Conjuring Property

"Conjuring Property provides a rare insight into the social structure, class divisions and psychology of colonist communities. The awareness and empathy that can be taken from Campbell’s findings are his most significant contribution, and will prove valuable to anyone seeking a greater understanding of the Amazon’s complex, and often oversimplified, society."

"Campbell’s excellent research and writing takes on extra significance in producing a full and nuanced ethnography of a colonist settlement in the central Brazilian Amazon. . . . An effective and dynamic portrait of this ‘frontier’ region."

"A real novelty for studies on the Amazon. It helps rethink the region’s identity and history by showing the agency of small and mid-range settlers with unprecedented precision and evidence. . . . A particularly important book for historians."

"Campbell explores in thrilling detail the way that these territorial policies have intersected with life on the ground to produce both spectacular and scandalous policy failures and the effective transformation of the region. . . . This is an honest and necessary assessment of the potentially catastrophic future that Amazonia faces emerging from this rigorous, important, and rather devastating research into how capitalism and the state are constructed on a daily basis in Amazonia."

"Conjuring Property is a welcome close ethnographic account. . . . Campbell’s prose reads effortlessly, and the reader is transported from intimate conversations with homesteaders to more abstract discussions on Marx’ concept of alienation without a hint of altitude sickness. . . . The book enters the shelves of works such as Social Facts and Fabrications by Moore (1986) and Weapons of the Weak by Scott (1985)."

"Conjuring Property provides particularly salient lessons for anthropologists as well as multidisciplinary researchers and practitioners of conservation, development, and environmental governance."

"Shows how the land law in Brazil has evolved since the Amazon colonization era and how the government and many NGOs influenced local communities to participate in development planning and the propagation of development concepts in land claiming in the Amazon."

"One of far too few works in the literature on the Brazilian Amazon today explicitly focused on the fate and visons of colonizers. . . . [Campbell] shows unique evidence of the colonizers simultaneously claiming land under sustainable development schemes while not giving up on other land claims based on past land regularization schemes. . . . The book sheds light on how property is not a fixed category and comprises part of a political economy in formation."

"Demonstrates how colonists conjucture, speculate, and manipulate the environment, and each other’s labor, in hope that their rationale and actions will fit desired state-sanctioned property forms in the future. . . . [A] complex and well-written ethnography. . . . Describes how improvisation transforms into legitimacy through an emerging neoliberal order that is ‘rigged for theft and destruction.'"

"Conjuring Property moves easily between critical theory, history, and ethnographic narrative. The tempo is well-suited for undergraduate and graduate courses in environmental and political anthropology, rural sociology, and ethnographic writing and methods. I highly recommended it."

"Campbell’s writing is fluid and engaging. He demonstrates how large-holders (grandes) and homesteaders alike use parallel forms of graft, coercion, and chicanery to claim land."

"Campbell breaks new ground in Latin American ethnographic treatments of Amazonia through the focus on layered histories of promised development that have, over the years, drawn diverse people to these places, and prompted the varied and unexpected modes of speculative accumulation described."