¨Se tem o turismo, pra que se matar fazendo roça?¨ Dinâmicas de trabalho no turismo em comunidades ribeirinhas da RDS do Uatumã/Amazonas

Abstract

In recent decades, tourism has become consolidated as a strategy for sustainable development in protected areas of the Amazon. Under this discourse, public policies have increasingly promoted tourism activities as an economic alternative for traditional communities, without, however, fully considering their territorial specificities, ways of life, and modes of labor. Based on the observation that scientific production on tourism in conservation units tends to emphasize economic aspects to the detriment of social and labor dimensions, the research aims to understand the dynamics of work organization in fishing tourism and the changes they cause in riverside lifestyles and in the regulation of social metabolism in the Bela Vista Community/RDSU. At the methodological level, a qualitative approach is updated, guided by a critical perspective. Two empirical fieldworks were carried out in the RDSU, in 2022 and 2023, including informal conversations, narrative and semi-structured interviews with tourism workers, community residents and representatives of third sector institutions that operate in tourism in the RDSU. Furthermore, observation of daily life and work during sport fishing, combined with field notebooks, provided relevant data for the composition of the critical analysis. The results reveal that fishing tourism, far from representing a harmonious solution between environmental conservation and local development, functions as a mechanism for reconfiguring the territory that imposes new demands, dependencies and forms of exploitation. Local workers, most of whom belong to riverside communities, are inserted in economic circuits marked by informality, subordination and lack of labor rights. The institutional rhetoric of sustainability encompasses the logic of the commodification of nature and culture. In this scenario, the figure of the “stranger” — the Balbina Hydroelectric Power Plant, the institutionalization of the RDSU, the arrival of tourism and many others — acquires centrality: these are the agents that introduce logics and expectations external to the territory, interfere in the forms of community organization and reconfigure local ways of life according to market demands and public policies. Their presence, although legitimized by the discourse of local development and nature conservation, often reinforces historical asymmetries and promotes a symbolic colonization of community knowledge and practices. The research contributes to the debate on tourism, work, and conservation in the Amazon by highlighting the limits of the sustainability paradigm when anchored in neoliberal mechanisms of managing life and work. By revealing how public policies and market logic intertwine to shape entrepreneurial subjectivities and strengthen structures of dependency, the thesis proposes a critical reflection on the meanings of work, nature, and participation in “development” projects imposed on traditional Amazonian communities. It is concluded that there is an urgent need for models of territorial governance and public policies that recognize the centrality of work, social justice, and the self-determination of traditional communities in addressing the socio-environmental inequalities that characterize the Amazon biome.