Foundation and comuunity: social formations from the emergency of new population settlements

• Grant number: 10/10669-7
• Support Opportunities: Regular Research Grants
• Start date: October 01, 2010
• End date: June 30, 2012
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology - Rural Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques
• Grantee: Ana Claudia Duarte Rocha Marques
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The main objective of this project is to analytically describe processes of settlement, from foundation to consolidation, in the Northeastern backlands since the end of the nineteenth Century, and in the Central-Western regions where grain-based agribusiness have developed, more recently, since the mid-twentieth century. This project hinges on a specific interest in the social relations that prefigure and above all that are established as a result of settlement processes. With this in mind, certain groups of relations were distinguished as the preferred focus of the investigation: between local actors and the State; within or between families; between groups, classes or social segments that compose these new local communities, it its relations of complementarity and tension. The general objective of this project corresponds to the formulation of a comparative frame in which the recurrences and distinctions in processes of foundation, consolidation or decadence in settlements in both regions can be recognized, correlated to specific historical periods and political-economic conjunctures, while always privileging the internal social dynamics of the formulation and realization of settlement projects. Complementing a classic theme in Brazilian historiography, human geography and sociology, this project proposes an anthropological approach, grounded in ethnography, and supported by literature that ranges from community studies, to the anthropology of the peasantry and of kinship, to new disciplinary developments in the study of politics and morality, in order to emphasize the social production of the social within these communities in formation. (AU)