A Destinação de terras na Transamazônica e BR-163 e o dispositivo da racialidade: um estudo sobre o Distrito de Campo Verde, Itaituba, Pará

Abstract

This doctoral thesis is the result of research conducted about the application of the racial dispositif through land designation in its various ramifications, focusing on the period from 1972 to 2023, specifically in the Campo Verde District, Itaituba, Pará. It is an interdisciplinary research project engaging with sociology, anthropology, and law, based on investigations within three main debates that comprise the theoretical framework: racial theory, development studies, and studies of the Amazonian peasantry. The absence of connection between the academic accumulations of the three approaches was considered. However, it was possible to consider that the baggage of the three perspectives offers relevant contributions to the perspective of situating race as a category for the study of land ownership and property relations engendered by different development policies in the Amazon region. The central concept of the research is the racial dispositif, which, in fact, is only a term introduced by Michel Foucault, but which was broadened by the analysis of Sueli Carneiro. Based on the contributions of Sueli Carneiro and authors such as Fanon, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Charles Mills, it was possible to trace an analytical perspective on frontier and peasant studies, as in Hebette and José de Souza Martins, on the development of the Amazon, as in Edna Castro and Violeta Loureiro, and on sustainable development, as in Bertha Becker and Marcela Vecchione-Gonçalves, for example, questioning the satelized representation of the Amazon based on the reduction of Amazonian problems to investigations of deforestation. The racial dispositif, as a term, was an instrument that allowed the revelation of the complex web that maintains inequalities in the Amazonian countryside based on race, combining discourses, myths, policies, land agencies, financial institutions, and notarial procedures. Thus, the Foucauldian thought updated by Sueli Carneiro proved to be applicable to the Amazonian context and allowed us to conclude that the allocation of lands originating from the imperial period of Brazil was and still is an instrument of racialization by not confronting the past when the myth of racial democracy was activated to erase Black trajectories, and also by establishing criteria and procedures that distance Black families from access to and permanence on the land during times of expansion of the logistics of agricultural commodity outflow in the region. The methodological approach consisted of documentary research (government reports, laws, decrees, ordinances, and constitutions), bibliographic research, data from notary registries, environmental data (through the Rural Environmental Registry System and the Environmental Licensing System), and land data (from the SIGEF - Land Management System), in addition to field research and an artistic approach that allows for the sensitization of the gaze and as a didactic instrument to engage with the interlocutor group in the field. A relationship based on personal confidentiality was established with the interlocutor group, due to the exposure of property data and the risk of conflicts with farmers in the research area. However, this relationship occurred within the context of a political group that allows itself to think about and reflect on its reality. From this, the interlocutor group debated the research results, bringing reflections on the device of race presented through data, stories, photographs, and literary tales