Olhos da paisagem: o monoculturar nos rastros das infraestruturas de produção e circulação de commodities no Baixo Tocantins

Abstract

This dissertation proposes the concept of monoculturar to understand contemporary processes of landscape transformation associated with the expansion of infrastructures. Rather than referring to specific production systems, the term is mobilized as a verb, that is, as an activity that simplifies, fragments, and reorganizes relations, converting living territories into operational surfaces oriented toward circulation, accumulation, and disposal. The analytical focus thus shifts from the description of isolated commodity chains to the identification of a modus operandi that recurs across different contexts, operating through both visible and invisible dimensions. The research is grounded in a situated case in northeastern Pará, particularly in the Baixo Tocantins region, where the landscape emerges as a relational fabric in constant movement, articulated by rivers, tides, islands, and flows that connect people, economies, and ways of life. From this territory, the study examines how monoculturar operates by dissociating what is otherwise inseparable such as time and space, nature and culture imposing rhythms, scales, and categories that favor accumulation and control. This process produces not only spatial transformations but also affects forms of sensibility, altering how environments are perceived, inhabited, and experienced within a broader context marked by the compression of space-time. The analysis unfolds through three complementary movements: the identification of (im)material infrastructures and their inscriptions in the landscape; the examination of the legal, technical, and discursive dispositifs that enable their expansion; and the investigation of their effects on local relationalities, highlighting how monoculturar reorganizes flows, produces stocks, and structures practices of disposal. The dissertation is situated within a field of scholarship that understands landscape as the outcome of relations in continuous formation, mobilizing the notion of relationality (Escobar, 2018) as a central analytical axis to examine how worlds are produced, contested, and transformed (Vecchione Gonçalves, 2014). Within this framework, it engages with critiques of development and ecological modernization (Escobar, 2018; Shiva, 2005), understood not merely as economic projects but as dispositifs that reorganize space, time, and forms of existence by dissociating dimensions that are experienced as inseparable. In tracing these processes in the Baixo Tocantins, the study draws on approaches that foreground friction and ruination as ways of apprehending unequal encounters and their enduring traces (Tsing, 2015), as well as perspectives that unsettle the nature–society divide by recognizing the coexistence of multiple ontologies (de la Cadena, 2015; Haraway, 2016). It further incorporates contributions that conceptualize infrastructure beyond its material dimension, emphasizing its logistical, political, and affective roles in organizing flows and territories (Cowen, 2014). Methodologically, the research adopts a situated approach that refuses the hierarchization of knowledge and understands knowledge production as emerging through relations with territory. It combines the analysis of visible and invisible infrastructures (material, legal, and symbolic) with sensitive practices of observation, listening, and creation, in which photography operates both as language and method. As a contribution, the dissertation offers an expanded reading of processes of monoculturation, highlighting their effects on landscapes, temporalities, and ways of life, while proposing a displacement of perception. By conceptualizing monoculturar as a verb, the study foregrounds its continuous operation in shaping the world and points to the need to recognize and sustain forms of existence that resist its logic.