Contribution short abstract

This research reframes the Tapajós and Amazonas rivers as more-than-human political actors whose histories reveal relations of reciprocity, extractive pressures, and the socio-environmental conflicts shaping the socio-economic formation of the Amazon region they inhabit.

Contribution long abstract

Building on critical geography, Indigenous ontologies, and posthumanist approaches within Science and Technology Studies, this research is guided by the question: What histories about the socio-territorial formation of Santarém, in the Brazilian Amazon, can the Tapajós and Amazonas rivers tell? Through a bibliographic review, it centers the protagonism of these rivers in shaping the region’s territorial dynamics. Rather than interpreting territorial history as an exclusively anthropocentric process, the study approaches it as a political-ecological assemblage in which the Tapajós and Amazonas act simultaneously as active subjects, historical agents, and entities that have been subjugated across successive cycles of human occupation.

The study revisits key moments of socio-territorial transformation, from ancestral Indigenous presence to extractive economies (rubber, timber, cattle, mining) and the construction of ports and large-scale commodity-shipping infrastructure, revealing how a developmental model organized around the rivers has produced deep asymmetries.

It further examines relations of care, rituality, and reciprocity cultivated with the rivers by Indigenous peoples and riverine communities (Beltrão & Lopes, 2016; Torregroza-Espinosa et al., 2025), and how these hydrological ontologies have been increasingly pressured by logics of territorial commodification, generating new forms of socio-environmental vulnerability and violence (Batista & Miranda, 2019).

By repositioning the rivers’ agency as subjects endowed with history and collective memory, the research reframes them not as resources but as political-ecological actors. This perspective supports territorial and political decision-making that acknowledges the presence and participation of more-than-human entities in planning, governance, and ongoing disputes over the Amazonian landscape.