Resgate da construção de conhecimentos coevolutivos ecológicos, através da atuação do movimento de mulheres camponesas (MMC)

Abstract

This thesis mainly aims to answer the question: is the Peasant Women’s Movement (MMC), in Minas Gerais and Santa Catarina state, managing to rescue strategies for the ecological coevolutionary knowledge construction? By dialectical historical materialism, the research used life history, participant and non-participant observation as data collection methods. Four women from MMC - MG and five from MMC - SC participated in the survey. We aimed to understand the life history of women before and after they joined MMC, and we made observations and questions about their current production systems. As a theoretical framework, we started from the concept of what it is to be a peasant in Brazil, to the discussions about traditional knowledge and agroecology, arriving at the definition of what we present as ecological coevolutionary knowledge. We found that researches on traditional knowledge present it through the unique view of man as if he were the only representative of this knowledge. However, based on our epistemological assumptions and the understanding that gender relations, when structuring societies, are decisive in the way in which men and women build their knowledge, we cannot accept men as exclusive spokespersons for this knowledge. The literature review revealed a shortage of international and national research on women's traditional ecological knowledge. The invisibilization and devaluation of women's knowledge result from the combination of two systems of domination and exploitation: patriarchy and capitalism. With the advancement of capitalism, what generates money is valued, and what does not is devalued. Due to the sexual division of capitalist work, women were responsible for subsistence work, which was gradually being devalued and made invisible, as well the activities of traditional communities and nature itself. On the one hand, this historical-cultural process allowed women to conserve more ecological knowledge than men. On the other hand, the unilaterality of patriarchal science prevents society from making women visible and understanding how modernization impacts their lives and leads to the erosion of their knowledge. This research revealed these results: diversity of ecological knowledge of the peasant women in their agricultural management, with different criteria for seed selection, ways of storage and processing it; how these practices come from the knowledge inherited from past generations, built by the peasants themselves and/or learned through dialogue/experiences from their sociability networks. The results pointed to the conservation in MG and the recovery in SC of the strategies for building ecological coevolutionary knowledge, based on participation in the MMC. This participation allows them to build a new kosmos, generating an expanded perception of society, in which they feel capable and duty-bond to build their history, aiming at the community reconstruction, in contrast to the capitalist ideology of individuality and competition. The MMC peasants women move around, denying patriarchal and neoliberal values to affirm the positive aspects of traditional cultures: the reciprocal relations of human beings with each other and with nature.