University of Campinas
Octobre 2020 à Juin 2021
Nashieli Rangel Loera is an anthropologist. She was born in Guadalajara, Mexico where she graduated in Sociology with a specialization in Latin America. She obtained her master's degree (2004) and her doctorate (2009) in Social Anthropology at the State University of Campinas- Unicamp, Brazil. In 2003, an article of hers resulting from a research conducted in Mexico on the artisanal production of Cotija cheese, received the Harold K. Schneider award from the Society for Economical Anthropology. In 2005, her work on the dynamics of land occupations organized by rural social movements in Brazil received the award for best research from the national project “Ciências Sociais e Formação de Pesquisadores” [Social Sciences and Training of Researchers]. Currently she is a professor and researcher at the Department of Anthropology of the Philosophy and Humanities Institute of Unicamp. Between 2017 and 2019 she was coordinator of the graduate program in Social Anthropology and since 2015 she has been deputy director of the Center for Rural Studies (CERES) of the same university. Between 2014 and 2016 she chaired the Agrarian Studies session of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA). Since 2019 she coordinates the working group "Reinvenciones de lo común" [Reinventions of the common] of the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). Her research interests center around issues related to the way of life of peasant populations, territorialities, the state and the social effects of contemporary collective claims.
Lands, exchanges and consideration: everyday production of territory
In the last 35 years the rural region of Pontal de Paranapanema, in São Paulo state, has had the largest amount of land distributed (settlements) to land claimants participating in social movements of rural workers. In this region, settlements are closely linked to each other through a network of relatives, friends, acquaintances and also through houses located in small towns or nearby communities, forming in this way a larger shared territory. This research project seeks to explore from an ethnographic perspective the social mechanisms that enable the existence of these mutually interconnected spaces and life in common. One of these mechanisms seems to be the persistence of requesting and exchanging, a practice that produces vicinity and also translates precise calculations: a particular knowledge about the others’ needs and a ‘consideration’ or a certain kind of daily care in relation to the other. In this way, this proposal poses, on the one hand, a methodological challenge, that of capturing the contingent nature of interactions, relationships that enable more or less lasting links and produce a common space and shared temporalities. On the other hand, there is a broader theoretical challenge: that of inquiring about the mutual constitution of people and territories, and in this entanglement, the production of rights and social demands.
