Acker, Antoine

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Zurich Open Repository andArchiveUniversity of ZurichMain LibraryStrickhofstrasse 39CH-8057 Zurichwww.zora.uzh.chYear: 2017Review of: Jeremy M. Campbell, Conjuring property: speculation andenvironmental futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 2015)Acker, AntoineOther titles: Acker on Campbell, ’Conjuring property: speculation and environmental futures in theBrazilian Amazon’; Modeling time in the AmazonPosted at the Zurich Open Repository and Archive, University of ZurichZORA URL: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-203772Scientific Publication in Electronic FormPublished Version  The following work is licensed under a Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License.Originally published at:Acker, Antoine (2017). Review of: Jeremy M. Campbell, Conjuring property: speculation and environ-mental futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015). . Jeremy M. Campbell. Conjuring Property: Speculation and Environmental Futures inthe Brazilian Amazon. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015. xx + 231 pp.$30.00, paper, ISBN 978-0-295-99529-8.  Reviewed by Antoine Acker Published on H-LatAm (February, 2017) Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University) In an article published in 1996, the Braziliansociologist  José  de Souza Martins  “unmasked”  adocument about the conquest of the territory ofthe Goitacá Indians, presumably dating from theseventeenth  century.[1]  The  piece,  which  SouzaMartins suggested had been actually produced inthe  nineteenth  century  to  forge  a  proof  thatwould support a land property claim, had turnedinto a major source for many a historical analysisof  colonial  Brazil.  It  is  not  unlikely  that  today’smost consensual accounts of the country’s historymight  be  partly  based  on  other  such  forgedsources. Indeed, the practice of “grilagem”--origi‐nally, forging a land title and letting grilos (crick‐ets)  defecate on and chew it  to make the paperlook old and thus authentic--has been common inBrazil since at least the end of the colonial era. How property has been fabricated by actorsfrom different social categories in the absence ofa comprehensive and efficiently centralized landregister is the topic of the anthropologist JeremyM. Campbell’s latest book on the Brazilian Ama‐zon. Just as was shown by Souza Martins’s revela‐tion, Campbell evidences how “conjuring proper‐ty” fundamentally amounts to constructing specif‐ic accounts of the past that are tailored to serveprivate interests. But in order to be granted legiti‐macy, these accounts also inscribe themselves incollective visions for the future. In that sense, illic‐it property making is associated with the defini‐tion of the Amazon as a pristine forest to be con‐quered  by  brave  settlers,  staging  themselves  as“pioneers” of a national epopee of economic de‐velopment. Campbell’s study is the result of forty monthsof observing, becoming familiar with, and inter‐viewing  settlers  in  and  around  the  village  ofCastelo  de  Sonhos,  located  along  the  famouslydysfunctional BR-163 highway, in the southwest‐ern corner of the Amazonian state of Pará.[2] Itanalyzes the long-term, but at the same time high‐ly  flexible strategies of  these settlers,  mostly ar‐rived in or after the 1990s, to secure land tenure.The social context is one of very marked hierar‐chies  going  from  subsistence  farmers  (the  pe‐quenos)  to  well-organized  ranchers  practicingland-grabbing to follow a logic of capitalist accu‐mulation (the  grandes).  Although pequenos  andgrandes  deploy  their  strategies  in  the  quasi-ab‐sence of state government, they constantly embedtheir property claims within the norms accordingto which they expect the state to rule in the fu‐ture. In  this  regard,  Campbell’s  book,  althoughmainly based on fieldwork conducted in the twen‐ty-first  century,  is  in  dialogue  with  nearly  fiftyyears of Amazonian history, that is, history sincethe region entered a phase of increased politicalattention, massive deforestation, and multiplyingland  conflicts.  It  shows  how  settlers  positionthemselves in relation to the development plansdrafted  and  unsuccessfully  implemented  by  theBrazilian state since the late 1960s. Although thesecontradictory  plans  for  agrarian  modernization,capitalist investment, partial land redistribution,and intensive extraction have failed, they contin‐ue to serve as a repertoire of discourses, practices,values,  and  projects,  which  Campbell  calls  “thedevelopment  archive.”  Actors  of  modern  settle‐ment and property conflicts do more than drawfrom this archive to replace an absent central au‐thority. They were also brought to the region bythe development archive. Many grandes came tothe Amazon tempted by its speculative possibili‐ties  and by the government’s  active  steps  to  at‐tract  entrepreneurs  from  Brazil’s  South  andSoutheast.  The first  waves of  pequenos,  in turn,landed in the Amazon through big state coloniza‐tion schemes, or under the sway of the propagan‐da campaigns that presented the rain forest as a“land  without  men  for  men  without  land.”