Escopo: Publicar trabalhos e pesquisas produzidos em contextos nacionais e internacionais que envolvam atores, instituições e situações relacionados ao mundo rural, abordando tanto questões relativas às dinâmicas dos processos históricos referidos ao mundo rural, quanto temas e as questões que emergem dos processos sociais contemporâneos. Qualis: B2 Área do conhecimento: Ciências Humanas Ano de fundação: 2007 e-ISSN: 2317-1480 Título abreviado: RURIS (Campinas, Online) E-mail: ruris@unicamp.br Unidade: IFCH Editora responsável: Nashieli Rangel Loera Prefixo DOI: 10.53000
Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas
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The stories from the caatinga about humans transforming into animals that look like pigs, dogs, or wolves, rather than being mere anecdotes or simple cultural variations on a familiar theme (the werewolf), point to connections with an Amerindian mythical-sociocosmological background, in which otherness appears as a given and as a regime of transformation. Far from constituting merely a regional narrative motif, these stories mobilize classic problems of South American ethnology within a social universe that has rarely been described in these terms. Certainly, the caatingueiros share several elements with the vast bibliography on the theme (from the European werwolf to the Latin American lobisomem). However, what is of interest here is the ethnographic inflection that my interlocutors introduce into this literature: the Labisôme, or Bicho, does not attack humans to devour them or drink their blood, but to urinate in their mouths and convert them into Bicho, a more-than-human way of producing another of oneself and, with that, subtly displacing the very anthropological problem of otherness.
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The objective of this article is to produce a sociological analysis of the characteristics and profile of cannabis researchers at the Federal University of Viçosa (UFV). The methodology involves a case study, selecting participants for interviews through the "snowball sampling" procedure. The results revealed five aspects of the researchers: cultural, social, and political interests; recognition of the plant's economic potential; study orientation; the existence of close individuals using the plant for medicinal purposes; and commitment to the scientific advancement of the subject. These characteristics were crucial for identifying three profiles of scholars: scientist-researcher, entrepreneur-researcher, and activist-researcher.
Organic certification and agroecology: notes on the conformation of a participatory guarantee system
Brazilian legislation was a pioneer in recognizing Participatory Guarantee Systems (SPG), characterized by collective action in evaluating the quality of organic products. The expansion of participatory certification initiatives in Brazil has sparked studies due to the potential innovations of this model. Thus, this research analyzed the consolidation of the SPG Rede Borborema de Agroecologia, based on documentary research, semi-structured interviews and participant observation. It was found that adherence to this model was beneficial for the production system, especially for opening up the market, building knowledge, greater autonomy and greater visibility of female work, influencing the promotion of agroecology.
The dossier, Ways of Knowing: Rural Worlds at the Intersection of the Arts and the Humanities, aims to foster dialogue, exchanges, and encounters between the arts and ethnographic practice as pathways to knowledge. Our purpose is to stimulate the know-how of the humanities in mutual interactions, alongside multiple perspectives and ways of knowing.
Repeated non-demarcation of indigenous lands in the upper Purus
The purpose of this article is to go through, based on field research observations, the documentation on the non-demarcation of part of the Indigenous Lands of the upper Purus, referring directly to the Jamamadi, but also to the Apurinã. These papers refer to different institutions, such as FUNAI, the local Prefecture, the Public Prosecutor's Office and the Federal Executive. By going through these dynamics over decades, the historical effect allows us to analyse and reflect on the dimensions of non-indigenous actions in the region.
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Agrarian Reform as an Environmental Protection Policy
In recent decades, the greater global recognition of the risks associated with climate change, as well as the new possibilities for linking social and ecological agendas, has favored the emergence of new perspectives on socio-environmental justice in rural areas. Alongside food security and fair land distribution, environmental protection is being mobilized by agrarian reform social movements as a strong justification for land expropriation and the promotion of family farming. This work investigates the case of the Mário Lago settlement in Ribeirão Preto, São Paulo, whose political legitimacy is primarily based on moral perspectives of an ecological nature. In conclusion, the construction of a political agenda aimed at the conservation of natural resources has enabled the MST to link ecological values to its proposal for land use and occupation, politically facilitating the establishment of a Sustainable Development Project (PDS) settlement. As a result, the MST's popular agrarian reform goes beyond production and income issues and is now presented as an important socio-environmental policy.
