Abstract
This article aims to understand the relationships between rural–urban mobility and economic differentiation in Amazonian communities, through a multi-scaled methodological framework. We focus on Amazonian quilombola communities (Par a State, Brazil), and we use a rural–urban circulation index to untangle the concept of mobility system. We show that individual mobility patterns are embedded in a process of multilocalisation, articulating rural and urban areas at a collective level. Economic diversification relies on complementarity of circulation within households. In this sense, the ability of some families to maintain resource rights in different places is one of the premises for economic differentiation. Since the 1980s, many traditional communities have been granted land rights in the Amazon basin. In several Amazonian countries, innovative legal statuses have given political visibility and land tenure security to indigenous and traditional peoples, based on the recognition of a special relationship between these communities and nature, usually embedded in spatial status and social boundedness (Alexiades, 2009; Newing, 2009). Brazil has gone further since 2006 with Decree n • 5.758, which considers