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Critique of Anthropology
0(0) 1–23
Political ethics and ! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X18790796
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of a ‘fishing scab’

Luciana Lang
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
In the 1980s, local mobilization to turn a mangrove swamp, the Manguezal do Jequiá,
into an environmentally protected area in the urban periphery of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,
brought distinct motivations together under one vision: that of regenerating what was
once a resource-rich commons for local fishers. However, conflicts emerged when
framings ceased to coincide, thereby curtailing the network, and compromising the
co-existence of humans, fish and mangroves. Prompted by the ethnographic category of
pelego, or ‘scab’, used by people from outside the community to explain political dis-
engagement amongst fishers, this paper sheds light on what being political means.
Following the tropes of nets and networks, it unveils the tension between adaptation
and resistance. At the threshold between traditional ways of living and progress,
between continuity and change, adaptation emerges as a means to survive for both
the mangroves and the fishers, who are political insofar as they affect the relations that
constitute the network.

Keywords
Social movement, environmental governance, fishers, networks, framing, adaptation

On 22 June 2012, just a few days after the end of Rio þ 20 Earth Summit, also
known as the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, two fish-
ermen were found dead on Guanabara Bay, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with visible
signs of torture. There was broad online mobilization with a variety of bodies

Corresponding author:
Luciana Lang, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Rd, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: luzilang@hotmail.com
2 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

summoning people to an act of repudiation. The murdered fishermen were mem-

bers of the Associaç~ao de Homens e Mulheres do Mar (AHOMAR),1 a group
involved in political activism against big oil enterprises. After the news reached
the social media, there was a very emotional gathering with the presence of a
political leader and candidate for a left-wing political party in the local elections
for city mayor, representatives from trade unions and Non-Governmental
Organizations (NGOs), fishers and Elmo, an environmental activist involved
with the movement to protect the mangroves at the Colony, a fishing community
where I was conducting fieldwork.2 Discussants talked about five other murders of
AHOMAR members in the last four years, and some went as far as suggesting that
people connected with big oil enterprises were behind the killings.
Touched by the emotional mood of the event, I was somewhat surprised when,
back at the Colony, people I talked to were oblivious of, and not particularly
interested in, the tragedy concerning fellow fishers who shared the bay with
them, displaying what I perceived as lack of solidarity. When I suggested the
theory going round at the meeting that the murders were committed on the
orders of people connected to big corporations, people reacted with scepticism,
replying that the fishermen were most likely killed because of fishing net theft or
personal vengeance. I confided my surprise with Joana, a resident,
who commented:

Ah, here in the colony people don’t get mobilized about anything, least of all the
fishermen. Cesar [her husband] can’t even get them to clean up after themselves when
they bring the fish in!

Later that week at another meeting in town to organise a protest against the
murders one activist, on noting that none of the fishers from the Colony were
present, reacted: ‘The problem is that the fishers there are scabs’. In his view,
and I later heard the expression being used by other political activists, fishing
colonies in Brazil spawned what is known in Portuguese as pelegos da pesca, or
‘fishing scabs’.3
The term ‘pelego’ started to be used after the Unionization Law of 1931 during
Get ulio Vargas’s term in office, when Union statutes went under the umbrella of
the Work Department. Back then, ‘pelego’ referred to the union leader who
ensured deference, and whose relationship with the government was based on
mutual trust and guided by reciprocal collaboration and exchanges (Santana,
1999). The term regained popularity during the military rule to refer to the
union leaders who had been appointed by the government, and like the English
term ‘scab’, it started to also be used to refer to the worker who breaks a strike.
Lula, who served as president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011, himself a former union
leader, described the pelego as someone who ‘moulds him or herself to any type of
government’ (cited in Santana, 1999:107, my translation), implying that the pelego
was dextrous in terms of adapting to new contexts. The term is relevant for the
current analysis because it illuminates the contradictions within mobilizations, not
Lang 3

least because its underlying connotations encompass the spheres of the political
and the cultural, and belong to the latent, taken for granted, everyday culture
(Salman and Assies, 2007) of this particular social movement.
This paper investigates the conditions that enabled mobilisation around a man-
grove swamp, the Manguezal do Jequiá, to shed light on the enigma of an alleged
political disengagement in the Colony, of which the offensive term ‘pelego’ is
indicative. The motivation for this analysis is not only to show distinct ways of
pursuing political efficacy in the environmental network around the mangroves,
including engagement not based on resistance, but also to contribute towards what
has been perceived as a gap in the literature on social movement, namely,
‘the dynamics of networks over time’ (Stekelenburg and Roggeband, 2013: xx).
The fact is that the category of ‘social movement’ has been in constant process of
re-configuration: from its focus on class during the 1960s and 1970s, it came to
encompass a multiplicity of possibilities under the identity politics umbrella in late
twentieth and early twenty first century. The analysis here uncovers a particular re-
configuration, and one that spans over three decades, revealing distinct political
motivations in the rise and demise of a social movement.
This paper will trace the political trajectory of the mangroves, attending to how
people fit into the network and in what capacity, and to the conflicts brought about
by contending framings (Benford and Snow, 2000). It will start by giving a histor-
ical background to the social movement that led to the creation of a protected area,
to then elaborate on the trope of nets and variations of networks (De Landa, 2006;
Escobar, 2008; Harvey, 2013; Latour, 1990, 1993; Stekelenburg and Roggeband,
2013; Strathern, 1996). The story of the movement, told through two distinct
voices, provides yet another link in this network, traversed as it is by the local
and the global. To better grasp how the local is informed by the wider context, the
ethnography moves to the translocal space of the Rio þ 20 Conference, a locus of
environmental discourses that allows people to bridge distinct framings to aggre-
gate symbolic capital. Finally, it returns to the Colony to observe the repercussions
of the local political campaigns to reassess which political configurations are
deemed useful or detrimental by stakeholders. I shall conclude that the tensions
between adaptation and resistance curtail the relations within the network, arguing
that the choice to adapt rather than resist is itself political, seeing that it affects the
material relations that constitute the network.