Book review Aprendizajes del Movimiento Zapatista. De la insurgencia armada a la autonomía popular
The book Aprendizajes del Movimiento Zapatista. De la insurgencia armada a la autonomía popular (From armed insurgency to popular autonomy) is a contemporary synthesis of the history of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), covering the background to the indigenous peasant resistance in Chiapas, in southern Mexico, and the historical context that led to the armed movement in 1994, which has become known throughout the world and, throughout its existence, has become an example of radical autonomy with an autonomous popular and class political project, built from its territories and which is seen as a reference for other indigenous and peasant communities, and for various popular sectors in the world.
Narratives of knowledge and practices of a profession in decline
This article aims to understand the role of blacksmiths in the production of equipment for family farming. To this end, it was based on fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, both with family farmers who demand the work of blacksmiths, and with blacksmiths in rural areas, in Vale do Rio Pardo - RS. The research identified various equipment created for family farming. Such utensils make it possible to increase work productivity, reduce labor burden, and improve the quality of family farming products. Therefore, they can contribute to the maintenance and renewal of the sector. In this sense, they denote the importance that blacksmiths still have in rural areas.
This article analyses the process of regulating Article 68 of the Transitional Constitutional Provisions Act of 1988, which deals with land for the remnant Quilombo communities. We examine archival documents, such as bills, draft decrees, and decrees, that sought to regulate or regulated the article. The text's main argument is that the constitutional regulatory process produced an unprecedented political notion of "quilombo remnant communities" that impacted the proper lands they occupied. Based on the constitutional association between land and culture, the right to the land the "remnants" occupied was produced and legitimised through the unprecedented notion of " common usage land". Out of this combination, the legal apparatus of the Brazilian state forged the possibility of living on private land, but inalienable meant and intended for common use only.
This article seeks to analyze the construction of the concept of family farming in Brazil. To this end, it examines government documents, public policies and legislation on the subject, intertwining anti-black dimensions present in the archives and the prioritization of European-type farmers as an emblematic case of success. Finally, it points out how the definition of the characteristics and operationalization of the concept of family farmer in public rural development policies has served to enhance and feed back into forms of hierarchization and indignity based on racial selectivity and the privileging of white lives to the detriment of other racial groups.
Interview with Claudio Aparecido de Carvalho, former president of the Congadeiros Association of the city of Machado (MG)
The interview given by Claudio Aparecido de Carvalho intertwines his family's trajectory, from a historical and spiritual point of view, with the context of the Feast of Saint Benedict in the city of Machado, in southern Minas Gerais. Cultural aspects associated with the lifestyles of the Black population established in the region are raised, considering political and economic dimensions linked to the transformation of the territory, the transition from the context of farms based on enslaved labor to the urban consolidation of the municipality, and the perpetuation of traditions that reference the African continent as a dimension of identity and belonging for the communities devoted to Saint Benedict. Claudio also addresses the context of the coffee economy that was established in the region, spanning the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, as well as transitions from the slave-based structure to the post-abolition era in the southern Minas Gerais territory.
In this article, I deal with Nove, a kinetic-musical rite marked by sung poetry and collective dances, held in the Médio Jequitinhonha region of Minas Gerais. The Brinquedo is associated with the so-called beginning of the world, a time marked by enchantment, secrets, and in which all beings had the faculty of speech. By considering some of the elements of Nove, especially the device of alternating singing, as well as issues relating to the repertoire, I seek to detail and analyze them in order to argue that the rite ends up remaking, or updating, the so-called beginning of the world.
Forms and meanings of the drawings-writings on the Stones of the Baniwa people
This article deals (Veiga, 2023) with the dynamics of Baniwa knowledge through drawings on stones (petroglyphs) in the territory of the upper Rio Negro (AM), based on the ethnographic experience of a collective research trip to the upper Içana and Ayari rivers with teachers Baniwa from Kariamã school. Thus, I reflect on how these drawings - marked by mythological episodes and the action of ancestors during the formation of the world and cosmic organization (Baniwa; Barreto; Hugh-Jones; Luciano; Xavier) - are connected to different forms of languages, practices and arts (rituals, narratives, blessings, graphics, objects), which awaken its vivification today.
The book Pelo Prisma Rural by Fernando Cerisara Gil explores how rural themes shape Brazilian literature, present both in explicitly rural novels and more cosmopolitan works. Divided into two parts, the book revisits the concept of regionalism and its historical evolution, highlighting its significance in shaping national literary identity. In the second part, Gil analyzes the representation of rural life in works by authors such as Afonso Arinos, Graciliano Ramos, and Itamar Vieira Júnior, emphasizing narrative distancing and the dehumanization of rural characters. This work is a major contribution to contemporary literary studies.
