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Abstract
Global environmental concerns have provided greater visibility to Amazonian traditional communities that have adopted new political identities to struggle for their livelihoods and territories. Through a case study of the quebradeiras de coco babaçu, babassu breaker women, this article offers a critical analysis of the challenges and opportunities involved in these processes. Through analyzing empirical evidence of their strategies of political representation, economic initiatives, a combination of productive and conservation concerns, and forms of accessing land and forest resources, this study addresses the risks of reproduction of relations of domination within their organizations, imposition of agendas by their allies and donors, and dilution of political capital due to the multiplication of social organizations. By confronting these risks, quebradeiras’ organizations have managed to maintain a dynamic process of social learning. Embracing their internal diversity and sustaining a continuous dialogue between external actors and communities, they have been able to manage the tensions which emerged in their socio-political struggle. Quebradeiras have continuously reinvented their traditions, to strengthen new political identities and to bring concrete changes in the cultural geographies of their communities.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank each and every quebradeira de coco babaçu who patiently shared lessons about their ways of life and social movement.
Notes
1. According to Scherer-Warren (Citation2009, p. 1): “there is a social movement when a collective action generates a principle of identity as a group, defining opponents or antagonists who work against the thorough existence of this identity and identification, and acting on behalf of a process of change, either social, cultural or systemic.” While social movements are non-hierarchical and fluid, social organizations or grassroots organizations are the hierarchical structures formalized to represent and mobilize them, as an agent in the interlocution with other sectors in society.
2. Consider, for example, the illustrations by Percy Lau, in Tipos e Aspectos do Brasil for the Revista Brasileira de Geografia (IBGE 1956). According to Almeida (2008), Lau's illustrations were used in textbooks for geography classes in schools in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1970s.
3. In Brazilian legislation, traditional people and communities are defined as: “culturally differentiated groups who recognize themselves as such, who hold their own forms of social organization, who occupy and use territories and natural resources as a condition for their cultural, social, religious, ancestral and economic reproduction, utilizing knowledge, innovations and practices generated and transmitted through tradition” (Decree 6040 of February 7, 2007).
4. According to the IBGE (Citation2008a) census for agriculture and livestock, there were 46,706 landholdings producing babassu kernels. Women's grassroots organizations estimate 400,000 babassu breakers (Almeida Citation2006c, p. 49). At any rate, they are the largest group of traditional communities extracting forest products, and the second in terms of value of production. The value of the 114,847 tons of kernels produced in 2007 was R$ 113,268,000 or approximately U$ 56,634,000 (IBGE Citation2008b,Citation2008c).
5. Territories are defined here as the units made up of the physical land and associated natural resources, intrinsically linked to all the socially constructed attributes that assure their belonging to a people and to a way of life collectively performed in a specific place, throughout their common history and political struggles.
6. Babassu fruits have a peel (epicarp) covering a starchy layer (mesocarp), which envelops a hard shell (endocarp) holding oily kernels.
