Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Race and Space : The Politics of Inequality at Brazil's Satellite Launch Center

Contemporary Brazil seems riven by paradoxes.  The nation is heralded internationally for  its economic growth and reduction in inequality; yet Brazil is also convulsed by conflict over inequality, race, governance, and the national place in global hierarchies.  This ethnographic study of the three-decade-old strife that surrounds Brazil's Air Force controlled spaceport—a hugely ambitious technopolitical undertaking in one of Brazil’s poorest regions—sheds light on how these conflicts have long developed.  The equatorial spaceport stands at the center of multiple conflicting projects of social and material transformation, each aimed at redressing inequality, though on very different scales.  One project envisions the expansion of an Air Force-controlled spaceport, and the transformation of Brazil into a world technomilitary power.  Another project emphasizes civilian and commercial launch programs, in order to leverage the gravitational advantages of the equatorial base for profit in the international launching market.  Yet another project is concerned not with international inequalities, but Brazil’s internal inequalities of class and race.  Mobilizing as escaped-slave descended communities, (remanescentes das comunidades dos quilombos), local villagers (and their allies) aim to resist the expansion of the base and to win the villagers rights of citizenship and wellbeing long denied them.  Through long-term ethnography among the activists, villagers, soldiers and scientists around the spaceport, this study analyses the changing politics of inequality in Brazil and traces some of the roots of Brazil’s contemporary protest movements.

Sean T. Mitchell, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is assistant professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, Newark.  His ethnographically-based work focuses on the politics of inequality, particularly in Brazil.  His work also touches on science and technology studies; race and ethnicity; war and violence; governance and citizenship; social movements; and the politics of expertise.  He is coeditor of Anthropology and Global Counterinsurgency (Chicago 2010) and author of numerous articles.  He is currently completing the book manuscript, Space and Race: The Politics of Inequality at Brazil’s Satellite Launch Center.