Rural social experiences and the implications of silencing: History and Sociology dialogues

Abstract

This article recovers, in rural studies in the field of historiography and sociology produced from the second half of the twentieth century, issues associated with the importance of understanding agrarian spaces from the point of view of peasant social experiences that coexist with other modes of production, maintaining relationships. interdependence, fundamental to social reproduction. It arises from a need to respond to those who bet on the silencing of the social experiences developed by the rural populations as a strategy of domination and appropriation of the lands historically occupied by these communities. In this aspect, we seek to present a set of works that allow us to think about the transformations of the rural, the diversity of forms of existence in and of the countryside and about the knowledge produced from the various situations. The proposal is to overcome the belief in the unique and inexorable character of only one developmental path, which would favor the large agricultural establishments, today called agribusiness, from the outset to point out that we must be aware of the plurality of the rural. As we scrutinize academic production with political and social transformations in Brazil, and as previously silenced social agents have emerged, we no longer see a dichotomous rural world divided between dominant and dominant, but gradually come descriptions and analyzes of a marginal peasantry in the areas of large plantations, on the banks of the rivers and occupying the spaces of forests, such as besiegers, settlers, squatters, tenants, households, residents, extractors, among others. The merit of this reflection is to present the process of construction in the studies of sociology and history of a representation of rural space that allowed these groups to be seen in their experience of access and use of land.