Etnografia do ambientalismo corporativo. Notas para uma antropologia do estado de morte que marca o campo dos megaempreendimentos = Ethnography of corporate environmentalism. Notes towards an anthropology of the state of death marking the field of

This paper is an ethnographic essay based on the work experience of one of the authors (da Costa) inside the environmental department of an electric energy producer corporation, between 2010 and 2013, period during which he was part of the technical team responsible for conducting environmental measures of the Belo Monte Dam on the Xingu River, in the region known as Volta Grande, Amazon. Following an anthropological approach, the essay describes how the corporate environmental experts interpret a world vastly more complex than that reached by the jargon vocabulary of their professional activity in their daily lives. Our aim is to show how the most intimate understandings of these professionals – in contrast to the technical standards required by corporate environmentalism – configure a productive factor of the destructive and death dimensions that characterize the territories of a mega-project.