Da terra arada à terra arrasada : um estudo sobre a lógica costumeira das relações de terra e trabalho e a luta por direitos do campesinato de Conceição do Mato Dentro – MG.

Abstract

The peasantry located in the rural area of Conceição do Mato Dentro – MG is built by different possessory regimes that vary according to family trajectories, generating a heterogeneous peasantry. The use and occupation of the lands by farmers were historically mediated by aggregation and partnership relationships established with local landowner (farmers) over the years, which are intertwined in a complex web of favors, gifts and obligations. In this dissertation, we aim to analyze the social trajectory of those peasantry under the light of land and labor relations and the social practices established inside the farms - based on the narrative and memory of four families. In response to the social, political and economic contexts that come into being over time, the content of the social relations between the agents in this scenario undergoes gradual transitions through a prolonged and discontinuous change process, unfolding in an accelerated or dragged out manner over time. The transformations do not occur in the same way and intensity for all families and communities. Thus the ethnography of the particular (Abu Lughod, 2018), I show and use here, allows us to examine the varying degrees of autonomy and the responses produced by peasant fractions in order to stay on the land. I argue that the patronage relationship is circumscribed not only by ties of solidarity, but also by ties of authority and subordination that mark the dynamic equilibrium characteristic of relations historically established there (Carvalhosa, 2016). I suggest that this characteristic is what has kept the relationship between farmers and landowners (patrão, bosses) solid until the present day, although it has undergone several reconfigurations over time. However, one of the contexts that provokes a rupture in the customary patterns of land use and expels the farmers from the land is the arrival of the Minas-Rio mining enterprise owned by the transnational Anglo American. The strategies of land acquisition by the businessmen ignore completely the main characteristic of this peasantry: the subordinate use of the land. Thereby, the networks of social relations and the ties with the land and the territory are disrupted, making the families' mode of production and social reproduction unfeasible, jeopardizing their very existence conditions. The deconstitution of the notion of possession as a social form of land occupation, the non-recognition of cultural codes imbricated with socio-environmental dynamics, the expropriation of the peasantry, and in situ displacement (Feldmann, 2003) trigger a violent scorched earth process (Santos, 2014). This research intends, therefore, from the ethnographic point of view, to contribute to the understanding of the strategies of production, reproduction, and maintenance of family patrimony and the historical solutions produced for the construction of resistance of the farmers in defense of customs and the right to land.