Praxis without universality?

Considerations on the fetishism of the particular in contemporary agrarian geography studies

Abstract

This text aims to present an analysis of articles published in Agrarian Geography journals about traditional communities, seeking to understand how they establish a relationship between the notions of praxis and politics. We are also interested in scrutinizing the relationship between universality and particularity present/absent in these articles. To weave the proposed analysis, we carried out a survey of scientific papers about traditional peoples and communities in three Agrarian Geography journals, between the years 2008 and 2021. Based on this survey, we present how the authors define their objects of study and the main references used, and thus demonstrate how the fetishization of particular case studies greatly shapes geographic practice and restricts analyses to an immediacy that tends to cloud the understanding of reality precisely by hypostatizing its empirical manifestations.