PLANTING THE FIELD AND KNOWLEDGE IN THE EMPLOYMENTS: Knowledge and Food Knowledge in Quilombo de Praia - North of Minas Gerais
Agrifood System; San Francisco River; North of Minas Gerais; Vazanteiros and Quilombolas
This thesis research has as main objective to understand the agro-food system in a Vazanteira/Quilombola community on the São Francisco river, in the north of Minas Gerais. It analyzes the practices of knowledge associated with the traditional territory in the characterization of know-how, production and management of food. As an empirical cut, this study is carried out in Quilombo de Praia, located in the municipality of Matias Cardoso, in the extreme north of the state. This community has a socio-biodiversity, an ancestral link with the land, with the ebb tides and with the São Francisco River, which characterizes their ways of life and their relationships of belonging to the place. The evacanteiros/quilombolas use the practices of swiddens in the ebb rivers and lakes for the production of food, which makes the relations of use and management of the different landscape environments, relate and are directly influenced by the dynamics and floods of the San Francisco River. By using these practices, they reaffirm and activate their identities as evacanteiros and quilombolas, using mechanisms such as seed exchanges, collective work and cultural expressions such as “batuque circles” to reaffirm these identities. In this study, it is intended to approach and investigate the know-how, the ancestral knowledge, the means of planting the fields, of harvesting the food and how this same knowledge ends up establishing itself as a form of "resistance" to struggles, territorial claims and the processes of environmental conflicts and transformations of the place, with significant changes in the relationships of food production in the community. As a main structure, the ethnographic analysis, the dense observation, the description of the gardens, the life stories of the subjects/actors, the knowledge and knowledge, the descriptions of the existing relations between the dry land, the ebb tide and the river, thus pointing to a reproduction logic and social practice of Vazanteira and Quilombola life and identity.