In the beginning was the Land: The territorialization of agrarian struggles in the context of the expansion of capitalist accumulation in the Amazon

Abstract

The paper analyzes complementarities and dissonances among peasant struggles for land, most often associated with land reform and redistribution mechanisms, and the conflicts carried out by indians, quilombolas and traditional populations that struggle for maintaining and conquering territories and at the same time require that the state recognize their specific ways of being, living and producing. To do so, fieldwork was undertaken in the western region of Pará, which over the last decade has been the locus of intense land conflicts involving new areas of capitalist accumulation and the traditional and peasant populations. It could be preliminarily suggested that a demand for land does not necessarily challenge the regulations of the right to property, whereas a territorial claim evokes issues of power, identity affirmation, selfmanagement and control of natural resources that seek to establish a new territorialization