The moral architecture of the resistance, of the practices to the discourses and the feelings: the case of the ranchers of the extreme Northwest of São Paulo

Abstract

The reflections that will be produced by means of this research are impulse to empirical evidence that amounted of field work carried out for the doctorate of the researcher who presents this project. We will move from analysis of the moral content of the strategies of reproduction of ranchers of extreme northwest of São Paulo state (microregion of Jales), who were treated at that moment as strategies of resistance, to achieve the morality contained in other expressions of resistance: the feelings (especially of belonging and of suffering) and the speeches (especially of affirmation of small agriculture or critical/affirmation of the model of agribusiness development). Beyond the explanations offered at that moment, we will take the feelings (as an expression of a contradiction hermeneutics that reveals a morality) and discourses (as a manifestation of a reflexivity that also contains notions of justice) as capable of expressing and also sustain the processes of resistance to expansion of the sugar cane agribusiness in the region, which poses a threat to the reproduction of the way of life of ranchers. Important theoretical frameworks for the deepening of this interpretative perspective are those focused on the Sociology of Emotions, and in Political Sociology of Morality. In addition to revisiting the vast empirical material produced for the confection of the doctoral dissertation of this researcher, will be resumed work in the field with a view to pursuing the interpretative hypotheses suggested by this project. We will conduct further interviews taking into account the theoretical and methodological principles of Oral History, as well as some important principles of ethnography, we will follow the process of ongoing transformation produced by the arrival of sugar and alcohol plant (since it was installed in the region quite recently) by also analysis of secondary data, and take lessons from studies of the "sociology of image and photography" for the incorporation of iconographic images (photographs taken and produced in the field) as a source of information, analytical resource and methodological tool. (AU)