Território como norma ou norma como território?: práticas e representações sociais durante a ocupação do Médio Rio Doce. (1891 1930)

Abstract

The territorial configuration and its relation towards the practices and social representations, which occurred during the process of occupation and legitimation of the vacant lands at the Médio Rio Doce (Medium Sweet River), in the first half of the 20th century. The rule is not restricted to neither its legal dimension nor to the purpose of the State, where this is made and approved, but works in the social practice according to certain historical circumstances and social, cultural and geographical features particularized. The open border of the Vale do Rio Doce (Sweet River Valley), until 1930, is characterized by the front of geographic occupation, based on shifting cultivation, however, after that it became itself in zone of capitalist penetration. This change has contributed to the displacement of peasants and agriculture which were replaced by farmers and capitalist companies. The forest that means good land became merchandise and means of capitalization to the cattle farm set. The hypothesis raised here is that the appropriation of the territory it is not only a game of economic forces and market, but of position occupied by the authors on a territorial scope and by the resources that these agents are able to mobilize. The advantage is with that one who is able to operate inside the regulatory benchmark created by the State and, this way, put the law in his/her favor. Advantage that is reinforced by the social representation, since if the law is on one side, simbolically it means that the other came to occupy a negative position of an outlaw in other words a rowdy and violator of the right. However, the one that is from the side of the law is fitted in the category of a good man and a true citizien. That way, the representation of the private property as social higher value and absolute right served to delegitimize the right of possession and, thus, contributed to the end of the front of geographic occupation and predominance of the great property. The main sources to be analyzed are related to a set of material virtually unexplored. These are the processes of purchasing of vacant lands conducted by the Secretaria de Estado da Agricultura de Minas Gerais (Secretary of Agriculture of the State of Minas Gerais), between the years of 1891 and 1937. The information contained in the dossiers were systematized in a database which containing: location, kind of occupation and land cultivation, land quality, occupant or applicants quality, price, and the particularities in the procedures as third-party challenges, deforestation of vacant lands, jurisprudence, invasion and ilegal occupation complaints and other situations that reveal conflits among different social authors. It has been outstanding for its unprecendent characteristic and by the complementarity to the analysis of the land processes, the state legislation produced along almost forty years of the republican period (1890-1930), related to the land grabbing and the use of the vacant lands