IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/ecanth/v9y2022i2p349-360.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Merchants of the north: Infrastructure and indebtedness along Brazil's Amazon estuary

Author

Listed:
  • Matthew Abel

Abstract

Drawing on fieldwork with riverine householders in the Amazonian municipality of Abaetetuba, this article recounts an ongoing struggle against the construction of a fluvial grain terminal by Cargill, the global grain‐trading giant. Over the past two decades, grain‐trading firms have engaged in a publicly subsidized bidding war to expand export infrastructure in the Amazon, harnessing the world's largest river system to flush agricultural commodities on the global market. The so‐called Northern Arc consists of a regional network of private grain terminals, ports, roads, and railways connecting disparate places within a broader landscape of value. This article overlays ethnography with historical analysis to examine the confrontation between a regional project of commodity chain integration and a set of valuations derived from the long‐standing role of commodity exchange in the Amazon. I suggest that the Northern Arc articulates with the sociological legacy of the aviamento: a system of debt‐peonage that structured the circulation of commodities in the basin during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By connecting local understandings of power, circulation, and authority to a new structural position within the global food system, the Northern Arc has galvanized old antagonisms and reflects the history of social conflict along the Amazon estuary.

Suggested Citation

  • Matthew Abel, 2022. "Merchants of the north: Infrastructure and indebtedness along Brazil's Amazon estuary," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 349-360, June.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:9:y:2022:i:2:p:349-360
    DOI: 10.1002/sea2.12245
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/sea2.12245
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/sea2.12245?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Andrew L. Ofstehage, 2018. "Financialization of work, value, and social organization among transnational soy farmers in the Brazilian Cerrado," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 274-285, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Andrea Rissing & Bradley M. Jones, 2022. "Landscapes of value," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 193-206, June.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bear, Laura, 2020. "Speculation: a political economy of technologies of imagination," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 103433, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    2. Tariq Rahman, 2022. "Landscapes of rizq: Mediating worldly and otherworldly in Lahore's speculative real estate market," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(2), pages 297-308, June.
    3. Aaron Z. Pitluck & Fabio Mattioli & Daniel Souleles, 2018. "Finance beyond function: Three causal explanations for financialization," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 5(2), pages 157-171, June.
    4. Ipshita Ghosh, 2020. "Investment, value, and the making of entrepreneurship in India," Economic Anthropology, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 7(2), pages 190-202, June.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecanth:v:9:y:2022:i:2:p:349-360. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/journal.asp?ref=2330-4847 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.