Amazonian peasant livelihood differentiation as mutuality-market dialectics

Abstract

Economistic approaches to the study of peasant livelihoods have considerable academic and policy influence, yet, we argue, perpetuate a partial misunderstanding -often reducing peasant livelihood to the management of capital assets by rational actors. In this paper, we propose to revitalize the original heterodox spirit of the sustainable livelihoods framework by drawing on Stephen Gudeman's work on the dialectic between use values and mutuality on the one hand, and exchange values and the market on the other. We use this approach to examine how historically divergent mutuality-market dialectics in different Amazonian regions have shaped greater prominence of either extractivism or agriculture in current livelihoods. We conclude that an approach centered on the mutuality-market dialectic is of considerable utility in revealing the role of economic histories in shaping differential peasant livelihoods in tropical forests. More generally, it has considerable potential to contribute to a much-needed re-pluralization of approaches to livelihood in academia and policy.

Research On Degrowth

“…More common today are socio-economies in which practices and meanings oriented toward expanding profit have been incorporated into older systems oriented toward reproduction of families and communities. Fraser et al (92) compare Amazonian livelihood systems in which smallholders engage in extractivist activities for cash, variously balanced with agroforestry for subsistence, and mutuality coexists in complementarity and tension with exchange values and market mechanisms. Guttmann-Bond (93) reviews engineering and agricultural technologies adapted to sustain populations over thousands of years with stable resource use: raised fields in Bolivia and Mexico, water-harvesting in the Negev desert, terraces in Yemen, and intercropping around the world.…”

Capítulo 10: Interconexiones críticas entre la diversidad cultural y biológica de los pueblos y ecosistemas Amazónicos

“…Like Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and other Amazonian communities engage in multisited rural-urban livelihoods that are finely tuned to diverse ecosystems as well as seasonal fluc-tuation in river levels, especially in the flooded varzea forests along the main channel of the Amazon and its larger tributaries (Adams et al 2009, see Chapter 14). Referred to variably as caboclos, mestizos, peasants, or "riverine" dwellers (ribeirinhos), these populations have intensively participated in regional, national, and global markets through extraction, processing, and commercialization of forest resources (Fraser et al 2018). Since the colonization of the Amazon associated with different economic cycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, IPLCs' livelihoods have been connected to global consumption and technological developments, as well as to national and regional fluctuations in demand for wage labor (Fraser et al 2018;Chapters 11 and 14).…”

“…Referred to variably as caboclos, mestizos, peasants, or "riverine" dwellers (ribeirinhos), these populations have intensively participated in regional, national, and global markets through extraction, processing, and commercialization of forest resources (Fraser et al 2018). Since the colonization of the Amazon associated with different economic cycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, IPLCs' livelihoods have been connected to global consumption and technological developments, as well as to national and regional fluctuations in demand for wage labor (Fraser et al 2018;Chapters 11 and 14). Geographer Bertha Becker (in memoriam) refers to the Amazon as an "urbanized forest," describing urbanization processes that began in the 1980s triggered by the construction of railroads, highways, ports, and the vehiculation of urban society (Becker 2005).…”

Capacidades locales para el desarrollo de los territorios rurales: un debate vigente

“…En América Latina, los trabajos de Kühn y Waquil (2015), Freitas et al (2016), Fraser et al (2018 y Matte y Waquil (2018) aportan elementos de análisis en esa dirección. Las investigaciones problematizan, a través de casos empíricos localizados principalmente en Brasil, la manera en que formas alternativas de organización social lograron movilizarse en contra de intervenciones gubernamentales impopulares, hasta lograr constituirse como contra narrativas del discurso oficial del desarrollo por medio de la participación de los actores locales.…”