[3]Castelenses (the inhabitants of Castelo de Sonhos)are both anxious to become recognized landown‐ers while at the same time remaining haunted bythe dreams of progress that brought them to theAmazon. This combination produces a sensation,shared by most settlers, of being “before history”(p. 97). While Campbell argues that this sensationresults  from the  feeling  of  being  abandoned bythe state and “stuck” in time, one can safely saythat it is also coupled with a consensual negation,among the settlers, of any form of history prior tothem. This negation is expressed through recur‐rent assertions and clichés that belittle the abili‐ties and dignity of Indigenous people and depictthem  as  socially  useless,  or  even  obstacles  toprogress. Campbell  denies  neither the racist  vision ofthe world,  in which many settlers,  grandes,  andpequenos seem at times to be mentally stuck, northe operations of intimidation, violence, and sub‐jugation  with  which  some  of  them  (especiallygrandes) act. However, his analysis goes well be‐yond, and reflects the plurality of strategies withwhich settlers attempt to find a place for them‐selves on the local map, or sometimes even moresimply,  secure  a  lot  where  they  can  produceenough to make a living. Through concrete exam‐ples, Campbell shows the multilayered characterof property making by which actors on the Ama‐zon  “frontier”  play  with  expectations  as  theyevolve as farmers. After  a  first  chapter  that  sets  the  historicaland geographical stage for the study, chapter 2 ex‐plores grilagem as a widespread practice in theregion, used by everyone from rural trade union‐ists to large-scale landowners in order to both de‐fend and extend their  control  of  the  landscape.Grilagem,  Campbell  explains,  does  not  only  in‐volve forging and buying titles but also direct in‐terventions  on  the  landscape,  such  as  clearingand  fencing,  and  strategies  to  proletarianizehomesteaders.  Chapter  3,  which  analyzes  thescramble for the acquisition and making of prop‐erty “before” the existence of a legal framework,shows the symbolic side of this process. Campbellnames it “speculative accumulation” in the sensethat  it  consists  in  “preparing  stories,  arranginghistories,  cutting  deals,  and  projecting  confi‐dence” (p. 122) in the aim of providing a sufficientamount of (often invented) historicity for proper‐ty, to be later regularized as part of the govern‐ment-promoted push for  progress,  whether  eco‐H-Net Reviews2nomic or ecological (chapter 4). Conjuring Proper‐ty's  fifth  and  last  chapter  finally  addresses  themuch-expected question of regularization by ana‐lyzing some features and effects of the “Terra Le‐gal”  program,  an  attempt  by  the  governmentlaunched in  2009 to  regularize  the chaotic  landtenure situation of the Amazon. Although it wasframed  according  to  a  differentiated  regime  ofgranting land, which favored small settlers overbig ranchers, grandes were legally and materiallybetter  equipped  to  take  advantage  of  the  newrules.  Taking into account the fact  that  the pro‐gram leaves out ruling for all land subject to mul‐tiple property claims, Campbell's interpretation isthat Terra Legal “obscures as much as it reveals”(p.  174).  Although  Campbell  does  not  say  it  asbluntly, the reader is left with the impression thatthe  sheer  amount  of  paperwork,  manipulation,stories,  superposed claims, and competing inter‐ventions into the landscape has made it definitelyimpossible to distinguish the illicit from the licit. Without losing sight of Castelo de Sonhos, thelast chapter on Terra Legal as well as the book’sconclusion provide a much-sought Amazon-wideperspective. By repeatedly resorting to a vocabu‐lary that refers to the whole region, especially intopic  sentences,  the  book  rhetorically  suggeststhat what happens in Castelo is, at least to someextent, valid for the whole Amazon. Having stud‐ied an opposite corner of the state of Pará myself,I do recognize many common traits that frame lo‐cal land conflicts there and in Castelo. That said,Campbell  ought  to  explain  more  concretelywhether and why Castelo  can be considered anemblematic case. There is not one, but many Ama‐zons,  and I  missed  Campbell’s  reflection  on theimplications  of  primarily  defining Castelo  as  an“Amazonian” locality, especially in view of the im‐pressive precision with which the other key con‐cepts of the book are defined. Our perception ofthe Amazon as a united space is a rather recentand fragile construction. Until the nineteenth cen‐tury, the use of the term was confined to designat‐ing a river or at best a river system, and even to‐day it stands in association with multiple mean‐ings,  that  are  alternatively  geographic,  adminis‐trative, cultural, or biological. Besides, the idea ofan Amazonian “whole” results in part from globalrepresentations, such as the Amazon’s rise to a en‐vironmental  symbol since the late 1970s,  whoserelevance for studying local  settlers’  lives mightbe  important,  but  still  has  to  be  demonstrated.How does Campbell’s Amazon relate to these rep‐resentations and what is the Amazonian unity towhich his  book implicitly  refers?  