Amazonian quilombolas and the technopolitics of aluminum

Abstract

By drawing on field research, this article suggests that the impact of an aluminum mine on its neighboring quilombola communities can be analyzed from at least two interconnected technopolitical scales. The first relates to the anatomo-political discipline that the mine imposes over the body of its workers as well as to its inhibiting effect on the traditional body techniques of the populations that surround it. The second stresses a mine’s ecological governmentality that naturalizes the Amazonian environment and downplays quilombola sociotechnical infrastructures. The term technopolitics is proposed as a critical reading on biopolitics that ethnographically highlights the connection between the individual body and the environment as example of the entanglement of the bios (political, qualified life) and a technologically affected zoe, or “bare life”.