Os conflicts around the pirarucu

Researcher reconnects with his origins by portraying, in theory, clashes between managers and community invaders in the Amazon

Os conflicts around the pirarucu

Researcher reconnects with his origins by portraying, in theory, clashes between managers and community invaders in the Amazon

“People think a lot about the Amazon, but they don’t think with the Amazon, right?” asks anthropologist Rônisson de Oliveira. Born in São Paulo do Coraci, a community in the central region of the state of Amazonas, the researcher believes that many public policies do not take into account the complexity of the Amazon territory. Taking this concern to the center of his doctoral thesis, defended in the Postgraduate Program in Social Sciences of the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp, Oliveira examines the conflicts surrounding pirarucu fishing in his hometown.

In the territory, located in the Amanã Sustainable Development Reserve (RDS Amanã), conservation plans, initiated in the early 2000s, changed the relationship between the pirarucu and fishermen. Some of them organized themselves around management, adhering to rules aimed at conserving this species. Another group did not do the same, losing the right to fish legally. Given this scenario, one of the motivations of the study, supervised by IFCH professor Mauro Almeida, was to understand how a public policy affects the relationships of a community. “We focus a lot on the result, but not on the impact [of these measures] on people’s lives. We need to delve into this. Not to end [the conservation policy], but to strengthen it.”

The return to Coraci

At the age of 11, Oliveira left São Paulo do Coraci for the city of Tefé (AM) to continue his studies. At the time, it was only possible to attend elementary school up to the fourth grade in the community. In Tefé, the student at the time was afraid to say that he belonged to a traditional community. After 20 years of a career focused on studies, the anthropologist says he no longer feels any need to hide his origins. His thesis made him reconnect with his homeland.

“When I was a teenager, I didn’t even say I was from there. Not today. Today I recognize myself as a Coraci native. Wherever I go and where I can say I’m from Coraci, I will. This thesis makes me return to Coraci in many ways: returning to my mother’s story, my father’s story, and seeing how powerful their struggle is.”

For the anthropologist, formal education provided a change of direction. “Studying was very important to me. It was the reason I left and I embraced it with great intensity because I saw a possibility for transformation.”

While in the community, Oliveira preferred to play in the river or in the fields with his cousins ​​and siblings. In the city, he returned to the dynamics of school. “In Tefé, life changes. It’s a city. You become much more isolated. So I focused a lot on my studies. I was always very shy, so one of the ways out of school was precisely to be an intelligent person. For me, you need to understand how school works, and I understood that very early on. That’s when you start to be seen as an intelligent person.”

After high school, Oliveira enrolled in a history course at the Amazonas State University (UEA), during which time she first became involved in research activities. She then completed a master's degree in sociology at the Federal University of Amazonas (Ufam), with a dissertation on gender issues. A year later, she joined the Mamirauá Institute, a social organization (SO) supported and supervised by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (MCTI) that works with research focused on natural resource management and social development.

Through the institute, the anthropologist returned to Coraci as a researcher, working on a survey of the traditional practices of fishermen in the region. During this period, he noticed a conflict in the community between those who manage the pirarucu and those who do not, who are considered invaders. “I was bothered by this division. I thought: 'Why are people divided? Why are they fighting and giving it so much importance?'” This was the beginning of a change in the focus of his research.

Until 1998, when the Amanã Reserve was created, the invaders were fishermen from outside. “Until then, there were no such invaders from inside. Boats, the ‘fishmongers’, as we call them here, came from other regions. They came from Manaus and even from Pará. They were large boats, with materials that didn’t even exist here, in Coraci. These were the invaders until then. When the conservation unit was created, the entry of invaders from outside began to be blocked, at the end of the 90s. Until, in 2001, they could no longer enter.”

In 1996, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA) banned the capture of pirarucu due to the decline in the species' population, a phenomenon associated with indiscriminate fishing. Two years later, the management plan began to be implemented, which established rules, such as a quota of adult fish for capture, standardization of storage and transportation, and the delimitation of fishing areas.

In Coraci, the managers organized themselves into the Coraci Sector Producers Association (APSC). “From then on, invaders from within began to appear, because not all men joined the group,” says Oliveira. 