The turning point

The Colony was the first of around 800 fishing colonies founded along the coast of
Brazil just after the First World War as part of the National Program for Fishing
and Sanitation. The intention behind the policy was to curb the spread of diseases
amongst the fishing populations, disseminate basic notions of hygiene, and pro-
mote literacy. But most importantly, the initiative was designed to strengthen the
bonds with the fishers, who were seen as the ideal coast guards to protect the
national borders against unwanted visitors, especially in the strategic location of
4 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Guanabara Bay where the Colony is located. The relationship that developed
between the fishers and the navy representatives was, according to interviewees,
one of mutual exchange of favours. Unlike the clientelistic4 relations found
throughout Brazil, it did not involve obligations in terms of political votes, nor
was it a pure form of tutelage or guardianship, since the Navy did expect the fishers
to keep an eye over national waters. In return, fishers had land and ownership of
their houses, and some managed to secure work at the navy headquarters
next door.
The turning point was in 1975 when a big fire caused by a massive oil spill to
spread across the mangroves, and which I described elsewhere as ‘the ethical
moment’ (Zigon, 2008: 165) since it prompted reflective and reflexive responses,
such as a grassroots movement to protect the area. Almost 20 years later, and not
by coincidence just after the first Earth Summit held in Rio in 1992, the swamp was
turned into an Area of Environmental Protection and Urban Regeneration, also
known by its acronym APARU, through Decree 12,250. This paved the way for a
vast reforestation project sponsored by the multinational Shell and led by Arnaldo,
the son of a local fisherman, in spite of ongoing conflicts with local politicians over
how this commons ought to be used. But the movement did bring some unpredict-
able outcomes: the decree had as its corollary a change in governance with the
Navy having to pass the management of the area to the municipal department of
environment.
This meant that after more than 70 years under a system of tutelage and strict
control by the Navy, the colony and the mangroves were subjected to an environ-
mental form of governance administered by the City Council. As a result, the
community witnessed unprecedented urban growth since residents, no longer
under the authoritarian rule by navy representatives, could build without restric-
tions, and people without kin or fishing connections could move into the Colony.
By the time I arrived to conduct fieldwork, 20 years after the decree and just in
time for the Earth Summit follow-up, commonly known as Rio þ 20, local mobi-
lization had completely dried up and public access to the mangroves had been
closed due to insalubrious levels of pollution, with sewage from households flowing
straight into the mangroves and material waste emerging from the surface at low
tide. The mangroves that the Department of Environment hoped to enact should
not be contaminated by sewage, which explains why the area was locked up and
the APARU signs were rusty, no longer indicating a preserved area but the failure
to ‘save’ the Manguezal do Jequiá. The City Council was apparently not perform-
ing its enabling duty and was often criticised for hiring people from outside the
community to work at the local Centre for Environmental Education, when they
could be employing Arnaldo ‘who knows the mangroves like no one else’. In
interviews, the view that CEA is ‘detached’ from the community was almost unan-
imous: residents did not know that the acronym CEA stood for Centre for
Environmental Education, the centre is often inactive, and when there are activ-
ities, they fail to engage the community. The former vice-president of the
Residents’ Association gave me his view on the subject:
Lang 5

The APARU was a political initiative, not a community one. There’s nothing hap-
pening here for the community. No one is going to do anything now, because
elections are only next year, and by then, people will have forgotten who did
what. They want to be able to wave their hands when work is concluded so
people will vote for them.

I had conducted research at the Colony four years before, when I had been wel-
comed by Arnaldo who was still passionate about the regeneration of the man-
groves. He looked very different now: he had lost a lot of weight and was very
bitter and cynical about researchers, activists, the city council and the community
as a whole. His commitment towards the mangroves, however, had not dwindled.
Over the months that followed I started to piece together the fragments of what
Arnaldo perceived as the demise of a dream. Through long interviews with him
and with Elmo, and conversations with residents and visitors to the Colony,
I structured the history of the movement. Events outside the Colony, such as
meetings held by environmentalists during Rio þ 20, protests and demonstrations,
equipped me with additional information and provided fuel for my emotional
engagement with the idea of political mobilization.
Considering that there had once been a movement, which involved hundreds of
residents and secured a legal status of protected area for the mangroves, I was
intrigued to find out more about the drying up of the social movement, and why
the fishers were called ‘pelegos’. From the reaction by the activist who first dubbed
the fishers scabs, it was plain that the term was contrasted to the position of those
attending the protest meetings and who were making a stance against the big oil
enterprises seen as culprits in current struggles faced by the fishers. In addition,
while the majority of left-leaning activists would praise values such as reciprocity in
the context of collective action, they unanimously looked down on the close bond-
ing between fishers and the Navy since this bonding was perceived as subservience
to authorities more generally, and to the military rule in particular. I heard other
militants using the term pelego to refer to fishers from different fishing colonies in
the country for not engaging with political mobilizations, as though being a fisher
from a fishing colony was tantamount to being a ‘scab’. In other words, the offen-
sive term ‘pelego’ stood in opposition to: (1) being in support of the fishers and
against big oil enterprises; (2) not being subservient to authorities and (3) being
involved with political mobilizations. I would have to search for other links in the
network if I was to understand this perceived unwillingness by fishers to engage
with political resistance. But most importantly, I would have to tap into the con-
tinuities and changes in the Colony over time to understand its particular socio-
economic configuration.

Fishing nets and networks

In the 1500s, when the Portuguese first arrived in Guanabara Bay, whales were a
common feature, depicted in old paintings and narratives (Amador, 2013; Léry,
6 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

2009 [1578]). Nowadays, the bay is considered a lost environmental cause and the
few traditional fishers left have to row for half an hour into Guanabara Bay in
order to catch anything. Neco, a fisherman I sometimes accompanied into
Guanabara Bay, would set off before sunrise to be back as the low tide undressed
the landscape, laying bare amidst the mud, plastic bottles, untreated sewage and
other human-made materials.
Baixinho, allegedly the oldest fisherman in the colony, was born in 1924, and
can no longer row, so his main activity is to weave and repair fishing nets. As one
enters the Colony, he can easily be spotted weaving endlessly, a craft he patiently
taught me whilst reminiscing on how the colony was when he first arrived there in
1945. Back then, the Navy was still the colony’s overseer, and any problems or
requests concerning housing or land were discussed and negotiated with a Navy
representative. Weaving fishing nets used to be a common activity amongst those
who could not go out to sea. But the image of Baixinho repairing nets is like a
simulacrum of the fishing colony this community once was. Nowadays, people see
no point making fishing nets to sell since manufactured ones can be purchased at
prices that cannot be matched by human labour. Nevertheless, Baixinho offers a
competitive price when it comes to repairing nets, while his tarrafas, or sweep nets,
which he puts together with manufactured net material, fetch R$200 each, the
equivalent of approximately £40 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Baixinho repairing a fishing net in the Colony (photograph by the author).
Lang 7

