Ways of living in non-capitalist resistance ruralities in Tocantins

Abstract

This article presents some reflections on the non-capitalist possibilities of resistance from the ways of living in the rural territory in the interior of Tocantins - a State in the North Region of Brazil, more specifically, the territory lived by the quilombola community Barra do Aroeira. From an ethnographic and semiotic approach, without losing the connection with the geohistorical and political analysis, of the most abstract scale, for which we use Dialectical Historical Materialism and Decolonial Thought, we enter this territory of vast ancestral knowledge and non-capitalist resistance, with the objective of thinking, together with the community, if the quilombos would be capable of providing elements for a decolonial turn of the category of the common. More than a case study, the research that gives rise to this work opens fundamental questions, without necessarily solving them. We understand that the Eurocentric debate on the common, despite its importance, presents some limits with regard to the historical process of violent colonial domination in the Americas, whose black and indigenous resistance point to other paths. In addition, we believe that this resistance converges with constructive autonomy and women's leadership in social cohesion and in the struggle for land. For this we have divided the text into six parts: 1. Slowly stepping on this ground; 2. The lesson of subaltern landscapes; 3. Rurality of non-capitalist resistance; 4. Territory and architecture in Barra da Aroeira; 5. To be a black quilombola woman is to be a woman of courage; 6. Meeting of Knowledges.