Envisioning Amazonia: Geospatial technology, legality and the (dis)enchantments of infrastructure

Abstract

The article discusses the sociotechnical infrastructures of deforestation detection in the Brazilian Amazon and the forms of visibility and legality these enact. It draws upon a long-term ethnographic study of how digital infrastructures impinge upon, and are enacted as, social relations. We focus upon the role of satellite images in these processes and on how the arrangements for their production and circulation become sites where knowledge and ‘un-knowledge’ are engendered and environmental politics waged.