Somanlu: Journal of Amazonian Studies

Editorial

Ludolf Waldmann Júnior — 2025-09-09

Health Policy at the State-Subnational Level

Luci Maria Teston — 2025-09-09

This study aims to analyze the performance of Acre state deputies regarding the initiative of legislation involving health policies. A total of 3,573 ordinary bills presented during a 24-year period (1999 to 2022) were identified and analyzed. The results demonstrate that health policies occupy a marginal space on the deputies' agenda, with bills related to the topic representing 9.40% of the total initiatives of the deputies, with honorary and symbolic themes playing a prominent role. There was greater legislative activity during the critical period of the covid-19 pandemic, with a subsequent decline, suggesting a possible resumption of the previous pattern of less attention to health. Deputies linked to political parties of different ideological spectrums proposed bills involving health, with variations considering the governments. Bills involving specific population groups, such as indigenous health, were marginalized from the agenda of proposed topics. The need for greater technical and strategic capacity among parliamentarians to develop effective and constitutionally valid policies aimed at finding solutions to the population's health problems became evident.

Legislative production on health in the Legislative Assembly of the State of Pará (ALEPA)

Wesley Rodrigues Santos Ferreira — 2025-09-09

This article analyzes the legislative activity of the Legislative Assembly of Pará (ALEPA) on health-related issues between 2015 and 2022, covering the last term of Governor Simão Jatene (PSDB) and the first term of Governor Helder Barbalho (PMDB/MDB). To this end, all Ordinary Bills, Supplementary Bills, and Proposed Constitutional Amendments submitted to the state legislature were examined, with emphasis on the partisan origin of the sponsors, the number of initiatives by party, the frequency of final decisions on bills, success rates, and the processing time of the proposals. The findings indicate that health ranks only fifth among the thematic areas addressed by the Assembly. Although this position remains unchanged across legislatures, the Helder administration period shows greater legislative engagement in health-related initiatives compared to the preceding government. Moreover, decisions during this period have been made more swiftly. Finally, the main sponsor of health-related proposals is the Legislative Branch itself, while the role of the state Executive Branch has been merely residual.

Between the Forest and Parliament

Carlos Augusto da Silva Souza — 2025-09-09

This article aims to understand the participation of indigenous candidates in the sphere of political representation, with an emphasis on the elections for Municipal Chambers held in 2024. Data from the Superior Electoral Court has shown that indigenous candidacies have been growing in recent elections in Brazil, especially at the local level. However, indigenous people still lack representation in the electoral sphere and their demands are barely perceived in institutional decision-making spaces, contributing to the marginalization of their cultures and the maintenance of racial inequalities. It is in the context of this discussion that this article is inserted. It aims to analyze indigenous candidacies, seeking to perceive the existence of differentiated patterns in their profile among the states that make up the Legal Amazon, which constitutes the region with the largest presence of indigenous candidates in municipal elections.

Local Politics and the Environment in the Amazon

João Paulo Saraiva Leão Viana — 2025-09-09

This study aims to analyse the environmental agenda in the context of the Executive-Legislative relations in the Porto Velho City Council (CMPV), in the capital of Rondônia. It seeks to understand the relevance of the environmental issue, with a focus on local governance in an Amazonian region. It analyses the political process that resulted in the parliamentary supermajority supporting Mayor Hildon Chaves (Socialist Democratic Brazilian Party) and the dynamics between the Executive and Legislative branches, from January 2021 to July 2023. The data analysis focuses on the environmental agenda in the CMPV. It concludes with important findings, such as the lack of proposals to tackle chronic environmental problems, as well as suggesting further research into the dynamics of the municipal parliament and the relationship between powers in Porto Velho.