As well as having a powerful appeal as a metaphor, nets and its derivative net-
works, have semantic unfoldings that go well beyond the material artefact. Network
is often used to describe the material relations between people, referred to in soci-
ology as ‘network analysis’. It is also closely linked with the concept of ‘assemblage’,
in the sense that both terms enable the tracing of the heterogeneous elements of a
given collective. Latour goes so far as to suggest that the purpose of actor-network
theory is ‘to rebuild social theory out of networks’ (1990: 2), while Arturo Escobar
defines a network as ‘a multi-layered entanglement with a host of actors, organiza-
tions, the natural environment, political and institutional terrains, and cultural-
discursive fields that may be properly seen as a result of assemblage processes’
(Escobar, 2008: 273). Escobar’s definition is in tune with the approach that sees
networks as ecologically contingent (Ingold cited in Harvey, 2013), a view that
chimes with the complex entanglements in my field. Because fieldwork revealed a
collection of things, people, concepts and non-human nature that ranged from
sewage to city council departments, the network model appeared to be the most
appropriate to explore the social and material relations around the mangroves.
In the case of fishing nets, the relations that encompass labour, raw materials, use
and exchange values are contingent. Weaving nets was part of the everyday in the
Colony when there was an abundance of fish in the sea because a fishing net used to
be an expensive item comparatively speaking and an essential tool for the large
number of local fishers in those days. According to older residents, the women and
the children would also engage in this activity when the men were out at sea, and each
member of the family would have a fishing net: small ones for children and big ones
for adults. Now people see no point in consuming hours weaving fishing nets, given
that industries mass-produce them and many family members have become wage
labourers. Baixinho may well be the very last fishing net craftsman around, and one
can’t help but wonder how different the Colony will look without this 90-year-old
fisherman, an iconic link in the network of relations that constitutes the APARU.
Contingencies can also lead to new practices and create new networks, as in the
case of Daniel, a resident in the Colony, who makes a three-hour journey to Cabo
Frio three times a week to buy shrimps that will be sold at the fish stall at the
Colony next to the mangroves. Because there are no shrimps left in Guanabara
Bay he can make a living by driving many kilometres to buy the shrimps from
fishers far away. He still remembers how in the past women and children would
pick shrimps by the mangroves to complement the household income. But Daniel
has now become the middleman, and his network has expanded by hundreds of
kilometres to include people from outside the Colony; materials, such as a car and
fuel; and relations of production that were not there before.
For Strathern (1996: 523), the chain of elements that constitute networks can
produce artefacts, as in the case of an invention resulting from a particular com-
bination of knowledge, scientists, experiments and tools. I would suggest that the
mangrove swamp as a matter of concern is such an example, produced through the
chain of elements that make up the network surrounding it, which includes the
movement that turned it into an area of preservation and forged this
8 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

environmental artefact. In Strathern’s words, ‘the concept of network summons

the tracery of heterogeneous elements that constitute such an object or event, or
string of circumstances, held together by social interactions’ (1996: 521). The mil-
itary heritage found in the history of the Colony under the Navy’s tutelage falls
into a hierarchical type of network (De Landa, 2006), while the model of the
activists’ movements would be closer to a ‘self-organizing meshwork’ (Escobar,
2008: 274). For a good few years, the movement was held together by the common
goal of turning the mangroves into an area of preservation. However, the move-
ment is generally perceived as having lost momentum, and the failure in ‘sustain-
ing’ the network had direct consequences for the mangroves. While the artefact is
still there, the elements that were its condition of possibility have changed sub-
stantially causing the network to fragment.
The political theorists Robert Benford and David Snow (2000) have analysed
social movements using the concept of ‘framing’, understood as shared cultural
understandings, such as environmental justice, morality or order, to understand
how ideas and meanings get mobilized or counter-mobilized. They base their
theory on the concept of schemata of interpretation by Goffman (1986 [1974])
‘that enable individuals to locate, perceive, identify, and label occurrences within
their life space and the world at large’ (2000: 21). At this point, it is worth returning
to the ethnographic signifier ‘scab’ to flesh out what exactly is at stake here. A scab,
a strike-breaker, implies some form of betrayal, and this form of disloyalty is par-
ticularly looked down on because it cuts the potential network (Strathern, 1996),
causing the movement to wither. The accusatory tone in the use of the term mirrors
the resentment felt towards the fishers, given that their choice to abstain from the
movement translates into a substantial loss of symbolic capital to the cause. Such
resentment is lodged in the realm of emotions, an affective sphere that must be taken
into account given that most of the time the motivations that make movements tick
are not based on rational choices (Rubin, 2004; Salman and Assies, 2007).
The literature on social movements points to a ‘motivational constellation’
(Klandermans and Roggeband, 2007:5) made up of social identity, social
cognition, emotions and motivation, prompting the individual to engage with col-
lective action. The overall consensus in the literature is that the decision to join a
movement involves ‘intuitive, emotional, and rational considerations’ (Escobar,
2008: 261), and is commonly associated with a sense of social injustice that enters
the collective sphere and triggers mobilization. In the case of the Colony, the col-
lective sense of injustice was triggered by the big fire that consumed the mangroves in
1975 leaving it, in the words of Margarida, my hostess, ‘as bald as an egg’.

