Places of Agribusiness: Displacement, Replacement, and Misplacement in Mato Grosso, Brazil

This article investigates the spatial logic and different moments of place‐making during the expansion of Mato Grosso's agribusiness frontier, in the southern section of the Brazilian Amazon. The analysis is informed by three conceptual concerns: the tensions between representation and experience, between humanist and class‐based explanations, and between the intensity of place‐making and place‐framing. Empirical results from a qualitative case study (carried out between 2013–2015, when agribusiness was the undisputed locomotive of the Brazilian economy) demonstrate that socio‐spatial changes in the last four decades evolved due to the complementary pressures and controversies of displacement (particularly in the 1970s–1980s) and replacement (in the 1990s–2000s), which eventually resulted in the widespread sense of misplacement due to accumulated inequalities and entrenched forms of socioeconomic exclusion. The principal conclusion found that the places dominated by agribusiness in Mato Grosso evolved around a totalizing spatial strategy that undermined alternative forms of production and livelihoods that do not fit in the export‐oriented agricultural model.