Da ambiguidade à ambivalência : a democracia emergente e as práticas de agricultura urbana em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This is a dissertation on radical democracy. Based on a critical reading of the Latin American investment in institutionalized participation, I seek to reconcile the concept of democracy with two central notions that are, nevertheless, to some extent avoided by much of the scientific corpus shaping key debates in participatory and deliberative democratic theory: the state and ways of life. The locus of the discussion centers on agriculture—a choice motivated both by the fact that the overcoming of traditional agricultural practices, seen as archaic, lies at the heart of modern state formation, and because, today, it is the peasant way of life, in alliance with quilombola and Indigenous traditional knowledge, that articulates the most significant critiques of these states. This reconciliation unfolds in two movements. The first, historiographic in nature, presents a brief reading of Brazilian state formation from the perspective of formalism and its latent consequence: the dialectic of ambiguity. I argue, however, that the formation of the Brazilian nation does not represent an interrupted process of modernization, but rather its caricatural expression—one that makes explicit aspects which, elsewhere, remain concealed. I thus trace the formation of the Brazilian state and its discourses of belonging through the lens of agricultural modernization. Along the way, I examine how this trajectory has led to the expulsion of peasants from rural areas, revealing a movement of flight by those who, in seeking to preserve their ways of life, reassemble insurgently in spaces of resistance. From this perspective, I analyze the recent politicization of urban agriculture. The second movement, ethnographic in nature, explores the conflicts experienced by two urban gardens in the city of Belo Horizonte: the Coqueiro Verde community agroforestry project and the Vila Pinho community garden. Drawing on long-term engagement with the farmers working in these spaces, I show how their demands insurgently disrupt prevailing formalist norms. In conclusion, I offer some reflective notes on the potential redefinition of the concept of democracy. Drawing from the ontological turn in anthropology, I defend the notion of emergent democracy, grounded in a pragmatic ethics of radical alterity, which calls for the non-assimilative coexistence of ambivalent worlds.