The politicization of the mangroves: Stories and history

as links in the network
The stories of what paved the way for the creation of the APARU after the fire
differ in a number of ways. Arnaldo says his commitment to the mangroves was a
Lang 9

direct consequence of his work with the research centre in the Navy, the Instituto
de Pesquisas da Marinha (IPQM), where he spent four years helping to make
graphs of the local tides and winds. The Research Centre at the Navy Radio
Transmitter was undertaking studies in the realm of biological sciences, informed
by increasing concerns with the degradation of the mangroves, a framing akin to
that used by young environmentalists of the time. Arnaldo is undisputedly the
main protagonist in the struggle to save the mangroves: I counted more than
200 entries of related news in the local newspaper over the period between 1993
and 1998, almost all focusing on the work by Arnaldo, including the mobilization
prior to the decree and the reforestation efforts, which was supported by Shell.
That said, a few respondents from outside the colony claim that despite Arnaldo’s
obviously deserved merit, ‘to say that the APARU was down to the singlehanded
work of one person’, as one interviewee put it, ‘would be like erasing history’.
Amongst other actors who were mentioned, there is Admiral José Luiz Belart, a
Navy officer who played an important role in the Brazilian environmental move-
ment in the 1960s and who was deeply engaged with the protection of the man-
groves.5 He was a resident of Ilha and is said to have influenced a lot of people in
the Navy to think ‘environmentally’. He also played an important role in the
struggle against the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam in the country,
a project by the military regime, which went ahead despite his efforts and personal
connections in the Armed Forces. Belart wanted to turn the mangroves into a
park, and to call it Heron Park, due to the huge population of that bird species
around the mangroves. However, seeing that parks are public and the area
belonged to the Navy, the project was abandoned. Ronaldo, the main navy rep-
resentative in the Colony, and head of the Navy Department of Environment and
Heritage, also mentioned Commander Julio Brand~ao Costa, another navy officer,
who helped found a medicinal pharmacy in a local hospital with a focus on the
local herbs found in the mangroves.
An additional key figure is Elmo, one of my interviewees with a history of
political activism going back to his grandfather, a unionist in the north of
Brazil, and father, a leader of re-settled rural workers. Elmo joined the environ-
mental network around the mangroves in 1987 when Arnaldo was already involved
in the struggle for its protection. Elmo describes the precedents to that struggle as
‘a beautiful story’, and instead of highlighting the contributions of navy officers, he
gives the protagonist role in the movement to a woman. According to him, during
the military dictatorship in the 1970s, there was a communist group in Ilha led by
Aunt Helena, a woman who started a movement to protect the mangroves against
the widening of the Jequiá road, a fight that was followed up by Arnaldo:

The widening of the Jequiá road haunts us like a ghost. The plans were around in the
70s, in the late 80s, and again in 2007 with the proposals of a wholesale fish market,
which we managed to stop. The story goes that Arnaldo repeatedly demolished the
foundations for the road with some of his mates. They would go there in the middle of
the night and, hiding from the Navy, would smash down the foundations with
10 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

hammers. It was a clever move to destroy the road being built over a land filled
section of the mangroves, and they managed to stop the construction.

Arnaldo actually denies this story, and claims it is a legend about him. From an
anthropologist’s perspective, the ‘legendary’ element adds another link to the net-
work, highlighting the myth-making role of stories of resistance in the collective
imaginary. Elmo’s involvement with the mangroves started in the 1980s, when he
saw a picture of Arnaldo in the local newspaper in an article describing his battle
against a politician who was pushing to make a land fill in the mangrove area. The
next day Elmo started a petition against the land fill at the college where he was
studying. But if Arnaldo was the initial source of inspiration, this soon changed:

The first time I went to the colony I met Arnaldo, and he threw a wet blanket over us.
There is no chance of social mobilization with him. He used to work for the Navy in
those days and the military regime ideology was still very present. Arnaldo doesn’t
have the mental disposition for social movement; he has an individualistic frame of
mind. I never heard Arnaldo speak of mobilization.

The above accounts are revealing in terms of the motivational constellation and
show that there was a clash between framings from the early days of the move-
ment: Elmo is clearly motivated by Arnaldo’s work, and by the stories of resistance
surrounding his name, but at the same time frustrated by his supposed ‘individu-
alistic frame of mind’ and association with ‘the military regime ideology’. Elmo
went on to join the Green Party at the age of 19 and helped found The Greens,
Os Verdes, a group involved in the struggle for the preservation of the Manguezal
do Jequiá. In 1991, UERJ, the State University of Rio de Janeiro, was hired by the
city council to do a diagnostic of the mangroves, and they concluded that the
mangrove swamp was no longer a matter pertaining to the biological sciences
since so much in it was sewage, which emphasized the need to protect it. Those
were the golden days for the environmental project planned for the mangroves,
result of a partnership between private initiatives and public power. There was
plenty of political will to invest in the area, motivated by global interests in the
aftermath of the Rio Summit in 1992, and large amounts of funding by big oil
corporations to support a number of initiatives, such as a percussion project with
instruments made from rubbish found in the mangroves, and a theatre project
showing plays with an environmental theme.
At the beginning of the movement to save the mangroves, the group Elmo was
part represented a vital hinge in the articulation of the local and global, which
served to strengthen the network of relations, and the movement was sustained by
the overlapping of framings around the mangroves. A coincidence of shared
understandings or framings nurtured people’s engagement giving it impulse and
encouragement. Other elements were assembled then, including political networks
of the Green Party, scientific information regarding the composition of the man-
groves, democratic ideals of social justice and ethical sensibilities rooted in the
Lang 11

fishing colony’s history. But then, Elmo concludes, there was an implosion after
the local priest spread some rumours in the colony that the Greens were commu-
nists. But the fact is that relations between outsiders and insiders were fragile from
the start. Arnaldo, the main link between environmentalists from outside the
Colony and people from within, was sceptical of the motives of the group since
the first time they met. Arnaldo equates activists with politicians with short-time
interests and believes that their involvement with the struggle to preserve the
mangroves is only to serve their desire of securing political capital, motivations
that in his view are very different from the life-long relationship between the
mangroves and fishers who were born literally on houses constructed on the man-
groves. Elmo’s opinion, on the other hand, is that the problem with disengagement
in the Colony is because Arnaldo, and other fishers by extension, have ‘an indi-
vidualistic frame of mind’, and are only interested in the benefits they can get from
a relationship of subservience to the Navy. And, accusations of alliances with
corrupted politicians go both ways:

All that gossip about us being communists continued and ended up demobilising the
group; we were unable to engage further and the movement emptied out. Because the
bridge had collapsed leaving people in a situation of emergency, a new bridge was
built, and on the opening day, Gilmar Maranh~ao [the head of one of the two political
clans of Ilha]6 went there and was photographed as though the bridge had been his
achievement. Arnaldo let off fireworks and we felt betrayed, that’s when we finally
broke with Arnaldo. By the time the other improvements suggested in the report by
UERJ started, there was no longer a social movement there; there was only this
person of Arnaldo all by himself, as the saviour of the mangrove. In those days
there were no NGOs, something that came as a strategy from the International
Monetary Fund, with neoliberalism. . .Throughout this trajectory I helped found
more than 30 NGOs, but for the last 15 years I’ve just been a member in them,
with no management role. Today, I see myself as an environmental justice activist,
and I make a living from writing technical reports. For me the Colony needs social
organization; the only place where we see this there is in the Carnival bloco[a carnival
percussion group].

