A (re)pecuarização do semiárido nordestino: reconversões produtivas entre agricultores familiares do Pajeú (PE).

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the dynamics of social change experienced by the semi-arid family farmers of brazilian northeast engendered by the process of “(re)cattlelization” in the transition of the 70s to the 80s, in the context of the cotton and sisal economic cycles crisis. This study focused on social, political and economic processes that have been consolidating the livestock expansion at the expense of agriculture, particularly temporary and selfconsumption crops, in the Pajeú region in the state of Pernambuco. Based on the assumption that social change is directly related to changes in the positions (which involves changes in status) of some social groups in relation to others, and supported by the theoretical and methodological tool which articulates the notions of productive reconversion (Bourdieu), figurational change (Elias) and territorialization process, this study undertook, specifically, to examine these transformations in family farmers life in Santo Izidro community area, in São José do Egito (PE) and in Barriguda agrarian reform settlement, in Tuparetama (PE), that abandoned the territorial project based on the combination of cotton, sisal and food crops with livestock to devote themselves almost exclusively to cattle breading and, finally, to establish a new territorial dynamics encouraged by institutional modernization policies and rationalization of the productive processes.