Socio-climatic markers and ontological conflict: iron mining, environmental racism, and quilombola resistance in Piatã, Chapada Diamantina (Bahia)

Abstract

This article proposes an approach to socio-environmental conflict between the *quilombola* communities of Bocaina and Mocó—located in the municipality of Piatã, Chapada Diamantina (Bahia, Brazil)—and the transnational mining company Brazil Iron. This analysis is grounded in the conceptual pairing of "ontological conflict" and "social drama," as formulated within political ontology (Blaser, 2010, 2013; de la Cadena, 2015; Escobar, 2014, 2015, 2016; Viveiros de Castro, 1996) and operationalized through Victor Turner’s (2008) processual approach. The research problem is distilled into two interconnected questions and two objects of study: a central one concerning the *quilombola* political struggle as a struggle for life, and a specific one concerning ontological violence as the institutional denial of *quilombola* identity. It is argued that the Piatã conflict is not a distributive dispute over mineral resources, but rather a clash between two incommensurable territorial ontologies—the *quilombola* relational ontology, in which the territory is a commons and a living body, and the mercantile-extractivist ontology, in which the territory is a resource convertible into a commodity. This clash manifests as a public event—lived and narratable—through the "prophecy of development" (Rist, 2009). This prophecy serves as the discursive backdrop legitimizing the mining company’s conduct from start to finish and as the institutional mechanism that materializes the social drama across its four phases—breach, crisis, redressive action, and reintegration or schism. In each of these phases, it operates as an instrument for dismantling the commons regime governing the territory (Almeida, M.W., 2013; Bollier & Helfrich, 2012; Escobar, 2016) while institutionally denying the *quilombola* identity of the affected communities. Based on original fiscal and socioeconomic data regarding the Financial Compensation for the Exploitation of Mineral Resources (CFEM) in Piatã, the article demonstrates that the prophecy of development does not withstand empirical scrutiny, revealing that its function is not distributive but ontological: to ensure the hegemony of a single possible world.