Governments, Mining and Land Grabbing

Clodoaldo Matias da Silva — 2025-09-09

The Legal Amazon has undergone a systematic process of territorial reconfiguration, marked by the consolidation of informal power networks linked to the expansion of illegal mining and land grabbing. This study analyses how federal government actions and omissions, between 2019 and 2022, contributed to the dismantling of environmental enforcement mechanisms and to the legitimisation of unlawful practices in the region. The article aims to examine how such measures affected the territorial rights of traditional peoples and communities, as well as to highlight the resistance strategies mobilised by these groups in response to predatory expansion. The research follows a qualitative approach, based on documentary analysis, literature review and institutional and legal sources. From this path, it identifies the emergence of a new cartography of illegality, sustained by political and institutional arrangements that weaken state control and intensify socio-environmental vulnerability. The study concludes that, although illegal practices were driven by regressive public policies, resistance actions led by social movements, local collectives and transnational alliances reveal the resilience of alternative forms of territorial governance. These findings contribute to critical reflection on the role of the State and to the strengthening of agendas committed to environmental justice and collective rights.

Environmental psychology theories among students at Save University, Massinga Extension, Mozambique

Bélcia Balbina João Langa — 2025-09-09

The relational process of academic geographic space is developed through the perception of mental images associated with feelings, emotions and meanings, constructed through the reading and interpretation of the landscape (natural and humanized). This study was based on the assumption that the environment is primarily responsible for the formation of the basic characteristics of man and his intellectual capacity. The objective of the research was based on the analysis of landscape theories and their influence on students at the Save Extension University of Massinga (UniSave). To operationalize the proposed objectives, a review of the literature and theoretical framework was carried out, combining the following theories of environmental psychology: evolutionary; habitat by Gordon H. Orian; perspective and refuge by Jay Appleton; affective by Roger Ulrich and information processing by Stephen & Rachel Kaplan. The results showed that the lack of natural or mixed landscapes generates less environmental affection for students who live and study in an urban municipal geographic space, negatively affecting their emotions and desires for well-being and happiness or favorable conditions for academic success, which normally occur together with other phenomena of daily life. There is a common desire to seek improvements in the environment/landscapes of UniSave, whose characteristics further strengthen the positive affective feeling towards academic life, which has not been the best for academic success and continuity in postgraduate studies.

The Decolonization of Brazilian Academic Thought

Thiago Barbosa Soares — 2025-09-09

This essay proposes a critical reflection on the persistence of Eurocentrism in Brazilian academic thought, analyzing its historical roots and the contemporary implications of Eurocentric approaches. Beginning with a historical review of Brazil's intellectual colonization, it discusses how the structuring of Brazilian universities, modeled after European standards, has cemented an epistemological dependency. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Michel Foucault and scholars of Discourse Analysis, the essay argues that the uncritical reproduction of foreign theories restricts the development of indigenous knowledge. It concludes by asserting the urgency of a conscious decolonization of knowledge, one that values local perspectives and promotes an epistemological anthropophagy.

Márcio Souza

Carlos Antônio Magalhães Guedelha — 2025-09-09

This article proposes a critical reading of Márcio Souza’s written production as an artistic and intellectual project that challenges official narratives, rescues subaltern voices, and denounces the multiple forms of violence—symbolic, historical, environmental, and social—that mark the Amazonian territory. The study seeks to demonstrate that, through his historical novels, films, plays, essays, and public interventions, Souza articulates a language that refuses the silencing imposed on the forest and its peoples, Turning the word into an arena of debate and identity affirmation. He is a writer whose intellectual trajectory stands as one of the most vigorous expressions of cultural resistance in the Brazilian Amazon. As a writer, filmmaker, playwright, essayist, critic, and cultural manager, Souza has built a multifaceted body of work, marked by the confrontation with symbolic hegemonies imposed upon the region and by a radical commitment to the history, culture, and conflicts of the Amazon. In his work, the word transcends its basic communicative function and becomes a political act and a gesture of insurgency. This research also highlights that, by situating his discourse at the heart of a region shaped by coloniality, predatory extractivism, and sociocultural exclusion, Márcio Souza establishes a voice that goes beyond denunciation: his work reconfigures the ways of narrating the Amazon, endowing it with complexity, historicity, and autonomy. Thus, this study aims to discuss how the word, in its aesthetic and political dimensions, operates as an instrument of resistance in Márcio Souza’s thought and creative practice, contributing to the strengthening of a critical Amazonian consciousness and to the broadening of the Brazilian cultural repertoire.

Apresentação do Dossiê "A Amazônia Brasileira em análise: poder, atores e dinâmicas políticas em trajetória recente"

Arleth Santos Borges — 2025-09-09