Interestingly, we see in Elmo’s narrative that his involvement with the mangroves
did yield results for his political career. Arnaldo, on the other hand, continues at
the margins, unemployed, and with no official role in the management of the
preserved area he helped to create, despite the fact that anyone interested in the
local mangrove bio system goes knocking at his door. Self-taught, Arnaldo wrote a
manuscript on the local fauna and flora: a 145-page long report containing tables
of chemical analysis of the biological composition of the mangroves and contam-
ination by heavy metals from the polluting industries in the surrounding area.
It also includes a compilation of the different types of molluscs, crustaceans
and all the fish found in the surrounding bay along with photographs of almost
every species mentioned, including local birds and vegetation. Yet, despite this
12 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

evidence of local expertise, the city council outsources the running of the Centre
for Environmental Education, which is staffed by people from outside the Colony.
What the above narratives make salient is that people’s involvement with
the struggle to preserve the mangroves can be jeopardised by ties that overrule
the more recent environmental discourse: according to some, the decades-old
ethical framing of reciprocal exchanges between the fishers and the Navy,
associated with the broader authoritarian framework of the military regime,
could have motivated the local population to be suspicious of supposed commu-
nists who the military rule had been committed to eliminate. In other words,
the sense of social injustice that instigated the social movement in the 1980s was
overridden by older ethical framings that characterised the patron–client relation-
ship between the fishers and the Navy. The perceived risk of jeopardising those ties
of bondage ended up compromising people’s participation in the movement. To
start with, the older ethical framings underpinning the relationship between the
Navy and the community at the Colony did not conflict with the environmental
cause. As divergences emerged and some framings were rejected, the network
changed shape.
The accounts above also suggest a connection between the local and the global
in the history of the struggle to protect the mangroves: people’s involvement with
the mangroves is motivated by distinct ethical sensibilities and does not happen in
a vacuum. The officers at the Navy started being interested in the mangroves
around the time when the concept of environment was beginning to circulate at
a global level, which in turn fostered the drafting of the Forest Code7 by the
military regime. The local and the trans-local also informed each other, reflecting
different moments in the history of environmentalism in Brazil: the interest in the
mangroves by the Navy’s officer coincided with a time when the term ‘environ-
ment’ entered public discourses; the motivation for the Heron Park that Admiral
Belarte was keen to promote was based on the aesthetic appeal of the wildlife, and
would have translated, had it gone through, into removing the population from the
preserved area, a rationale typical of the first wave of environmentalism in
Brazil (see Viola, 1992); the studies at the Research Centre at the Navy Radio
Transmitter were informed by concerns with the degradation of the mangroves; the
groups that joined the fight to preserve Jequiá are representative of the period of
re-democratization, around the time the 1988 Constitution was launched; and the
APARU was established a year after the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

Other shape-shifting drivers: Global links

By 2012, 20 years after the conference that paved the way for a number of initia-
tives to protect the mangroves such as the APARU, local mobilization at the
Colony had completely dried up and the mangrove area had been fenced off to
prevent public access due to insalubrious levels of pollution. In reply to my ques-
tion as to why a preserved area was in such a state, an employee from the
Department of the Environment told me that ‘the problem there is a political
Lang 13

one’; the vice-president of the Residents Association confided that the Colony was
not a worthy stake for politicians because votes there were divided; and I was
advised by colleagues in academia not to do my study in that community because
‘people there were politically disengaged’. If these seemingly disparate readings
were not intriguing enough, I was determined to scrutinize the potential bias by
activists and university intellectuals in terms of what they ‘deemed worthy of
investigation’ (Gledhill, 2012: 3).
Meanwhile, in the broader network around the city, environmentalists, social
activists and representatives of a wide range of grassroots groups, who shared
Elmo’s environmental justice framing, were getting mobilized for the conference
follow-up, with an updated version of the environmental agenda for the 21st
century. The Rio þ 20 Earth Summit followed in the steps of the 1992 event by pro-
viding an alternative space to bridge the local and the global: the C
upula dos Povos, or
People’s Summit. While the official event offered a performative stage for politicians
and representatives who enacted their repertoires within the geographically defined
spaces allocated to participant nation-states, the atmosphere of the People’s Summit
was a great deal more inclusive. The area where the Summit was held was set up like a
festival with tents for the seminars, stalls selling books, organic products and handi-
crafts, and with an overall consensual theme that ‘ecological awareness’ is about
militating for nature and quality of life, in opposition to the criteria currently used
to measure countries’ GDP. A massive area comprising five big marquees for films,
performances and debates, came under the umbrella Religi~ oes de Matriz da Natureza,
Religions of the Nature Matrix, a concept that encompasses indigenous and Afro-
Brazilian cosmologies, as well as some of the offshoots from both, such as Umbanda,
S~ao Daime, Jurema, Pajelança, and others. These practices are believed to exist within
the ‘nature matrix’ because their rituals make use of plants and their cosmogonies are
peopled with nature-related entities. In other words, they all denote a form of spiri-
tuality rooted in nature.
While the range of topics being addressed at the People’s Summit was varied,
encompassing major issues contemplated by social movements such as the landless,
the indigenous people’s struggle for land, women’s pleas, religious intolerance, the
most visible framing deployed was probably that of a nature-oriented form
of spirituality. The term mostly used at the People’s Summit was ‘nature’ and
‘forests’, rather than ‘environment’, perceived by some as a more technical term.
This shared interpretation of a contemporary scenario is what Benford and Snow
describe as ‘collective action frames’ (2000: 611), meaning a coincidence of interests
that nurtures collective action.
In the streets, people protested against Green Economy, consumption, the
tyranny of capital and the official Rio þ 20. The umbrella framing of environment
encompassed a cacophony of concerns, adding distinct cultural elements to the
overarching cause of nature. These different forms of environmentalisms happen-
ing around the city illustrate what could be seen as an oscillation between fram-
ings, at times causing them to overlap. The reason a collective framing becomes
powerful enough to mobilise a big number of actors, as seen at the People’s
14 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Summit, is because those originally distinct framings are articulating with each
other, combining into a varied ‘repertoire of collective action’ (Medeiros, 2012: 7;
Tilly, 2006), or performing some sort of ‘frame bridging’, which in Benford and
Snow’s words refers to ‘the linking of two or more ideologically congruent but
structurally unconnected frames regarding a particular issue’ (2000: 624). Whether
as ‘shared frames of meaning’ (Escobar, 2008: 271) or as ‘mediating mechanisms’
(Stekelenburg and Roggeband, 2013: xiii), this frame bridging is particularly rel-
evant in the context of multiple affiliations that characterise social movements in
the 21st century. The banners on display during demonstrations pointed to the
frame bridging mostly in use: an intersection between environmentalism, spiritu-
ality and social justice, where the concept of ‘nature’ served as the leitmotif.
Likewise, the university students who protested against market-economy as a
matter of ideology sympathised with eco-theologians like the Franciscans whose
banners promoted the commons and mother earth, spawning one collective fram-
ing for the just preservation of wildlife (Figures 2 and 3):