This article discusses how the intertwining of art and anthropology, from artistic practices such as photography, embroidery and poetry, based on autoethnography and combined with oral histories, provide unique perspectives for investigating narratives of life and resistance in the Pampas of Rio Grande do Sul. The study presents new ways of transforming realities and challenging the hegemonic logic of soy agribusiness. Articulating aesthetics and politics, it proposes sensitive ways of documenting socio-cultural dynamics, reaffirming the robustness of the arts as forms of resistance and reinvention. By rooting itself in local specificities, the research expands the possibilities for building knowledge in the social sciences, proposing a methodological polyphony.
The research has as a context the war between Russia and Ukraine and the consequences on international trade. Such an approach is justified by the fact that a possible depletion of the soil which could compromise the food and nutrition security of the country. The objective is to defend this condition occurs to maintain a colonial system which privileges large landowners and large corporations of the food industry. The study showed that the federal government created the Política Nacional de Fertilizantes, a measure that neither protects the soil nor encourages means of mitigating or eliminating food insecurity in the country.
In this article, I analyze the memorialistic dynamics of repressive events carried out after the coup of 1964, whose target was peasant populations in a locality known as Pedra Lisa, currently in the municipality of Japeri, where land struggles led by an association of rural workers took place, connected with other peasant mobilizations in the Baixada Fluminense in an earlier period. It is observed that, for these populations, repression began immediately after the 1964 coup, also manifesting in less explicit ways than conventionally known, such as the appropriation of land from former leaders with the support of the dictatorial regime. These events generate memorialistic dynamics that change over time, but are always marked by fear and forced attitudes of forgetfulness.
The objective of this work is to contribute to reconstruct and map the resistance processes that took place in the town of Santa Lucía, in Tucumán in the Northwest of Argentina. After a decade of crisis in production and processes of social mobilization in the 1960s, the dictatorial government of Juan Carlos Ongania announced the closure of 11 sugar mills. It is essential to investigate the implications of the closure of the mills at the level of changes in the socioeconomic and political structure, as well as how the resistance of the workers marked the conflict and violence of subsequent years and this was expressed in the dispute also in the territory. We propose a cartography of the resistance movement from the work with documentary sources and the crossing with interviews with actors in the process.
Violations of the rights of the Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples, of the municipality of Aracruz/ES, during the Brazilian corporate-military dictatorship
The objective of this article is to analyze the different types of violence against the Tupinikim and Guarani indigenous peoples, in the Municipality of Aracruz (Espírito Santo state), during the Brazilian business-military dictatorship (1964-1985), practiced by the dictatorial State, by FUNAI and by the Aracruz Celulose Group. This article is divided into three parts. In the first, we discuss the creation of the project that gave rise to the Aracruz Celulose holding and the relationship between its partners and repression. Next, we discuss the existence of these peoples in this region. In the last part, we analyze the violence to which they were subjected, emphasizing the participation of FUNAI.
Brazilian business-military dictatorship
In this report by Dercy Teles, it will be possible to learn a little more about the first major empate in Xapuri, in 1982, and the arrests that resulted from it through the perspective of one of the first women to lead a rural workers' union in Brazil. Furthermore, this report provides important information about the methods that the Federal Police and other state agents used to try to weaken and sabotage the struggle of the seringueiros during the dictatorship.
The view of the National Truth Commission on violations against indigenous peoples and their consequences
The article discusses the continuous violence produced against the indigenous natives and their timeless resistance. At the same time, it discusses the occurrence of these practices in the context of the civil-military dictatorship. In addition, it highlights the unprecedented nature of the recognition of indigenous peoples carried out by the National Truth Commission, as well as its investigative and methodological gaps. Finally, it distinguishes the challenges to the implementation of a National Indigenous Truth Commission.
This article presents part of the conflicts lived by Babaçu coconut breakers who have been lived for several generations in the southern region of Piauí, an area of agribusiness expansion, known as MATOPIBA. Based on documentary reviews, the research methodology is qualitative, participant and collaborative dialogic, in addition to the production/analysis of the documentary “Filhas do Coco”. Considering the memories and the content of the breakers' narratives, the attempt to (de)territorialize the region in an attempt to implement the agribusiness installed in the region is made explicit through the adoption of policies structured by the Brazilian state as a way to support/strengthen the agrarian sector.
