Silence, Noise, and Extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon Maria Fantinato
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Resonances of Land: Silence, Noise, and Extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon Maria Fantinato Géo de Siqueira Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Maria Fantinato Géo de Siqueira All Rights Reserved Abstract Resonances of Land: Silence, Noise, and Extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon Maria Fantinato Géo de Siqueira This dissertation investigates the role of listening and sounding in the geopolitics of extractivism, in which the Brazilian Amazon is deeply immersed, by weaving a storytelling of transformation and destruction of places in the region through the tropes of noise and silence. Extractivism here means a process of accumulation by dispossession tied to the tearing apart of places to become resources. The storytelling of this dissertation builds on ethnographic fieldwork in the state of Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, and the geopolitical testimonies of small farmers, inhabitants of riverine communities, and a social educator, as they articulate relations between the sonic and what they perceive around them, what they are losing, and what they value. I elaborate on a dialogue with and critique of acoustemology as tied to place making by attending to noise and silence as acoustic assemblages tied to modes of making, destroying, sensing, and neglecting place. In the context of radically unequal land distribution, finite land becomes a major contested ontological ground. As places clash, unequal needs of sensing reality as a shared ecosystem come to the fore. Chapter one delves into the way an educator in the Xingu region talks about the silence of the water and the loss of forest and river spirits to neoliberal megaprojects. In dialogue with her words, I explore how silence participates in an economy of extraction in which incompatible notions of nature clash while crystallized sensorial machinations of neoliberalism destroy place from a safe distance. Chapter two debates how soy monoculture farming, in the Low Amazonas Region, fabricates multiple silences as it displaces people, desertifies place, and fills the land with pesticides and mechanisms of surveillance for private property. In dialogue with the testimonies of small rural farmers, and building on my visits to the region, this chapter discusses silences in relation to the desertification and animation of place as part of the cycles of the monoculture extractive chain. The third chapter focuses on the trope of noise as tied to present and potentially changing infrastructures in a riverine community in a conservation unit in the same region. I build on what four inhabitants of this community express about the noise of motors and generators in relation to singing birds and roosters, noting how the storytelling of the relation between these sounding presences is also the storytelling of development as a threat and a promise, in a context where belonging is complexly situated in relation to state tutelage, notions of environmental protection, and NGO projects. Altogether, the storytelling of noise and silence presented in these chapters points to the complicated entanglement between modes of listening and modes of tying being, belonging, and land together, in territories of a region constantly positioned as a resource for extraction. Table of Contents List of Figures ................................................................................................................................ iii Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... vi Introduction: Sensing Place and Devastation ................................................................................. 1 0.1 Once there was a river stream .............................................................................................. 1 0.2 Listening, storytelling, and extractivism in the Amazon ..................................................... 3 0.3 The many paths, detours, and help received along the way.................................................. 4 0.4 The many birds and Marias .................................................................................................. 9 0.5 The “Amazon” .................................................................................................................... 18 0.6 Research collaborations and the research archive .............................................................. 23 0.7 Histories of listening, clashing “acoustic assemblages,” and land as contested ground..... 24 0.8 The three chapters ............................................................................................................... 33 0.9 What is your belonging? ..................................................................................................... 37 0.10 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 39 Chapter 1: “We are losing our encantados because we can’t hear them anymore”: silence, megaprojects, and politics of ecological attuning ......................................................................... 41 1.1 Belonging and the loss of the silence of the water ............................................................. 49 1.2 Silences and the question of scale ....................................................................................... 65 1.3 Conclusion: silence as presence of place and the absences generated by extractivism ...... 70 Chapter 2: “This is the beautiful that is not beautiful:” silences, monoculture, and the desertification of place in the Santareno Plateau .......................................................................... 80 i 2.1 Soy monoculture in the Santareno Plateau: deterritorialization of family farming ............ 85 2.2 Episode one: The visit to the empty soy field ..................................................................... 94 2.3 Episode two: Family agriculture—living with pesticides ................................................. 102 2.4 Episode three: The desert and the fancy neighborhood .................................................... 109 2.5 Episode four: “The beautiful that is not beautiful:” distance and closeness to the soy fields ................................................................................................................................................ 125 2.6 Conclusion: place over place, silence over silence. .......................................................... 131 2.7 “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life:” monoculture, silence, spirits and ghosts. ..................................................................................................................................... 134 Chapter 3: “The machines will replace us, it is the same as with the birds:” noises and the promises of infrastructure in a community in the Extractivist Reserve Tapajós Arapiuns ........ 137 3.1 Brief history of RESEX-Tapajós Arapiuns in the context of Conservation Units in Brazil .. ................................................................................................................................................ 147 3.2 Noisy machines, tournaments, and community infrastructure in Maripá. ........................ 154 3.3 Motors, birds, and the multiple senses of noise and replacement ..................................... 163 3.4 The promises of electricity at RESEX. ............................................................................. 174 3.5 Conclusion: the machines and the fears of replacement ................................................... 188 Conclusion: Resonances of land ................................................................................................. 192 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................ 200 ii List of Figures Figure 1: Çairé barracão (shed) in Alter do Chão during religious rite, in 2018. ......................... 13 Figure 2: Terra Rica Santarém/PA, 2017. Source: Marcos Colón & Beyond Fordlândia ............ 16 Figure 3: Amazon Basin, in relation to Latin American Countries. (Fragment from ISA: Unidades de Conservação no Brasil - https://uc.socioambiental.org/) ......................................... 19 Figure 4: “Map of the Volta Grande region of the Xingu River and locations of the Belo Monte hydropower complex and the Volta Grande Project relative to indigenous lands” (Tófoli et al. 2017: 130). .................................................................................................................................... 52 Figure 5: The Xingu River before and after Bello Monte dam construction. Images by NASA/USGS, from MAAP .......................................................................................................... 56 Figure 6: “Map showing the extensive deforestation occurring in the northern part of Mato Grosso between 1986 and 2016. In just 40 years, the advance of agribusiness has radically reduced forest coverage.” (by Mauricio Torres in Torres and Branford 2017). ........................... 79 Figure 7: “Map showing the extensive deforestation occurring in the northern part of Mato Grosso between 1986 and 2016. In just 40 years, the advance of agribusiness has radically reduced forest coverage.” (by Mauricio Torres in Torres and Branford