Indigeneity and political economy: Class and ethnicity of the Guarani-Kaiowa

Abstract

Ontological and identitary questions affecting indigenous peoples are discussed through an assessment of the socio-spatial trajectory of the Guarani-Kaiowa of South America, employing an analytical framework centred around land, labour and ethnicity. These enhanced politico-economic categories provide important entry points for understanding the violence and exploitation perpetrated against indigenous groups, as well as their capacity to reclaim ancestral territory lost to development. Evidence indicates that ethnicity is integral to class-based processes, given that the advance of capitalist relations both presumes and produces difference and subordination. The case study in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul demonstrates that the Guarani-Kaiowa became refugees in their own land due to ethnic differences, but at the same time their labour has underpinned the regional economy to a considerable extent through interrelated mechanisms of peasantification and proleterianisation. Trends of exploitation and alienation have intensified in recent decades due to racism and socio-spatial segregation, but the action/reaction of subordinate groups has also been reinforced through references to their ethnicity.

Corporate Power in the Bioeconomy Transition: The Policies and Politics of Conservative Ecological Modernization in Brazil

“…That includes, among others, land use policies that disproportionately benefit corporate agriculture [72,73] and lax rules on pesticide utilization suited for industrial monocultures [74]. Crucially, it also includes efforts to hinder collective land rights recognition, such as in indigenous territories that could block agribusiness expansion-as in the case of the sugarcane industry and the Guarani-Kaiowá people in Mato Grosso do Sul State [21].…”

“…That means going beyond merely investigating the use of the concept of bioeconomy as a "master narrative" [18] to also assess the practices linked to it, i.e., policies coming now under its aegis and the concrete sectors that currently represent the bioeconomy's de facto building blocks. As we shall see, while creating some environmental benefits (notably from fossil fuel replacement), and despite continuous talk of its potential for poverty alleviation and native biodiversity valorization, the Brazilian bioeconomy remains primarily anchored on large sugarcane, soy and cattle agroindustrial conglomerates-major drivers of deforestation, other ecological impacts, and social exclusion [19][20][21]. How that dominance is achieved (and its workings) needs to be understood if such a pathway is to eventually change towards sustainability.…”