Fernando Luz Brancoli

This ethnographic project investigates how people in the Brazilian Amazon navigate lives structured by precarity, informality, and expendability. Building on sustained fieldwork (2021-2024) including six months in illegal mining camps, accompanying platform delivery workers, and participating in Indigenous territorial monitoring, this follow-up phase examines how experiences and practices evolved between 2024-2026. The research asks: How do wildcat miners, platform workers, Indigenous communities, and urban residents experience sovereignty’s fragmentation? How do people navigate work spanning extraction, trafficking, and digital labor? What forms of solidarity emerge within these conditions? Rather than documenting political changes from above, the ethnography centers how people live, work, resist, and make meaning. Methods include participant observation across mining camps, urban sites, and Indigenous territories; life history conversations embedded in daily activities; and attention to how people theorize their circumstances. The research traces how individuals move between mining and app-based work, how families span legal and illegal economies, and how workers share survival strategies. This advances anthropological debates on capitalism, labor precarity, and sovereignty by demonstrating how ethnographic attention to lived experience reveals dynamics invisible in structural analysis, contributing to conversations on how people create livability within capitalism’s transformations.