Rupture and Resistance: Gender Relations and Life Trajectories in the Babaçu Palm Forests of Brazil
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RUPTURE AND RESISTANCE: GENDER RELATIONS AND LIFE TRAJECTORIES IN THE BABAÇU PALM FORESTS OF BRAZIL By NOEMI SAKIARA MIYASAKA PORRO A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2002 Copyright 2002 By Noemi Sakiara Miyasaka Porro To Roberto, Felipe, Pedro and Ana. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply grateful to the people whose trajectories I had the privilege to cross throughout my journey in the babaçu palm forests in Brazil. Through a symbolic recognition of dona Vitalina Andrade and senhor Manoel Rodrigues de Sousa, I acknowledge my extended gratitude to each and every man and woman whose insightful and humorous companionship guided my learning path through the Mearim valley. During my years as a practitioner and a fieldworker, I was supported by several grassroots organizations, especially ASSEMA, Movimento Interestadual das Quebradeiras de Côco Babaçu, Cooperativa dos Produtores Agro-Extrativistas de Lago do Junco, Associação das Trabalhadoras Rurais de Lago do Junco, associations, unions and parishes of Lago do Junco, Esperantinópolis, São Luís Gonzaga, and Lima Campos. During my years as a student, my chair and friend Dr. Marianne Schmink wisely mentored my academic trajectory and return to professional life. Dr. Peter Hildebrand, Dr. Anthony Oliver-Smith, Dr. Alfredo Wagner, Dr. David Wigston, Dr. Irma McClaurin, and Dr. Stephen Perz joined the hard job of my intellectual guidance. I have enjoyed both the freedom to hold my own opinions, and the challenge of defending them. My Ph.D. program at the Department of Anthropology at UF was financially supported by the Hewlett Foundation, the Charles Wagley Fund, the Florida-Brazil Institute, the Tropical Conservation and Development Program, the Center for Latin American Studies at UF, the Inter-American Foundation, the Research Foundation / SUNY / World Wildlife Fund/ USAID, the Compton Foundation/ Department of Botany, iv the O. Ruth McQuown Fund/ Women Studies Program, and the Department of Anthropology at UF. Practical aspects of my education came also from occasional jobs offered by the Center for International Forestry Research, the WIDTECH, ICRW, DAI, USAID program and the Forest Stewardship Council. Special thanks are due to Dr. Charles Wood, Hannah Covert, and the entire administrative staff at the TCD program and the Center for Latin American Studies, for their caring support during many years. I want also to recognize dona Dijé Bringelo, Antonia de Brito, Leonice Pereira, Carol Magalhães, Luciene Figueiredo, M. Alaídes de Souza, Sebastiana Sirqueira, Diocina Lopes, frei Adolfo Themme, Rosana and Ebine, Alfredo Wagner, Domingos Cardoso, Joaquim Shiraishi, Querubina Neta, Jaime de Oliveira, Raimundo Vital, Francisco de Paula, Glória Gaia, Helciane Araújo, Cynthia Carvalho, Patrícia Nunes, Dáda Chagas, Valdener Miranda, Teresinha Alvino, Ildeth Sousa, João Valdeci, Lindalva Carneiro, Maria José Pereira, Raimunda Gomes, Manoel Ferreira, Antonia Moreira, Magna Cunha, Antonino Sobrinho, d. Zezeca and d. Dade, Dora Hermínio, M. José Gontijo, Barbara Goraeb, Paul, Joelma and William Losch, Mariana, Jorge and Andres Aragon, Elli Sujita, Richard Wallace, Kristen Conway, Mrs. Bernice, Sarah Fedler, Erva Gilliam, Rhonda Riley, Carol Colfer, Omaira Bolanos, Diana Alvira, Vicky, Vincent and Clara Reyes, Kuniko Chijiwa, Dorothy Stang, Kevin Veach and Carmen Roca. The honor of their friendship has pushed me to learn about the ways of life in the Mearim valley and about my own ways through life. To my grandparents Shigeru and Koyuki Sakiara, my parents Kazuco and Shiro Miyasaka, and in-laws Ada and Antonio Porro, I extend my deepest gratitude. With Pedro, Felipe and Roberto Porro, I celebrate the joy of being alive and together. v PREFACE At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial – and any question about sex is that – one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Alas, laid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating. I will not trouble you with that thought now, though if you look carefully you may find it for yourselves in the course of what I am going to say (Woolf 1981: 4-5). Through this ethnography, I intend to show how I came to hold my opinion about gender relations. It meshes narratives by people living in the babaçu palm forests and accounts of my own journey throughout the Mearim Valley, in the Amazonian state of Maranhão, Brazil. It focuses on social relations among men and women struggling to control their ways of life in a context of social antagonism. In the situations studied with support of political economy and feminist theoretical frameworks, local discourse and practice of gender relations often contradict development approaches. My aim was to