O Território de Uso Comum amazônico

Pluriverso ou universalidade insurgente?

Bibliographic Data

ID24232164
AuthorsJames Angus Fraser (0000-0003-0718-6832), Maurício Torres (0000-0003-3579-6486), Luke Parry (0000-0003-0330-9516), Wilde Itaborahy (0009-0009-1838-8465), Victoria Frausin (0009-0007-6133-6594), Natalia Ribas Guerrero (0000-0003-3349-4273), Josinaldo Aleixo (0009-0000-7159-7623)
Year2026
Issue65
Pages27-70
Publication date2026-10-09
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAntípoda Revista de Antropología y Arqueología (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2011-4273 • E-ISSN: 1900-5407
PublisherUniversidad de los Andes (PUBLISHER • VE)
DOI10.7440/antipoda.13782
OpenAlexW7221180843
LanguagePT
References cited55

This article examines Brazil’s first Common-Use Territory (TUC), established in the Amazon, as a significant innovation in territorial rights that speaks to debates on the commons, the pluriverse, and insurgent universality. Scholarship has emphasised plural ontologies and forms of recognition grounded in identity. We propose instead that the Río Manicoré TUC is best understood in terms of insurgent universality: a women-led popular struggle in which concretely universal claims emerge from the defence of collective ways of life, rather than from abstract rights or fixed identities. Drawing on Karen Ng’s interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s concept of concrete universal humanity, we understand the TUC as an expression of existential freedom rooted in forest peoples’ common-use practices. Our ethnographic and historical analysis traces a longer trajectory of Amazonian resistance to capitalist expropriation, stretching from the early twentieth-century rebellion against Colonel Lindoso to contemporary mobilisations against logging, land grabbing, and industrial extractivism. Unlike state-managed conservation and agrarian reform units, the TUC centres forest peoples’ rights to traditionally occupied territories and collective self-government. In doing so, it moves beyond the exclusions associated with exclusive identity categories such as Indigenous and quilombola lands. By bringing diverse forest peoples together around shared common-use practices, this insurgent, universal model affirms their autonomy while resisting capitalist encroachment and state fragmentation. The Río Manicoré TUC also shows how popular struggles can transform legal frameworks. Since its recognition in 2022, twelve additional TUCs are now under consideration, and in 2025 the federal government adopted the model as a means of regularising traditionally occupied lands in undesignated forests across Brazil’s Legal Amazon. Serious challenges nevertheless remain. State institutions have failed to protect the TUC against illegal logging and land grabbing. Even so, the institutionalisation of insurgent universality through the TUC has both conceptual and practical relevance for the defence of collective rights in forest conservation worldwide. It points towards a planetary politics of the commons capable of reconciling social justice with environmental governance through the shared stewardship of land, water, and life.

Amazon · collective self-government · Commons · extractivism · forest conservation · forest dwellers · Frantz Fanon · Illegal logging · Land grabbing · Legal Amazon · pluriverse · popular struggles · state fragmentation · territorial rights · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management · Indigenous Cultures and History · Land Rights and Reforms