Figure 2. Demonstration during the Rio þ 20 Earth Summit (photograph by the author).
Lang 15

Figure 3. Demonstration during the Rio þ 20 Earth Summit (photograph by the author).

The banners read: ‘Rural Congressman, Red Card for you’; ‘Green Economy.
Impossible Future’; ‘Mining destroys our mother earth’; ‘The Franciscan Order
against the mercantilization of nature and for the commons’; ‘Deforestation Zero’
and ‘For a just and green world’. Such frame bridging is apparently missing in the
current network around the mangroves, and which by all accounts was there when
the APARU was first created. In fact, if we go by the opinion of environmentalists
and experts who suggested the mangrove swamp is no longer in the realm of biology
due to the volume of sewage in it, ‘nature’ is missing altogether from the network.
One of the meetings I attended during the Rio þ 20 was organized like a workshop
where participants put forward an environmental problem for colleagues to suggest
possible solutions. My ‘problem’, a polluted mangrove area next to Guanabara Bay,
was immediately considered irredeemable, and dismissed with a patronising smile on
the grounds that Guanabara Bay ‘já era’, ‘it’s history’; in other words, places like the
mangroves and Guanabara Bay are not enacted as nature since they are seen as
being ‘beyond repair’ even if they are classed as environment.

Adaptation or revolution? Non-engagement

as a political choice
The perspective that sees Guanabara Bay as doomed, held by a significant pro-
portion of environmentalists and ‘nature lovers’, is one that James Lovelock (1979)
16 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

defines as utopian, grounded on an idealistic form of environmental preservation

that discourages the investment of resources in places that are environmentally
depleted and undermines adaptive forms of nature such as the Manguezal do
Jequiá. To agree with such statements is to ignore the voices who throughout
my fieldwork attested to the rehabilitation of the mangroves, including so-called
environmentalists who remarked that Jequiá is evidence that Guanabara Bay can
bounce back from its state of degradation. In fact, most people from the Colony I
spoke to believe that the ‘mangroves are beautiful’, and that ‘thanks to Arnaldo,
our mangroves are thriving’. In an interesting exchange between nature and cul-
ture, I could not help but seeing a parallel between the view that dismisses
Guanabara Bay because ‘it’s history’ and ‘beyond repair’, and the perspective
that call fishers pelegos because they choose to adapt, rather than join protests.
Adaptation is by definition a pragmatic strategy of survival, and the fact that it
may include adapting to dominant forces means that some may see it as an
instance of ’false consciousness’ in the Marxist sense, political apathy or submis-
sion to hierarchical power relations. However, what actors like Elmo fail to
acknowledge, is that from the perspective of Arnaldo, the educated environmen-
talists that come to the Colony represent the dominant culture insofar as they are
involved with politicians and decision makers, and can more easily mobilise
resources. This became clear one day when Arnaldo said to me that ‘I’m not an
environmentalist, I’m just stubborn’, as if he wanted to distance himself from the
political positioning that environmentalists came to occupy, often equated to that
of politicians who are generally distrusted by the population. He is also defying the
moral high ground taken by those who look down on the fishers because they
enjoy the advantages, however, few, of siding with a paradigm of order and favour
exchanges with the Navy. David Graeber makes a point that actions can be rev-
olutionary without necessarily translating into the overthrow of a government
since ‘revolutionary action is any collective action which rejects, and therefore
confronts, some form of power or domination and in doing so, reconstitutes
social relations’ (2001: 45). I would argue that if being political implies the exercise
of choice and self-determination, and the capacity to negotiate a stance in a given
hierarchy, adaptation and non-engagement could be interpreted as a political
choice in the network around the mangroves, and one that is underpinned by
the desire to reconstitute the social dynamics that were present before the environ-
mental disaster in 1975.
‘Do you think people here are bothered with the mangroves? What they want is
bread and circus! Just give them some samba, do a huge barbecue, and politicians
will get their votes’, is what Arnaldo thinks of the local politics and why he wants
the whole place to sink. In his opinion, people want to drink and be merry, rather
than live in an ordered environment next to clean mangroves. Politicians know
this and lure voters by giving them beer and barbecue, while technicians from the
Department of Environment feel helpless when construction companies are
granted environmental licences by the city council during electoral year. And
sure enough, one week later, Nelson Pitanga, the candidate for the Green Party
Lang 17

