Behind the scenes of the landscape

a geographical journey through the territorial conflicts in Ceará, Piauí, and Tocantins

Abstract

The expansion of capitalism in the Brazilian countryside produces contradictions that are inherent to its existence: at the same time that it generates and concentrates wealth to guarantee its reproduction, it expropriates and subjugates those subjects who oppose its development logic, producing and accentuating inequalities between social classes. This study describes and reflects on the violence in the countryside generated by the development of capitalism, which lacerates the landscape and the subjects’ relationship with their territories, violating individual and collective rights and promoting innumerable territorial conflicts. In this article, we report the experiences arising from fieldwork carried out in the Cariri region of Ceará, in the semi-arid region of Piauí and the Cerrado of Tocantins in January 2020. The research was carried out through the systematization of dialogues and photographic records of these three places, together with a critical reading of the processes perceived during the visits.  As a result of the field study, we identified elements that act dialectically in the composition of the landscapes and territories, leading to an analysis of the landscapes which separated them into two groups: a) the group of landscapes of territorial conflict (perceived concretely), and b) the group of landscapes of territorial resistance (materialized in the subjects’ practices of resistance).