Land and Outrage: Violence in Land Conflicts, Fights and the Ethics of Struggle in the Faxinais of Paraná

Abstract

This article discusses violence in land conflicts through the perspectives of peasants in Pinhão, Paraná, concerning their experiences of deaths and threats in a struggle that unfolds in multiple ways. The analysis focuses on the terms through which the peasants narrate their experiences: outrages, provocations, fights, ambushes, bar fights, family fights. Such categories do not correspond to typologies or normative codes. Instead, they express forms of living and recognizing violations, and a knowledge of the dangers involved in the constitution of families, communities, and struggles. These categories also reveal the performative and everyday aspects of a dispossession process in which death and the threat of death become ways of claiming rights over people and lands, and of agencying persons and places. The categories remain open to contestation, representing how peasants morally evaluate the forms of violence and the tensions that come with living in disputed lands.