Julia F. Sauma

Julia F. Sauma is Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work investigates how collective life is maintained within and against extractive relations, structures and institutions in Brazil and the UK. Julia's auto-ethnographic work explores diasporic experience and the impact of crip experience on research practice.

My field setting

For the last two decades, I have worked with Amazonian Quilombo (Maroon) activists and families to create interventions in and reflections about the different kinds of work involved in maintaining collective refuges. For the Extort project I began new fieldwork in the region, exploring how patronage networks combined with resource extraction operations impact Quilombo political unity.

My key research questions

To what extent do contemporary patronage networks in the Amazon region operate like protection rackets in urban centres? Can we consider natural resources as a form of wealth that is being extorted through patronage networks in alignment with 'legal' resource extraction operations? How do patronage networks and resource extraction impact Quilombo political organisation today in the Amazon region? To what extent does environmental licensing in Brazil take into account the power of patronage networks in the Amazon region?

My research findings

In the Brazilian legal code, extortion refers to acts of obtaining undue financial advantage over others through violence as well as other forms of coercion. My research for this project has traced a direct line between the way in which political and economic elites historically undermined Quilombo self-sufficiency to enrich themselves, and the way in which contemporary elites create ruptures in Quilombo political unity and mobilisation in the Amazon region. It is important, in this context, to understand natural resources as the wealth held by Quilombolas, Indigenous and other traditional communities. In this respect, political and economic patronage networks created by local elites offering basic social resources – such as schools – and political protection to individual Quilombolas and Quilombo communities in return for access to collectively owned natural resources, should be understood as extortion to the same extent that militias in urban centres extort local populations by offering basic utilities for fees. My research has also explored the extent to which existing legal frameworks facilitate the exploitation of Quilombo communities by 'legal' resource extraction operations, and the role of cosmology, kinship and the law in the maintenance and ruptures between political relationships and actors.

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