investigate gender relations through these contradictions. This investigation required a consideration of discourses labeled as “gender and development,” currently involving the scenario of sustainable development in the Brazilian Amazon; and affecting gendered, ethnic-based forms of babaçu forest livelihoods. This dissertation also takes me one step closer to my dream of becoming an ethnographer. After some preliminary ethnographic experiments, I realized that I had to include myself as part of the data into the analysis to better explain my findings. Far from vi intending to write an auto-ethnography per se, I could not pretend an “objective” outsider standpoint either, but integrated some elements of my own life experience in the Mearim valley as a research strategy to validate and share my learning. Warned by the postmodern critique about the problems regarding the authoritarian representation of the “Other” (Marcus and Fischer 1986), I applied to myself as an ethnographer that constant exercise of questioning proposed by Foucault (1972: 50-55): Who is writing? What kinds of qualification does the author have? From which kind of social relations does her enunciation emerge? What are the institutional sites from which she writes? What tools do these institutions provide to her? I offer, therefore, my reading and analysis of the situations studied, while positioning my authorship as a woman, a married mother, a Brazilian descendant of Japanese peasants, a grassroots practitioner and a scholar trained in an American university. In 1983, I graduated as an agronomic engineer with a concentration in Ecology, at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. Having nothing like the political resistance of the 1960s, “left wing” students turned to alternative agriculture, agro-ecology, and adaptive technologies as our ways to come together to oppose “conservative modernization” driving the development model that predominated in Agronomy schools at those times. To celebrate graduation, a dozen of these half “greens,” half anarchist graduates opted for a trip to the Amazon of the rain forests, of the resisting Indians and peasants. After our planned tour together through major research institutions and sites, my boyfriend, Roberto Porro, and I decided not to return with the group; and crossing the states of Amazon and Pará by river, we ended up in a peasant village on the coast of the state of Maranhão. We were enchanted by their unique, humored way of life. Their vii village was the reversal of images of the rural isolation of individual farms, which presumably would prevent them from joining unionized proletarians in the revolution imagined in our rural sociology classes. At any rate, after hanging around with fishermen and agriculturalist peasants, we thumbed back to the South. However, this first experience in a peasant village had already hooked us, especially when we learned that our host was murdered soon after we left, because of a conflict over his land, and that the whole village would be relocated to make way for the future Air Space Launching Base of Alcântara.1 We began to make plans to marry, head back north, run a nice goat farm in a peasant village in the forest, and live an ecologically and socially sound life by a riverine beach. It was only 2 years later, already married and with a baby boy, when we met a Franciscan friar who invited us to work on an agricultural project in the state of Maranhão. Finally, in 1986, we indeed moved up north, not to run our own goat farm in a nice forested area, but to work with a dynamic social movement of peasants facing agrarian conflicts in the Mearim valley, a so-called former expansion frontier, mostly covered by degraded secondary growth, palm forests, and pastures. Roberto was hired by the Franciscan friars to coordinate a German-funded agricultural project based in the municipality of Lago do Junco, which was closely involved with the CEBs, Eclesial Base Communities, inspired by Liberation Theology. A semi-boarding school, also linked to the pastoral movements, hired me to manage a Belgian-funded educational project for peasant teenagers in the neighboring municipality of Poção de Pedras. 1 For the case of the Air Space Launching Base of Alcântara, see Almeida’s (2001:137-141) Human Rights in Brazil 2001. viii In the years in which agrarian conflicts involving disputes over land tenure and property rights took place in the Mearim valley, throughout the 1970s and 1980s,2 the Franciscan friars supported villages in their struggle for recognition of their right to the land. While most of the villages were swept away, some achieved their rights through open conflict, and eventual governmental action through so-called Agrarian Reform, being mistakenly denominated thereafter as “settlements.”3 Still other villages managed to negotiate and purchase the land from the pretense landlords.