Cursos d’água, cursos da vida: comunidades tradicionais e a relação com a água

Abstract

Each culture develops a specific relationship with water. The traditional communities, usually groups of the Brazilian countryside, understand the water courses as references to everyday life both in regard to practical issues as symbolic. The production system, the location of the habitation, mythological beings and classification of time and space are created, and gain meaning in a whole, where the availability and the seasonality of water influence the modes of social reproduction. As intrinsic element to social relationships, water also synthesizes the contradictions between perceptions and different forms of appropriation coexistent. In this dissertation, I seek to analyze, through ethnographic research, the representation of water courses for the socio-cultural training of rural groups from Alto Jequitinhonha and Brasília de Minas, both in the State of Minas Gerais. These groups settled in regions of paths and they developed reproduction strategies through handlings that ensure its reproduction not only material but also symbolic, in the interaction with the environment and with surrounding groups. The discourse of development, coupled with the desire for sustainability, has reduced the importance of these peoples to their ability to produce and preserve biodiversity. This is a condition that reveals the materialist logic of production and ignores the bonds established with the ancestral territory. Thereby when development projects advance on traditional territories and use excessively the natural resources, impetuously they alter the devices ofreproducing material and symbolic these groups.