Field Movements, Mining, Social Transformations and Everyday Resistance in Rural Communities of Minas Gerais

This work aims to analyze the everyday resistance of peasants impacted by the largest mining project in Brazil, the Minas-Rio iron ore pipeline. In the face of the rupture of traditionally existing social relations, the aim is to show the analytical relevance of mobility, honor and everyday resistance in the violent expropriation of peasants by mining. This analysis is based on the main categories of the composition of memories of the social myth of the golden age of the village community. That is, the set of social representations of the peasants, according to their experiences of social organization, of a subsistence ethic and its interpretations, handled before the deep feeling of destitution that they were submitted. Through the displacements of the peasants, to produce their subsistence, between the farms and the lands of family inheritance, in the so-called field movements, it constitutes the synaesthetic universe of sounds, cold, reciprocal gifts, obligations and customary notions of law that the peasants mobilize as an expression of their dignity, pride and honor of life in the field. Life in the field thus becomes a category that represents a moral network of obligations - give, receive and reciprocate - that reveals a know-how of their cultivation techniques, the organization of time and spaces. In the social structure in which they find themselves and in the face of the repression they live under the taking of their inheritance lands, the loss of parcels of land they produce on large farms, family conflicts and neighborhood conflicts caused by the mining ethos, barriers to claims by roads formal and profound sense of destitution, the mobilization of such a category becomes the main weapon of the peasents and marks a form of everyday symbolic resistance, more specifically a resistance of the honor of life in the field.