Os negros de Pedra d'Água: um estudo de identidade étnica: história, parentesco e territorialidade numa comunidade rural.

Abstract

This work is a study of ethnic identity in a rural black community located in the municipality of Ingá, State of Paraíba. Concepts of territoriality (as spatial category), ethnic identity (as relational category) and interethnic boundary (as locus of interethnic contact) are used as analytical categories. In order to understand these categories, we take into account the multi - relationships established between: a) the constitution of the community from its history, the importance of kinship and territorial relations as a specificity in the total organization of the national space, b) the whole of representations about the notion of oneself and of others, c) the constituted community and the surrounding society, with special attention to the scenario of the interethnic frontier as a privileged locus of contact between the Negroes of Pedra D'Agua and the surrounding places through forms of sociability and d) the conception of ethnicity and the construction of ethnic identity as a representation of difference and as a mechanism for the struggle for the right to land tenure. Specifically, we work with three questions: 1) What allows the ethnic group to become cohesive and share the same symbolic order? 2) what mechanisms are used to ensure that the group stays in the territory historically occupied by it? 3) How does the rural black community build its internal logic and how is it situated in the surrounding society? In order to answer such questions, we carried out fieldwork in the community, using structured and semi-structured interviews with reports of conversations, the making of the field diary and the genealogy of the group. We show how the close relationship of symbiosis between history, kinship and territoriality constitutes the main mechanism used by the group to insure their continuity and the defense of their territory. At the level of interethnic contact, we observe the relation of alterity between blacks and whites, from the confrontation of the "we" in relation to the "other." We investigate, therefore, how the ethnic identity in the Pedra D'Agua community affirms and strengthens itself in the struggle for territory and in the defense of kinship relations, in the interdiction of interethnic marriage and in joining the group in defending itself from the stigmatization felt in contact interethnic