According to the study, there are many reasons for not adhering to management practices or for abandoning them, including the difficulty of dealing with bureaucracy and religious issues. However, this does not mean that the invaders are opposed to conservation measures in the area, including those related to the pirarucu. “These people still have a commitment to the territory because they live there. Even if they do not comply with all the agreements that have to be fulfilled, they do not want the territory to disappear.”

Invaders and managers

To delve deeper into the conflict between invaders and managers, Oliveira traveled to Coraci ten times, staying in the region for a minimum of 5 to a maximum of 30 days. “Can you guarantee it?”, they asked him when he participated in activities on the farms or in the lakes, wanting to know if he would be able to stay in the community. Upon returning, there was a process of adaptation. “I always said that I would guarantee it, but to really guarantee it, it was essential to experiment, relive and readapt. Thus, I got a fever after touching a tree infested with tachi, a type of ant that lives in certain trees in the region. The same thing happened when I was stung by a caba, a nocturnal wasp,” he reports in his thesis, which was funded by the São Paulo Research Foundation (Fapesp).

During his stay in São Paulo do Coraci, he conducted 19 interviews, participated in ten meetings and analyzed 53 APSC minutes (written from 2001 to 2010), 18 reports from the Coraci community promoter (dated from 2001 to 2002) and 90 documents from the Mamirauá Institute. In addition, he participated in management activities with fishermen.

Despite the difficulties faced in the readaptation process, the fact that he was in a familiar environment helped with the research, since Oliveira had access to conversation circles, even the most informal ones. The main difficulty was communicating with the group of invaders, also because this group does not recognize itself as such.

“They don’t see themselves as invaders. This is one of the first points they made a point of making: they know they are categorized as invaders, but they don’t accept it because there is a lot of stigma,” he said.

Despite the difficulty in maintaining contact with this group, Oliveira, while wandering around Coraci, heard an important story that helped him understand these people. The anthropologist hitched a ride on a boat with a councilman who needed to stop for a meeting in the Ebenézer community – this community broke away from Coraci in 2007 to seek recognition as an indigenous territory. There, during lunch, a person who did not know him said: “I agree with the invaders because no one here has a farm with a nursery, around here, everything belongs to God. These guys [the invaders] have the right to take it away.”

According to Oliveira, his frankness proved to be essential for him to understand one of the reasons justifying the invasions. “He was not shy about speaking. I don’t judge whether it’s right or wrong. He said what he was thinking. And, for me, it was extremely important for him to have this position because it may also be a collective position. But people won’t talk about this to me, saying that the fish is natural and that, therefore, everyone has the right to take it.”

Religious concepts are also among the issues investigated by Oliveira in interviews with evangelical and Catholic leaders. According to one of his hypotheses, while Catholics in Coraci are largely committed to the ideal of the common good and environmental conservation, evangelical Protestants are less so. In his interactions, the researcher says, he has often heard Catholics accuse evangelicals of following the philosophy that “what God left behind never ends.” Therefore, for these people, there would be no need to preserve nature. Furthermore, he found that most evangelical men are not part of the management group.

However, in the interviews conducted, there was no record of this type of opinion, perhaps because the author of the thesis has a family relationship with leaders linked to management, as Oliveira himself suggests. In addition, “[evangelicals] carry several negative stigmas, including in relation to conservation and management of resources. So they have a lot of difficulty approaching the subject, which is very sensitive for them.”

Ties prevail

Debates surrounding the invasion and management rules are sometimes heated. One of the cases narrated by the anthropologist concerns a fisherman who stopped participating in the association's activities for more than six months and was therefore expelled after getting involved in arguments at a meeting.

There are also cases where the fisherman decides to leave the association on his own. One of the interviewees, for example, told Oliveira that he left due to the excessive bureaucracy involved in the group's operation.

Discussions also occur among the fish handlers themselves. In his thesis, the anthropologist cites an accusation made between colleagues. “You walk around with a harpoon armed in your canoe. I’m not saying that you harpoon pirarucu, but I’ve seen you walk around with a harpoon armed,” said one fisherman to another, implying that his colleague was fishing for pirarucu outside of the management guidelines.

However, even the toughest clashes, says Oliveria, end up cooling down due to family and neighborhood relationships. “Sometimes things seem like they’re going to explode and create a huge mess and that no one will be able to talk to each other anymore. Sometimes, there really are very strong clashes, but they gradually dissolve due to other connections, permeated by this relationship of family and neighborhood and also by dependence, because people depend on each other because they are in that territory,” he summarizes.