Expressions of violence in the countryside under the corporate-military regime
This article presents a systematization of expressions of violence in the context of land conflicts in Maranhão in the 1970s, a period that runs through the Coup d'Etat (1964-1985). Violence manifested itself in different ways: arrests, torture, beatings, situations that compromised the control of assets and/or fundamental resources for the production and social reproduction of families, in addition to those involving moral aspects. The present study, based on State documents from the Delegacia de Ordem Politica e Social (Dops) in Maranhão, offers a contribution to the literature that deals with the impacts of the business-military regime in the countryside.
A decade of the peasant truth commission
The text is an excerpt from an interview with Leonilde Medeiros, Sérgio Sauer, Regina Coelly Saraiva and Clea Nice Porto, who made up the group most actively linked to the actions and initiatives of the Camponesa da Verdade Commission (CCV) since its creation in 2012. The interview explores a little of the memory of the work carried out by the CCV, as well as allows us to see the contributions made by the group to the more general debate on repression in the Brazilian countryside, in addition to the limits of the dialogue held with the National Truth Commission (CNV) and some divergences of understanding about what would have been the dictatorship in the Brazilian rural areas.
The article brings reflections on labor relations and the specific type of poultry confinement based on data collected in a rural community in Ubiratã-PR. Taking poultry farming as a plantation system, the author followed the routine of a family of employees and residents and could see how, despite being independent contractors, their degrees of freedom are very limited. In addition to transforming the pace of the cycle of plants, animals and people, with a set of techniques and technologies that accelerate the growth of chickens, making farmers need to adapt to the accelerated pace, the dependence of the plantation on some kind of forced labor, in Donna Haraway's terms, became evident. The workers' lives are reoriented around the schedules and needs of the confined animals, all to keep them alive until the end of the batch. A combination of work in large-scale production and small-scale subsistence farming around the house under strict sanitary conditions is perceived, in addition to an intensification of the domination of the sphere of work over the domestic sphere, mainly in monitoring the temperature conditions during the heating period and at night.
Recent contributions from investigations into dictatorship, repression and social struggles in rural Brazil
In 2022, 10 years have passed since the installation of the National Truth Commission (CNV). In 2024, the civil-military coup completed 60 years. Despite the limits and contradictions that permeated its existence, the CNV's work offered undeniable contributions to discussions about the civil and military coup of 1964 and its impacts on society as a whole, as well as the implications of facts that still occurred in that period and have not yet been resolved in the current days.
In this article we set out to combine two approaches to reading Rachel de Queiroz's novel O Quinze. We use themes that drive our research agendas, namely migration and the environment, as a kind of “filter” through which we respond to the reading of the novel. Central to the book structure, in the scourge of drought and starvation, the nordestino is the migrant who is forced to leave the place where he lives. The outcome is an exercise to put in perspective literature and sociology in order to highlight the common ground on which both prescribe everyday life.
Rodolfo Bezerra de Menezes Lobato da Costa
José Lins do Rego and the transversal dialog with the Social Sciences
This essay aims to scrutinize the existing dialogue between the Arts and the field of Social Sciences, taking as its basis for discussion the literary novel Riacho Doce by José Lins do Rego (2021), with the aim of demonstrating how the sensitivity of the plot provides an in-depth reading of the social relations that guide the ways of being and knowing how to do things of sea fishermen. In order to deepen our interpretation of the work, we used as a base of support some concepts mobilized by researchers in the field of Social Sciences, with the interest of bringing together their threads of discussion.
In this visual essay, images of paintings that allude to open-air markets are presented, with particular emphasis on the "Itararé" open-air market, located in the central region of São Paulo (SP), Brazil. The market, as a symbol of the connection between the countryside and the city, is vividly represented in the paintings through the expressive use of color, which distinguishes it from, and contrasts with, the material and symbolic grays of the metropolis. The essay constitutes part of the dissertation “Pinturas Livres” (2023), authored by me, and developed within the graduate program at the Institute of Arts of the University of Campinas (PPGIA/UNICAMP).
This article proposes a reflection upon the changes in lands, experienced by rural families affected by the works of the project to integrate the São Francisco River, with hydrographic basins in the northern part of Brazil’s northeast region. The empirical focus is on a group of rural families from the county of São José de Piranhas, in the northeastern state of Paraíba, who, after being expelled from their Sítios, were resettled in productive rural villages. This is an ethnographic study that belongs to the debate surrounding Brazilian peasantry, having as itscentral concern the issue of access to land for historically marginalized people in our country. We aimed to understand how the transition between the categories of morador, shared by most of the resettled families, to that of landlord, and how the group has been giving meaning to this process.
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