A vivência de um laboratório social no sertão de Pernambuco: lideranças, mediação e práticas sociais em Mirandiba.

Abstract

This thesis describes how political and community leaders from Mirandiba (municipality of the hinterland of Pernambuco) give shape to interventions of the public power and of civil society whose objective is the promotion of the social rights of the familiar farmers and the quilombolas. The processes studied began in the 1990s, when a young politician from Mirandiba was elected mayor by the Workers' Party and promoted what he called a "social laboratory." That is, a conglomeration of social programs in the small municipality, which aimed at empowering the rural population. The dynamics created would favor the emergence in the rural communities of community leaders. Part of them created in 2001 a local NGO, the “Conviver”, who stands up the Food Acquisition Program. At the same time, some leaders of the NGO carried out public interventions for quilombolas – which would become the formal identity of a significant number of local communities as of 2006. In this context of profusion of public and civil interventions for family farmers and quilombolas, we will make the portrait of community leaders – as well as the politician, Nelson Pereira, who contributed to the initial mobilization dynamics. This portrait – based on the practices and representations of community members and leaders themselves – will be ambivalent. For some, leaders are self-seeking: they take advantage of their functions, of their influence, for themself or for their kinship group. For others, the same leaders are altruistic: they seek to defend the social rights of quilombolas and family farmers. These contradictions reveal that the materialization of interventions by leaders is a complex process. A process that refers to diverse interests, diverse dynamics, diverse norms, diverse powers. To take care of this complexity, we adopt the perspective of the mediator. Leadership is seen as a mediating figure who participates in the local translation" of programs and projects initially induced in external spheres. Our approach is also inspired by the anthropology of public action and public policy, which allows us to reflect on the "interlocking of social logics" observed empirically in the interventions of public power and / or civil society.