Based on 15 years of research in Brazil, this book is an interdisciplinary documentation and analysis of the process of frontier change in one region of the Brazilian Amazon, the southern region of the state of Para. The authors' analysis was based on the idea that what they documented in the field - deforestation, settlement patterns, and the intensity of rural violence, for example - were the outcomes of the competition for resources among social groups capable of mobilizing varying degrees of power. The analysis of these contests illustrates how national and international factors often...

This book examines how transformations in Brazil's social, economic and political organization affect the demographic behaviour of people who live in different parts of the country and who occupy different positions in the social system. The authors review the history of unequal development and document the concentration of income and land ownership. Using data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses, they show how the Brazilian style of economic growth unequally affected different population subgroups. Mortality estimates for white and non-white people measure the consequences of racial inequality...