Os Filhos do Lugar: crônicas da territorialidade pedral

Abstract

Research on the Brazilian rural world has sought to understand the practices and logics agencied by traditional populations in relation to the territories they inhabit. In this sense, studies have been produced on the so called specific territorialities of ethnic groups such as indigenous and quilombolas and productive groups such as extractivists and farmers. It is in this intellectual context that this study has listed as its object the strategies of appropriation and ordering spaces of housing, mobility and extractivism by the moradores of Pedra do Sal, a village located in Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel, on the coast of Piauí. Throughout the text, the aim is to describe and understand the pedral territoriality, a specific territoriality practiced by those who extract fruits, wood and animals from the forests and waters of the Piauí coast. It is a case study, based on fieldwork between the years 2015 and 2019, at Pedra do Sal, and on documentary research about the region and its inhabitants. It describes how the pedral territoriality was built over time by generations of moradores, who combined the family use of the terreno (casa and sítio), organized from kinship relations, with the common use of the terra (beach, forest, mangrove), ordered by a customary right, whose rules circulate orally in the community. However, the construction of this territoriality is not only the result of the ties that the moradores have established with the terra and the terreno. It is argued that the pedral territoriality results from the strategies activated by the moradores in relation to the possibilities and restrictions of use of the island territory, established by the donos de terra in the past and by empresas in the present. Between 1921 and 2004, there was a situation of morada, during which the povo of Pedral dealt with the regulation of the use of the terreno by members of the Silva family and that, between 2005 and 2019, there was a situation of enclosure, in which the resident dealt with the regulation of the uses of the terra by the wind energy companies. The study concludes that moradores developed pedral territoriality from a sophisticated family community ethical arrangement that orders a complex terra terreno space system, a product of the relations of conflict and solidarity established over time between moradores, donos de terra and empresas in the territory of Ilha Grande de Santa Isabel.