Techno-ecography of Frontier Industrial Landscape

A Case Study of Property Fabrication by Amazonian Colonists

Abstract

Property fabrication, as an attempt to create private property or its equivalent entity, is a technology indispensable for frontier industrial maneuvers. Envisaging the extension of land cover reflecting human activity as "landscape," the present conditions of the Amazonian ground surface, upon which geometric patterns of property have been deeply inscribed, can be perceived as a "frontier industrial landscape"： a geospheric configuration on the earth of the "Anthropocene." This study is built on a methodology of "techno-ecography" to demonstrate mechanisms through which this specific landscape emerges. Technological and ecological descriptions are inextricably combined in this approach because property fabrication unfolds in accordance with biophysical characteristics of the humid tropics in which anthropogenic intervention causes sequential alterations. The case study examines agrarian settlements informally constructed by immigrant colonists in the upper Xingu basin and elaborates the evolvement of their property-based projects multiply operated through agro-extractivism, production of semiotic artifacts, and bureaucratic entrepreneurship. This investigation traces chains of "translation" among these projects and the administrative/juridical institutions schematized to consolidate property regime.