La Iglesia y los movimientos sociales en Brasil: Actos y fragmentos de sumisión y rebeldía

This dissertation has as its main object of study to analyse the limits and possibilities of change happening with Brazilian peasants, from the northeast region of the country, more specifically, form the state of Paraiba. This process of change, starts in the beginning of this century, being more accentuated in the period 1975-1989. This process can be characterized by attempts of rupture of domination practices and patterns in sight of economic, politic and sociocultural events and of new actors, including especially the relevant action of the Catholic Church. We tried to understand the changes occurring in the peasants' politic and social practices, the actions and demands of its class organizations, the types of confrontations to the Sta te' actions through the adoption of assistant public policies. The confrontations with the landowners who use practices of repression and subjugation more direct and immediate. And also the peasants attitudes as acculturated subjects and by traditional values and processes and at the same time, changing their behaviour by demands and needs of the modern social patterns. It was also considered the new perspective of the Church, renewed on one side, committed with the peasants shrugged and on the other it has kept its traditional features, assuming also the conflicting identity of the peasants, sometimes advancing, sometimes receding, enclosing themselves in traditional, cultural, moral and religious practices, thus contributing to the emergence of conflict, permitting that the conservative and traditional dimension characteristics of the Northeast social structure, remain under new shapes. This is reflected as much in the dominant as in the dominated segments. The organization for the demand of rights, the rupture of the Social Contract and the history possibility of establishing a new sociability crash with the cultural schemes traditionally internalized constituting an obstacle to the many attempts to break the traditional social political relations, permitting thus the emerging of a new social order.