Participant Research, territorial rights and collective mapping

the intertwining between use and life

Abstract

The interlocution between Critical Geography and Participant Research transforms all involved in this task into active subjects, bringing collectivity to research and establishing a social commitment. It allows an understanding of the Brazilian countryside's social struggles and territorial rights, strengthened mainly in the period of the country’s democratization with the Constituent Assembly and read as a contradictory strategy for the reproduction of life. The objective is to bring the contents of this debate from this increased relationship of fieldwork and mapping processes, emphasizing the elaboration of Maps of the Lived. It is understood as a process that expresses the space of life and imbricates different historical moments, such as the past, present, and future, in the face of territorial conflicts and the distinct territorialization of rural subjects. The analysis of the territorial rights and disputes of Indigenous peoples is verticalized. In this article, we examine those linked to the administrative process of demarcation of the Tekoha Guasu Guavira Indigenous Land (PR). For these Guarani, the mapping is articulated: to the past, highlighting the dimension of the violence that emerged from the appropriation (and its attempts), as well as from the theft of their lands, to the present, through uses, the resumption of territory and the practical actions of territorialization, which are constructed as the future and aim at the physical and cultural reproduction of indigenous peoples, in addition to the boundary of their lands. To this end, there is, contradictorily, the negotiation of the limits of the TI that involves the possible mediation by the agents of the State, which powerfully summons Geography to the debate.