Unsettling Agribusiness: Indigenous Protests and Land Conflict in Brazil

By Lashandra Sullivan
University of Nebraska Press (2023)
232 pages

Review by Colin M. Snider

Lashandra Sullivan’s study of Brazilian Indigenous land occupations and agroindustry analyzes racial ideologies that marginalize Brazilian Native peoples. Sullivan situates agroindustry as just the latest in a long history of settler colonialism that has displaced and attempted to erase Indigenous lands and cultures.

Sullivan’s work is impressive as it moves from macrohistorical processes in Brazil to microlevel forms of mobilization and organization. The book’s introduction situates the historical roots of industrial agribusiness during Brazil’s military regime of 1964- 1985, the history of anti-Indigenous racism and land loss in Brazil, patterns of modern settler colonialism in Brazil, and her ethnographic methodology. The following six chapters consider agribusiness, Indigenous mobilization, and race and racism in the Mato Grosso do Sul state from a different perspective and scale.

Sullivan’s first chapter points to the tensions within Brazilian liberal democracy that agribusiness reveals, showing how notions of a universal Brazilian citizen are belied by the expansion of agroindustrial plantations that reify anti-Indian racial hierarchies. Chapter two considers the ways state policies designed to “protect” Native labor end up reinforcing racialized labor exploitation in Brazil’s interior. Chapter three shifts to Indigenous protest camps, identifying the forms and discourses of resistance they deploy while situating such movements within the broader history of agrarian labor and resistance. Chapter four returns to the plantations to analyze the ways the state, agroindustrial businesses, and farmers reconceptualized the Brazilian interior as empty, despite the presence of Indigenous peoples, in order to justify the agricultural enterprise. Chapter five returns to a microlevel approach that considers how a longer history of colonization and dislocation led to violence and resistance in the present. Chapter six provides a compelling critical analysis of the ways culture is a double-edged sword that both enables and limits concepts of Indigeneity and land use in Brazil.

There is much to praise in Sullivan’s work. She deftly moves between the micro and the macro to position agribusiness as a modern form of Indigenous displacement and attempted erasure, while showing how Native peoples have adapted rural resistance strategies to their own demands for access to their historic lands. Her consideration of anti-Indian racism and its manifestations within local communities provides a powerful reminder of how everyday actors contribute to and perpetuate broader institutional forms of racism. She compellingly suggests appeals to land rights for cultural preservation are valuable but also often reinforce a monolithic and anachronistic image of Indigeneity as unmodern, denying Indigenous mobility and diversity in the 21st century. Given the role of agroindustry and how the relations between race, labor, and class operate elsewhere in rural Brazil, it would be nice to see the book’s implications for the country more generally. But overall, this is an original, thoughtful, and important ethnographic contribution.

Colin M. Snider, PhD is an associate professor of Latin American history and chair of the Department of History at the University of Texas at Tyler.