Movimentos sociais como sistemas estruturados : sobre a possibilidade de uma análise estruturalista do Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra de Sergipe – MST/SE

Abstract

To what extent can social movements, and more specifically their symbology, be understood from their adequacy to the pre-existing systems of relations in the society in which they are formed? What is proposed here is that the symbolism of the Movement of Landless Rural Workers of Sergipe - MST/SE is largely explained by the fact that it simultaneously maintains objective relations of opposition and homology with other social movements. For the purposes of carrying out the investigation, the work relied on what Marcel Mauss called “a method of precise comparison”. The present study takes as a comparative base the symbolic system of Coletivo Under, an urban movement in Sergipe active in the capital of Aracaju in 2013. If there was initially a model still reified, which presupposed each social movement as having a strict system analogous to their specific position in the rural system::urban, social movements seem to be better described as realities that, at the same time that they position themselves (or are positioned) in relation to each other in the system, they do so to the same extent that they reproduce the constitutive relationships of the entire system in its own internal systems, similar to social microcosms, albeit differentially. Before being a “rural” movement, and against the very logic of social classifications which the work analyzes and which it uses to write and talk about the social movements in question, the MST/SE - as well as, consequently, the Collective Underneath - it is both rural and urban. Fruits of the same symbolic system and of its differential update in the constitution of its internal systems, both movements treated here are a micro version of the rural::urban system, although differentially structured. The research carried out, even though still very limited, could show that MST / SE has an analogous and inverse symbolic system, like an image in the mirror, to that of the Underneath, and vice versa. This conclusion points to the possibility of structural analysis of diverse social movements as structured systems, positions in groups of transformations.