This Land Is Ours Now Social Mobilization and the Meanings of Land in Brazil
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Wendy Wolford is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University.
“Wolford’s narrative style accommodates her heterogeneous sources, but she is rooted in ethnography, and the density of her description is a significant<br />virtue. She allows space for extended material directly from interviews with MST settlers and leaders, which ground her analysis. In her conclusion, she offers a careful, balanced, and subtle evaluation of President Lula’s record on agrarian reform that avoids the polemics associated with this subject.” - Thomas D. Rogers, <i>Hispanic American Historical Review</i>
“<i>This Land Is Ours Now</i> is destined to become a classic in social movement literature and among those who study property relations, land tenure, and development policy. Offering a fresh, honest, and insightful take on a compelling but previously oversimplified story, it has broad implications for the political strategies of social movements, autonomous communities, and development alternatives in Latin America and throughout the world.”—<b>Dianne Rocheleau</b>, Professor of Geography and Global Environmental Studies, Clark University
“Precious few ethnographic subjects have ever been accorded the respect, critical eye, and deep attention Wendy Wolford pays on every page to ordinary Brazilians. Her study of the MST is exemplary in every way. The voices and texture are palpable and are woven into an analytically powerful and conceptually original argument. A signal contribution to the study of land reform, of social movements, and of Brazilian politics. I’m frankly a little jealous of what she has achieved here.”—<b>James C. Scott</b>, Sterling Professor of Political Science and Anthropology, Yale University
“Wolford’s narrative style accommodates her heterogeneous sources, but she is rooted in ethnography, and the density of her description is a significant virtue. She allows space for extended material directly from interviews with MST settlers and leaders, which ground her analysis. In her conclusion, she offers a careful, balanced, and subtle evaluation of President Lula’s record on agrarian reform that avoids the polemics associated with this subject.”
- Thomas D. Rogers, Hispanic American Historical Review
Drawing on extensive ethnographic research, Wolford compares the development of the movement in Brazil’s southern state of Santa Catarina and its northeastern state of Pernambuco. As she explains, in the south, most of the movement’s members were sons and daughters of small peasant farmers; in the northeast, they were almost all former plantation workers, who related awkwardly to the movement’s agenda of accessing “land for those who work it.” The MST became an effective presence in Pernambuco only after the local sugarcane economy had collapsed. Worldwide sugarcane prices dropped throughout the 1990s, and by 1999 the MST was a prominent political organizer in the northeastern plantation region. Yet fewer than four years later, most of the region’s workers had dropped out of the movement. By delving into the northeastern workers’ motivations for joining and then leaving the MST, Wolford adds nuance and depth to accounts of a celebrated grassroots social movement, and she highlights the contingent nature of social movements and political identities more broadly.
List of Tables
Acknowledgments
1. Mobilization within Movements
2. The Making of a Movement in Southern Brazil
3. The MST's Imagined Community and Agrarian Populism
4. The Making of a Movement in Northeastern Brazil
5. Moral Economies of Sugarcane and Social Mobilization
6. Going Bananas: Producing for Market, State, and Movement
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Wendy Wolford is Associate Professor of Sociology at Cornell University.