in Ilha, the bigger island to which the Colony is attached, offered a barbecue with
free beer to celebrate the start of his campaign at a fishing colony that is also part
of the colony’s administrative unit, located in another part of Ilha. I asked Nelson
about his political agenda, and he said he would focus on the issue of sewage, and
on Ilha’s emancipation as a separate municipality from Rio. There was no mention
of the APARU. Despite the fact that Nelson Pitanga entered the environmental
network through his involvement with the Green Party, he does not play any active
role in the network.
Six of my local collaborators got temporary jobs with Nelson Pitanga. They had
to sit by the roadside at strategic points with his political banner for a few hours a
day in return for a minimum wage. They were happy with the extra cash, but their
willingness to work for the Green Party’s candidate was not because of any ideo-
logical drive. Nelson Pitanga is popular thanks to his barbecues and samba com-
positions, but it is the financial support he gives to the carnival bloco at the
Colony, that persuades people to vote for him. Elmo suggested that the lingering
presence of these contemporary versions of ‘colonels’ stops people in Ilha from
being engaged politically. Local power dynamics are informed by the neoliberal
logic of economic freedom and for-profit initiatives, which in this particular con-
text combines the political whim of democratically elected representatives, and
partnerships with construction companies and other corporations in the private
sector. While it is not within the scope of this article to explore these partnerships,
suffice it to say that the City Council/Department of Environment was involved in
public–private alliances in the construction of an Olympic Village, responsible for
the deforestation of part of the mangroves. On at least one point Arnaldo and
Elmo agree: people in the community only get fully organised and engaged when it
comes to carnival. By August 2012, the last month of my fieldwork, the landscape
of Ilha had completely changed with politicians’ banners attached to the walls of
the houses and throwaway leaflets carpeting the streets, as though illustrating
Arnaldo’s view of politics as both polluted and polluting.
Elsewhere in town, a meeting was held to organize the mobilization against the
murder of the fishermen from AHOMAR. Half of the people there were fishers or
trade union representatives, and the other half were researchers from universities
or NGOs, or full time political activists like Elmo. As maintained by those protest-
ing, ‘justice is one-eyed’, and in the words of Alexandre, a fisherman and member
of AHOMAR, ‘the struggle must go on’:

The environmental struggle is the other side of the social struggle, and the Ministry
of Fisheries has the obligation of addressing socio-environmental problems.
Governmental bodies need to be monitored. There ought to be a committee to protect
the rivers, and a social justice representative. The fishers were there long before the
corporations, so they have rights. Fishers are afraid to speak.

At another meeting to demand compensation from Petrobrás to redress the fishers

affected by the oil spill in 2000 organized by associations such as the Forum for
18 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

Fishers and Friends of the Sea (F

orum dos Pescadores e Amigos do Mar) and by
the Committee for the Guanabara Bay (Comiteˆ da Baıa da Guanabara), most
contributions came from those leading the mobilization, namely activists and uni-
versity representatives:

We have to work with the environmentalist discourse, with the mystique of the fishing
activity, the fishers being endangered. It’s emblematic.

If only a handful of fishers from around Guanabara Bay come, we will be vulnerable.
We have to fill the place up with political actors.

Petrobrás has to compensate the fishers for the biggest ecological disaster in the
country. Fishing is only still viable because the mangrove area, a breeding ground
for aquatic life, is protected. Guanabara Bay is still alive.

The reactions above interweave environment, fishers and political mobilization to

form a network within which environmental justice is the main framing. Fishers,
and especially traditional fishers, as is the case of the few left in the fishing colonies,
are important because they are ‘emblematic’, ‘endangered’. Without fishers like
Alexandre from Ahomar, who is still classed as a ‘traditional fisherman’ and
deploys framings shared by other activists, such as social justice, the movement
lacks the symbolic capital that could be an asset for the environmental cause.
Unless the political actors who come to the protests share a fishing identity, the
mobilization will be empty of its key asset. As noted by Jeffrey Rubin, claims on
behalf of a given cause ‘must essentialize in order to represent’ (2014: 126).
Representations form the basis for the legitimization of claims, and alongside
subjective reasons and personal interests in joining a movement, they constitute
necessary links in the network.
Many of those participating in the meetings showed frustration at the fishers
from colonies because they failed to mobilise an ‘essentialist’ identity. This refusal
to endorse the traditional fishing identity hinders the success of the mobilization
and adds to the contradictions already present within the movement to protect the
mangroves. With regards to people’s political participation, or lack of it, a tension
is apparent between adaptation and resistance in the Colony, which according to
Elmo prioritises individual interests to the detriment of collective needs. In an
ethnography about the political involvement of a black movement group in the
town of Ilhéus in Brazil, the anthropologist Marcio Goldman (2006) describes the
tension between those who perceive the cultural group they are involved with as an
almost transcendental entity, standing above the individuals that constitute it, and
those whose personal pursuits are sometimes leveraged by their work in the group.
Here also, politics is both polluting and polluted.
The political ethics around the mangroves reflect distinct strategies regarding
continuity and change. The adaptation strategy emerges as the option favoured by
most people at the Colony, which clashes with the resistance framing, supported by
Lang 19

those who look down on the lack of social organization perceived as necessary to
protect the mangroves. At the two extreme ends, there is a seemingly unbridgeable
gap between adaptive behaviours, underpinned by a nostalgia for an orderly form
of governance, supported by Arnaldo, and resistance through social movement,
Elmo’s approach, which shows no tolerance towards ‘pelegos’ with a history of
alliances with authorities in order to secure jobs and housing. For the environ-
mental activists, adaptation translates into an instance of ’false consciousness’ in
the Marxist sense, or political apathy, while for the fishers, it is a pragmatic strat-
egy of survival.

Conclusion
This paper explored the politicization of the mangroves after an environmental
disaster affected the relations between fishermen, navy representatives, activists
and council employees, forming an intricate assemblage around these urban
shores. At the threshold between traditional ways of living and progress through
development, people had to find alternative ways to adapt, informed by values that
were rooted in the historical trajectory of that community. The social movement
that ensued to protect the mangroves unveiled tensions between available fram-
ings, and between adaptive and resisting strategies. The paradox that unfolded is
that the creation of the APARU, or the rise of the environment as an issue of
concern, meant the rise of a different form of governance associated with the
outsourcing of functions, such as the management of the Centre for
Environmental Education by people from outside the Colony, and with the end
of the Navy rule and its system of norms and favour exchanges with local fisher-
men. The resulting configuration, against the backdrop of intensive development,
demographic growth and new social-economic dynamics, spawned a hybrid net-
work of humans, bacteria, oil, legislations, corporations and institutions in an
environment liminal by nature.
Analytically speaking, what we see in this conjuncture is an interesting two-way
dispute where conflicting framings are placed together in the environmental net-
work: Arnaldo stands for the orderly model, once found in a tutelary version of the
big State represented by the Navy; and Elmo stands for the collective action model,
in support of constitutional rights and social justice. The argument presented here
is that collective mobilization was curtailed when these two different framings
ceased to overlap. In the middle of this disruptive conversation is the very outcome
of the social movement to protect the mangroves: the City Council/Department of
Environment with its ambiguous and heterogeneous ethics. This form of gover-
nance is not only a dialectical result of the opposing forces in the aftermath of the
movement but also the mediator and distributor of resources, adding a third voice
to this contentious dialogue. The two framings analysed here do not coincide, and
the ‘mediating’ department of environment is criticised by both Arnaldo and Elmo,
bringing the dialogue and projects that could foster a more fruitful co-existence
between humans, fish and the mangroves to a standstill. Given that the local
20 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

