The Role of Intergenerational Dialogue in the Struggles for Rights in the Brazilian Amazon

• In Event: Communities Doing Futures: Research-Practice Continuum for Justice and Expansive Learning

Abstract

The research seeks to analyze the challenges of organizing collectively to fight for rights in the Brazilian Amazon, which is marked by violence related to land grabbing, mining, logging, predatory fishing, deforestation, drug trafficking, arms trafficking, and human trafficking (Fórum Brasileiro de Segurança Pública, 2022). In this challenging context, the practice-partnership research project “[anonymized]” was developed in 2019 by leaders from riverside communities in partnership with universities and non-governmental organizations to defend the Amazon, with the aim of consolidating the ‘buen vivir’ (Authors, 2022) and socio-environmental justice. The project takes place in a small school built of wood, without doors or windows, integrated with the forest and the Amazon River in the Marajó Archipelago (state of Pará). One weekend a month, young people from riverside communities, university students, community leaders, activists, and teachers, cross the River in small boats to stay for the weekend, discussing the past, the present, and the future of the Amazon and designing strategies for defending the rights of the riverside communities.
For those communities, the intergenerational dialogue is the basis of the tradition of knowledge production, which occurs in the interaction of human beings with the forest, the River, and non-human beings. In the project, dialogue is understood as a way of knowing, as the encounter of subjects with the common goal of knowing how to act to transform reality. The act of knowing is a process involving a dialogical situation in which the subjects try to apprehend reality to discover casualties and what makes reality as it is (Freire, 2001). It presupposes the understanding of the unfinished nature of the human being and the social character of knowledge (Vygotsky, 1997). The knowledge orally transmitted by the elders - about traditional agriculture, fishing, genetic resources, and use of flora species for the production of medicines - gains centrality in the pedagogical meetings as it allows youth to access memories of a past that they did not live but that was fundamental for their current presence in society as historical subjects capable of promoting social transformation. However, the tensions and contradictions between the traditional knowledge and culture, European colonizers’ culture, and the capitalist ideology of progress and economic exploitation of natural resources are part of everyday life in the Amazon.
The study analyzed those contradictions to understand the relationship between intergenerational ‘dialogue’, knowledge production, and ‘praxis’ (Author, 2021; Freire, 2001, 2005) in the project [anonymized]. The method was participatory action research; data was collected from 2020 to 2023 through participant observation, field notes, and group discussion. It can be observed that the food habit is an aspect that brings out multiple contradictions: tensions between food habits based on the Amazon biodiversity (açaí fruit, fish, and shrimp) and high-cost industrialized foods coming from distant regions; predatory fishing practices, ecological unbalance, and reduced availability of fish and shrimp; fish contamination, sickness, and difficult access to hospitals; labor exploitation, work in the economic chain of açaí fruit for subsistence or export; difficult access to school and high alcohol consumption.

Author

• Inny Accioly, Universidade Federal Fluminense