Sociabilidade no Assentamento Rural de Santana - Ce: terra e trabalho na construção do ser social.

Abstract

This research analyses the sociability at the rural settlement of Santana (between 1987 and 2005) and the learning processes of the rural workers on the struggles of everyday life for land, production and well-being. The Santana settlement was created by the agrarian reform policy of INCRA, in Brazil. It is situated in the city of Monsenhor Tabosa in the hinterlands (Sertão) of the State of Ceará, Northeast of Brazil. In the settlement, the rural workers build, in a peculiar way, the organization of the production and of their everyday lives. The research purpose is to investigate what it is to live in a rural settlement that keeps the common propriety of land and an organized (both collective and individual) form of production. Furthermore, it is important to investigate what the impact of such life for the formation of the settlers is. The theoretical approach is based on the “ontology of the social being” by Marx, Lukács and Mészáros. The field research had an anthropological Marxian approach, considering the totality represented by the sociability of the settlement as a case study. It could be observed that the rural settlement was strongly influenced by two historical moments. First, the settlers organized themselves based on two central mediations: collective property of the land and cooperative production, which led to the establishment of collective control of the settlement. Its sociability was characterized by solidarity and inter-dependency links of the settlers, because “all was decided collectively”. The social practice fostered a rich learning process, influenced by the associative production, frequent meetings and assemblies, amongst others. Nonetheless, material needs, practical difficulties of the collective production, and market relations with the outer world prevented the original project to further develop. In the second period, although the settlement maintained the collective property of the land, it changed the production to a mixed system, a combination of individual (whose responsibility was merely of the settler) and collective (organized by the Cooperative Union of the settlers) production to respond to both internal (enhancement of work and consume capacity) and external (insertion of the settlement in the market logic) demands. Besides, the settlers counted on external support for the implementation of the new individual-production system, such as governmental programs (PRONAF, for instance) and the approximation of some workers to the local political elite. From the results, one can conclude that the originality of the Santana sociability are the mediations required to maintain the original project, which reflects seeds of superior social relations, different from those of the bourgeoisie sociability. Although historical limits for the amplification of such sociability are a fact, the experience of Santana definitely contributes for the transition process to an emancipated society, beyond capital.