This article examines transformations associated with changes in resource use and land cover dynamics in the community of Sao Manoel, Maranhao state, in the eastern Brazilian Amazon. The shifting cultivator peasants in Sao Manoel integrate swidden fields for annual cropping, the extraction of babassu palm products, and pastures for cattle ranching. Since the early twentieth century, predominant vegetative cover patterns have been altered from species-rich mature forests to secondary succession with babassu dominant to pasture or swidden fields containing palm stands of various densities. A grounded political ecology of resource use in the area suggests that management strategies and the resulting land cover dynamics integrate site-specific decisions of peasant producers. I discuss the trajectory of production strategies in San Manoel since the establishment of the community in the 1920s, and identify the multiple dimensions affecting resource use and environmental outcomes, with an emphasis on the period following land struggles and the recovery of peasant tenure rights in the mid-1980s. The analysis indicates that socionatural trajectories that optimize resource use and address the socioeconomic needs of the community include the maintenance of palm/pastures associations.

KEY WORDS: Brazilian Amazon; babassu palm; shifting cultivation; land use change.

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INTRODUCTION

Significant changes in resource use have characterized the "babassu zone" of the easternmost fringe of the Legal Brazilian Amazon (2) since the early twentieth century. The resulting transformation of predominant landscapes has been that of species-rich mature forests to secondary succession with dominance of babassu palms, to pasture or croplands containing palms at various densities. By examining the relationships of resource users with the biophysical environment of the central portion of the state of Maranhao, I focus this analysis on the two most relevant social segments in the regional agrarian society: peasant producers, referred to as agro-extractive/shifting-cultivator peasants, and market-oriented cattle ranchers. I investigate how the interaction between these actors in the community of Sao Manoel (municipality of Lago do Junco), and their insertion into the broader social structure affected their resource management strategies. By combining "political ecology" and "ecology of practice" approaches of ecological anthropology, and a multidimensional framework for the study of land use/cover change, I seek to demonstrate that resource use and land cover dynamics integrate site-specific decisions of resource users organized in their units of production, with their agency in facing broader sociopolitical and economic structures.

In 1986, with a background in agronomy, I began a 3-year contract to assist peasant communities that had recovered tenure rights eroded in the wake of land conflicts that occurred since the 1970s. As it turned out, I lived in the Mearim Valley for 8 years, most of that time working in Lago do Junco. From 1996 to 2002, I returned every year to Lago do Junco to carry out research on the interplay between socioeconomic and biophysical change. Specifically, this article draws on dissertation fieldwork carried out in three periods between 1999 and 2001. Fieldwork methodology included ethnographic and interactive interviews with key informants; the application of a socioeconomic survey to the entire...