Resistência e alianças na extensão rural: etnobiografia de Miqueas Marques de Lima

Abstract

Focusing on the life trajectory of Miqueas Marques de Lima - a young family farmer, as he prefers to be called - who currently inhabits, organizes, and politically represents the Sepé Tiaraju Settlement, located in the municipality of Serra Azul, in the interior of São Paulo State, this dissertation takes - as a point of departure - life in its formative process: that which often remains outside analytical frameworks. Rather than adopting a distanced view of the countryside as structure, I propose a sensitive approach to the rural as lived experience, biographical and shaped by marks that precede the conquest of land and shape the ways in which that conquest is understood and continually updated. By following Miqueas’s accounts from the time of encampment, I sought to listen not only to what he does today, but to what led him nowadays - the black tarpaulins, the displacements, the silences and gestures that, even before the plot of land, already outlined the contours of a struggling man. In a life context marked by technical and bureaucratic apparatuses, one must ask: what alliances, networks, and translations are required to make the countryside not merely a space of labor, but a territory of existence, dignity, and future? And further, how does the experience with rural extension become, for Miqueas, not a means of leaving his farmer condition, but rather a way of building his own permanence, deepening his voice, and constructing political representation? By thinking of rural extension as a means, I argue that technique emerges as a possibility for continuity - not in opposition to farmer knowledge, but as a space of composition, translation, and mediation. It is in this intersection of memory, territory, technique, and knowledge that Miqueas’s trajectory is inscribed, in which his process of becoming a technician does not sever his condition as a young farmer; instead, it intensifies his capacity to claim, represent, and sustain the ways of life he upholds - for himself and for his collective. His work thus becomes part of a broader movement of voice-deepening, a concept I develop to understand the ways in which he articulates knowledge, institutions, and partnerships in building a form of representation that produces not only visibility, but also agency over his territory and the worlds being forged within it. I argue that life in and of the countryside is inseparable from the ways in which the knowledge that sustains it is constructed - and it is in this collective and relational construction that this dissertation seeks to explore. As this concerns the writing of a life, I chose ethnobiography as an analytical and methodological key, and as an ethnographic exercise to understand how an individual trajectory is woven through collectivities, networks, institutions, and struggles. It is also a way of recognizing that the making of a person - a “character-person” (Gonçalves et al., 2012) - is a continuous process of composition with territory, with relationships, institutions, and alliances that make life possible. This choice is grounded in the conviction that telling Miqueas’s life is not merely to record his path, but to accompany how he narrates and inscribes it in the world, converting his biography into a terrain of struggle, of knowledge translation, and of claiming.