Communal use of the land and associated-activist practices of cabocla population of the Santa Catarina Plateau

Abstract

Besides the proprietors of a large quantity of land, one significant portion of small and medium dwellers inhabited the Plateau of Santa Catarina. Most of them were squatters who lived at the marginal side of bucolic land properties of areas of natural fields. They made their principal source of living upon subsistence agriculture and in practices connected to the exploitation of communal resources of the fields, pine trees and native herbal trees. The access to those resources, as well as the possession of the land and the social life, which were transmitted from generation to generation in which orality and customary rights exerted fundamental importance, were regulated by means of practices, norms and habits, which were impossible to be assessed only by economic means. This undergoes a process of destabilization, as a new socio-spatial dynamics connected with the capitalist economy starts to be established in the region due to the new spatial circumstantial factors that become perceptible such as colonization, the legal property, the demarcation of the estates and the devastation of forests.