experience of mobilisation resulted in mixed blessings and unpredictable outcomes,

it is perhaps not surprising that some residents are suspicious of the potential
outcomes of social movements.
It becomes clear that the collective motivation that granted the conditions of
possibility for the APARU in the 1990s was a particular configuration that can no
longer be mobilized. Different versions of a single story told from different points
of view transform, complicate and enlarge the network. The mangrove swamp is
politicised not only in the sense of being the object of policies and politicians, but
also because it grants potential leverage to the political trajectories of individual
social actors. Against this backdrop, the ethnographic category of the scab, pelego,
used by people from outside the colony to explain the absence of social movement
there, points to a common perception amongst activists that there is one particular
way of being political. Thus, the refusal by fishers from colonies to actively par-
ticipate in political protests truncates the network envisaged by the activists
involved with the struggle to preserve the mangroves.
However, the outsider’s perception that ‘there are only scabs there’ fails to grasp
the complexity of the full picture: ethical sensibilities towards the mangroves do
affect practices, which may involve both acting against decisions concerning the
mangroves made elsewhere, or opting for non-engagement. In addition, stances
towards the politicised mangroves go well beyond environmental ideologies to
encompass a variety of idiosyncratic interests and short-term objectives, such as
political prestige, part-time work with Green Party politicians or a victory in the
carnival samba contest with a song about the mangrove. Moreover, many of the
protagonists in this story are either directly or indirectly enjoying the benefits of
pensions from hard-working relatives who had jobs in the Navy as cleaners or
janitors, such as Margarida’s husband. Abstaining from protest can be a way of
ensuring forms of security that historical alliances with the Navy provided.
To conclude, ‘pelego’, an ethnographic concept that conveys the antagonism
between activists and the fishers, not only illuminates the ethical stances regarding
political engagement from the part of activists, but is also telling of what changed
after the mobilization that culminated with Decree 12,250, and what stayed the
same. As for the mangrove swamp, after entering the environmental network and
acquiring status as an area of environmental protection, it became a different
thing; an artefact displaying new colours, smells and life forms, and re-signified
as environment. Culturally, the mangrove swamp reflects the myriad perceptions
people have of it. While the two-way tension unveils distinct ethical mixes regard-
ing oppositions such as individual versus collective interests, or adaptation versus
resistance, it is the sensibilities towards the mangroves that enables compromise
and holds the collective together. These ethical sensibilities provide the links that
make the whole bigger than the sum of its parts, but unless people, concepts, things,
and institutions are assembled in a particular way, contingent aspects such as polit-
ical affiliations can ‘cut into the network’, curtail relations within it, and curb
mobilisation. It waits to be seen whether the environmental endeavour will enable
Lang 21

the overlapping of framings once again for the network to thrive, so that others,
besides Arnaldo, may walk barefoot through this awe-inspiring urban landscape.

Acknowledgements
I am grateful to all the people involved with the struggle to keep the mangrove as a habitat for
non-human life forms, and in particular to Arnaldo, who placed the mangrove first in the
political contention here narrated. I also wish to thank Professor Peter Wade and Professor
Penny Harvey who provided critical feedback when I wrote the chapter that provided the core
material for this paper. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Institute of Latin
American Studies Seminar, and comments at its anthropology seminar were influential for its
final draft. Finally, I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers from the Critique
of Anthropology for the very helpful comments and close attention to detail.

Author’s note
In order to protect the identity of those who contributed to this research, I have anonymised
people in the ethnography, with the exception of those collaborators who specifically asked
to have their real names in related writings, as well as some historical figures.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, author-
ship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication
of this article.

Notes
1. Associaç~ao de Homens e Mulheres do Mar (Association of Men and Women of the Sea).
2. In this paper, I have called the fishing community where I conducted fieldwork
‘the Colony’.
3. The term originally referred to a sheepskin mat that goes on the top of the horse to make
the ride more comfortable for the horseman.
4. Ubiquitous in Brazilian history, clientelism, broadly understood as arrangements based
on reciprocal exchanges, has been the object of a great number of critical analyses by
social scientists in Brazil. For more on the topic see Victor Nunes Leal 1948; Octavio
Ianni 1958; Maria Isaura Pereira de Queiroz 1976; and André Botelho and Schwarcz,
2011, to mention a few.
5. José Luiz Belart is also mentioned in the 2001 book Miss~ ao (quase) Impossıvel, or
‘Mission (almost) Impossible’ (my translation), by Teresa Urban, which gives an over-
view of the environmental movement in Brazil. The author remarks that Belart’s public
activities, alongside those of another Navy admiral, Ibsen de Gusm~ao Câmara, point to
the active involvement of Navy officers in issues concerning the environment. They both
supported the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature (FBCN), a group
22 Critique of Anthropology 0(0)

formed by scientists, politicians and journalists in 1958. During Jânio Quadros’s term in
office, some of the members of that institution were involved with the elaboration of
political measures that paved the way for the creation of the Forest Code in 1965, only
one year after the military coup. Many of those actors were, according to the author,
inspired by London-based activists (Urban, 2001).
6. In Ilha, the bigger island to which the Colony is attached by a bridge, the same political
clans continue to have the final say over decisions such as the construction of an Olympic
Village on part of protected area, a power granted to them by their political connections.
7. In spite of being associated with the evils of an authoritarian State, the reformulation of
the Forest Code was one of the most contentious issues in 2012 and split the opinions of
left-wing commentators who, facing the proposed reform which would benefit big land-
owners, had to admit the code had many merits.

ORCID iD
Luciana Lang http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7598-6949

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Author Biography
Luciana Lang is an anthropologist working in the broad area of socio-ecological
anthropology in urban contexts. She is currently a Research Assistant at the
University of Manchester for the School of Environment, Education and
Development.