Abstract

DUPIN, Leonardo Vilaça. “I Am Part of a Class of Producers Who Lost the Know-How of the Past and Began to Tread the Path of Technology”: Peasant Trajectories in the Manufacture of Artisan Cheeses in Minas Gerais. Antipod. Rev. Antropol. Arqueol. [online]. 2020, n.40, pp.153-173. ISSN 1900-5407.  https://doi.org/10.7440/antipoda40.2020.07.

The article is the result of ethnographic work carried out in artisan cheese farms of southwestern Minas Gerais, Brazil. Its purpose is to discuss the complexity of the activity and the contemporary presence of peasants in the manufacture of this product. The peasants are analyzed as historical subjects, with a diversity of ways of being and living, and distinctive characteristics concerning the classic concept of peasant, resulting from their own national and regional circumstances. The "peasant" category, has emerged locally as an epistemological problem to be addressed, as it escapes the illusion of the circumscription of traditional society, which considers it a well-defined social and cultural unit. In a contemporary context, framed by the accelerated flow of people and things, in which borders are increasingly blurred, this category was not understood or used as a notion of society, but as actors who associate in various networks and who hold the family, land, and work as moral elements from which they establish specific relations with the occupied territories. Part of this complexity of relationships is what I discuss in this text. As I approached, through my fieldwork, the experiences and practices developed by social subjects, the research led me to the challenge of creating a multi-actor ethnography, several ethnographic "soils," and empirical questions to be solved. Faced with this situation, I chose to assume the idea of a "peasantry," understood as a subjectivity present, to a greater or lesser extent, in different specific groups that are articulated to varying extents and in ambiguous terms with modernity. Finally, I provide examples of how the trajectory of these actors is not linear, in such a way that a movement towards a dimension of modernity can open up variants that reconstitute tradition. With the establishment of health standards that reinforce "modernization" processes and the control activities that render illegal the Canastra producers, I analyze how they build local strategies based on their peasant ways.

Keywords : agriculture; artisan cheeses; illegality; modernization; peasant; peasant trajectories.

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