Abstract
The Brazilian state has been advancing its territorialization of ungoverned peripheral terrains through the procedure of “property regularization,” which permits claimants to acquire hereto unclaimed and untouched land and resources as public domain. Conversely, local subjects consider the state-owned property as entities to be possessed, subsequently regularized, and finally appropriated as private property. To understand the actual condition of territorialization in present Amazonia, this paper investigates the mechanism of property regularization, not through the state’s perspective of administrative rationality, but through the local knowledge of colonists encountering this intervention.
The case study focuses on an agrarian settlement which was established in the 1990s in the Northwestern Region in the Federal State of Mato Grosso. Brazilian agrarian reform has a peculiar feature in its ambiguous nature: the endeavor to improve drastic social disparity without modifying the existing structure of land tenure. This implies that the policy has been implemented as de facto “colonization” over a half century, promoting consolidation of private property across the state’s peripheral territory.
This study analyzes the land-use system in the settlement in terms of interplay between the state’s property regularization and the settlers’ spontaneous colonization. The latter is a popular movement conducted informally throughout history, interacting with official colonization projects by public or private bodies. It traces the process in which the informally acquired lands are refigured in accordance with the official scheme of the project, adequately maintained with possessory right, and consequently regularized as private property. Agrarian reform has been inescapably incorporated into the vortex of the popular movement shortly after its implementation.
The Amazonian frontier rapidly expands through organic collaboration amongst the regularization validated by legislative, administrative and judicial authorities and the spontaneous colonization advanced by various types of colonists. Through ethnographic description of colonists’ everyday life experience, this study examines the dynamics in which this magnificent project develops across the horizon of contemporary Amazonia.
