXPLOIT GLOBAL MARKETS

CONCLUSION