Entre províncias de significado e territórios do negacionismo: cartografias invisíveis das políticas ambiental e indigenista no governo Bolsonaro (2019-2022)

Abstract

This doctoral thesis investigates how the contemporary Brazilian far right, between 2019 and 2022, produced and consolidated an intersubjectively shared universe of meaning that conferred social plausibility upon the dismantling of environmental policy and the erosion of Indigenous rights. Although such processes are not unprecedented in the country’s history, the analysis focuses on the ways in which they were rearticulated and intensified during the Bolsonaro administration. Grounded in Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology, the study starts from the assumption that social reality is constituted within the life-world through typifications, systems of relevance, and reciprocal expectations that orient action and delimit the horizons of the possible and the legitimate. The central hypothesis argues that the environmental and Indigenous policies implemented during the period under analysis cannot be reduced to circumstantial administrative or legislative choices; rather, they participated in the consolidation of a finite province of meaning within which environmental depletion and the suppression of Indigenous rights gradually came to be naturalized and collectively legitimized as socially acceptable practices. This interpretation is empirically supported by a qualitative examination of normative acts, administrative reforms, official speeches, and documents produced by socio-environmental and Indigenous organizations. By articulating these elements, the study seeks to understand narratives that deny the environmental crisis and Indigenous rights as a specific mode of ordering social experience, materialized in invisible cartographies that silence, hierarchize, and delimit territories of belonging and exclusion. In this sense, the title of the thesis refers to the constitution of territories of denialism, understood as social spaces of taken-for-grantedness in which criteria of plausibility and patterns of legitimation are stabilized, orienting practices, discourses, and public policies within the contemporary Brazilian far right.