Abstract
Based on ethnographic research in the Lower Tapajós, Brazil, this talk begins with Indigenous and riverine critiques of dams, ports, waterways, and logistics corridors as “monstrous projects”: infrastructures whose effects exceed planning and control. It follows how new infrastructures built to respond to global demand for cheap protein actively produce the agricultural frontier by creating incentives for forest conversion. The talk examines how these infrastructures reshape multispecies relations by fragmenting forests, favoring generalist rodent species, and intensifying forms of human exposure through which hantavirus transmission becomes more likely. In dialogue with infrastructure studies, multispecies anthropology, and disease ecology, it reflects on the concept of “diseased landscapes” to understand viral contamination as inseparable from deforestation, commodity circulation, and the expansion of Amazonian agricultural frontiers. It also situates these pathogenic ecologies in contrast to Indigenous struggles for territory and the defense of life in the Tapajós region. This talk draws on a work-in-progress chapter from a book project on ecologies of destruction and resistance in the Tapajós.
Bio
Fábio Zuker is an environmental anthropologist on the intersections of industrial agriculture and health in the Brazilian Amazon. He is a researcher at the Pensi Institute/José Luiz Setúbal Foundation and the University of São Paulo, and a Visiting Global Research Associate at the Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation, Kellogg College, University of Oxford. He is currently developing a book manuscript under contract with the University of California Press and is the author of The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon (Milkweed Editions); his academic work has appeared in Science, Environment and Planning E, and Mana.