A deeper con‐frontation  with  colonial  and  nineteenth-centuryhistory in the first chapter might have been help‐ful to inform the reader in this regard. The reasonI raise this point is that aside from its contributionto the anthropology of property, Campbell’s bookis  a  real  novelty  for  studies  on  the  Amazon.  Ithelps rethink the region’s identity and history byshowing the agency of small and mid-range set‐tlers with unprecedented precision and evidence. For decades, literature on the Amazon restedalmost entirely on dependent development theo‐ries and the idea that everything, from deforesta‐tion  to  labor  exploitation,  was  explainablethrough relations of production. This analysis es‐pecially underlined the role of the state in super‐vising  the  process  of  capitalist  accumulation bymaking ground for big farmers to despoil subsis‐tence peasants and expel Indians. Of course, thisdimension is relevant, and Campbell, when neces‐sary, makes skillful use of Marx’s theories to ana‐lyze the link between property making and work‐ers’  alienation  as  well  as  the  transformation  ofproperty into capital. Yet he also challenges certi‐tudes about actors and categories to which schol‐ars have attributed coherent and systematic his‐torical  functions  a  priori  and  without  sufficientevidence. The state, for example, is by no means asolid  and  rational  agent  in  Conjuring  Property,while the commonly assumed central position ofpowerful  agribusiness  tends  to  fade  behind  thecomplex  game  of  competition,  exploitation,  andcircumstantial  alliances  between  pequenos  andgrandes. Likewise, property is not the clear juridi‐H-Net Reviews3cal concept we assumed it to be, but a product re‐sulting from the crossing of many variables, suchas landscape transformation,  storytelling,  collec‐tive identities,  individual projects and, not least,fraud. Conjuring Property is the latest of a series ofrecent  important  works  that  have  considerablysharpened scholarly views of the Amazon, includ‐ing Greg Grandin’s Fordlandia (2009), Susanna B.Hecht’s Scramble for the Amazon (2013), and SethGarfield’s In Search of the Amazon (2014). Put to‐gether, these contributions show that the Amazonis the product of many imaginaries of the relationbetween humans and nature. Campbell’s particu‐larity and strength, in this bibliographical body, isto show that the making of the modern Amazon isabout  modeling  not  only  space,  but  also,  andmaybe even more importantly, time, of which hisbook  articulates  three  dimensions.  The  first  isabout interpreting the past or forging it. The sec‐ond concerns living in a “long transitive moment”(in this case, living in the expectation of the stateto act),  which is a crucial and too-rarely-studiedposition  in  history.[4]  The  third  dimension  isabout preparing for the much-wanted “progress”,or what people see as history yet to be written.Conjuring Property, a work of great interdiscipli‐nary value, is thus a particularly important bookfor historians. Notes [1].  José  de  Souza  Martins,  “Um documentofalso  sobre  a  conquista  do  território  dos  índiosGoitacá,” Revista de Antropologia 39, no. 2 (1996):141-163. I am grateful to Diogo Cabral for this ref‐erence. [2]. On the BR-163 as a historical disaster seeMaurício  Torres,  ed.,  Amazônia  revelada:  osdescaminhos ao longo da BR-163 (Brasília: CNPq,2005). [3]. Probably to avoid writing in a genderedlanguage, Campbell translated this famous imageby  former  military  president  Emílio  GarrastazuMédici (1969-74) as “land without people to peo‐ple  without  land” (p.  32).  However,  the originaldeclaration clearly says homens (men), and statepropaganda regarding the Amazon did use to as‐sign women to a passive and servile position. [4].  For another valuable work on the Ama‐zon problematizing transition and expectation asa historical state, see Laurent Vidal, Mazagão, laville  qui  traversa  l'Atlantique,  du  Maroc  àl'Amazonie (1769-1783) (Paris: Aubier, 2005). H-Net Reviews4If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, athttps://networks.h-net.org/h-latam Citation: Antoine Acker. Review of Campbell, Jeremy M. Conjuring Property: Speculation andEnvironmental Futures in the Brazilian Amazon. H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. February, 2017. URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=47644  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-NoDerivative Works 3.0 United States License. H-Net Reviews5

Review of: Jeremy M. Campbell, Conjuring property: speculation and environmental futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015)

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Review of: Jeremy M. Campbell, Conjuring property: speculation and environmental futures in the Brazilian Amazon (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015)

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