Territories at stake: Tupinambá de Olivença indigenous land and biodiversity conservation in the Atlantic Rainforest in Southern Bahia.
Biodiversity Conservation; Ethnic Emergencies; Territorialities.
Biodiversity conservation is currently an important topic of debate and its elaboration contains a wide range of approaches and perspectives on the best ways to achieve it. In this thesis we seek to recognize some dimensions of the relations between knowledge and power that cross the theme of biodiversity conservation, especially in issues related to the inclusion / exclusion of populations living in and around Protected Areas. Operating trough Foucauldian tools, we analise, the historical processes of constitution of different interrelated themes such as biodiversity conservation, indigenous emergencies in northeastearn Brazil and the struggles for territory in contemporary Latin America, trying to recognize the links between the forms of legitimation and enunciation of the discourses and the actions practiced by the actors. Based on these elaborations, we carry out an analysis of environmental narratives in a specific territorial context, in order to recognize concrete approximations and distances between different discourses on biodiversity conservation. The geographic settings of this research is conformed by the areas administratively delimited by the Brazilian State as Tupinambá Indigenous Land of Olivença, and two Protected Areas, the Una Biological Reserve (REBIO UNA) and the Una Wildlife Refuge (REVIS UNA), both Federal Conservation Units. By exploring in more detail the production of these territories, we gradually open the scope from the perspective of its administrative dimension. In the case of the indigenous land, following the indigenous territorial trajectories, we try to recognize the actions in the present, and updates of the past, that are part of the Tupinambá de Olivença ethnic emergency process. In the case of PAs, we focus on the articulations and social legitimations that underpinned the installation of these conservation territories as well as other actions for conservation, highlighting the role of the NGO Institute of Socio-environmental Studies of the South of Bahia (IESB) and partner institutions in this process. Accompanying authors of Political Ecology, we present the causes and solutions proposed for the shared problem of the degradation of biodiversity in two environmental narratives, which we will call ‘indigenous’ and ‘environmental’. Regarding the indigenous narrative, aspects related to the ethnic emergence of the Tupinambá of Olivença are addressed, and the central of ‘retakes’ and struggles for demarcation in the constitution of practices and discourses linked to the ‘protection of nature’. On the other hand, the set of discursive materials that conform the environmental narrative highlights the scientific character of the justifications and forms of legitimation of the proposed solutions, in it’s relations to what has been established as a ‘bioregional paradigm’. Although it has been possible to recognize an asymmetrical alterity between the narratives, we emphasize that both challenge dominant perspectives that lack an environmental sensitivity on the management of land and natural resources, even if in different measures and in different ways.