The Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca community: ethnogenesis and quilombola territoriality

• Grant number: 24/19699-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Master's degree
• Start date: March 10, 2025
• End date: September 09, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Geography - Human Geography
• Principal Investigator: Valeria de Marcos
• Grantee: Lucas Martines de Azevedo da Silva
• Supervisor: Veronique Boyer
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Laboratoire Mondes Américains, France
• Associated to the scholarship: 23/04007-1 - Patriarchy and quilombola territoriality in Vale do Ribeira: a study on the relationship between gender and work in the community of Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca, BP.MS

Abstract

The ongoing master's project investigates the relationship between gender and labor in the production of quilombola territoriality in the Ribeirão Grande-Terra Seca community (Barra do Turvo, SP). The community self-identified as quilombola in the early 2000s, supported by EAACONE, to address the intensification of environmental preservationist policies in the Vale do Ribeira, established in 1969 but enforced only in the 1990s. Quilombola territoriality, as understood here, involves not only practices of common land use and natural resource management mediated by kinship, but also a new social relationship with the territory that strengthens political struggle, disrupts previous asymmetrical power relations, and legitimizes existing production practices. These changes affect and are affected by gender relations, both in terms of political mobilization and internal relations of production. In specialized literature, these processes - production of a specific territoriality, self-recognition as rights-bearing subjects, legal support for production practices, and shifts in gender relations - have been discussed through the concept of ethnogenesis. To deepen the theoretical understanding of the conditions that mediate the exercise of gender roles by women and men within the community after quilombola self-recognition, this project proposes a research internship at the Mondes Américains Laboratory (EHESS) in Paris, under the supervision of Dr. Véronique Boyer, a specialist in the field. The internship aims to investigate the relationships between gender, ethnogenesis, and ethno-territorialities in anthropological literature, in order to provide the ongoing research with the theoretical foundation necessary to understand the complex mediations involved in the reproduction of gender relations and the production of quilombola territoriality. Furthermore, it seeks to internationalize the research's preliminary results by submitting them to the evaluation and scrutiny of experts in the field, whose contributions can enrich the quality of the reflections developed thus far.