“A vez e a voz do território”

METHODOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS FOR A TERRITORIAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

Abstract

This article discusses the analytical importance of the territorial dimension for social movement studies by systematizing an analytical model capable of mediating the understanding of movements based on their territorial dynamics. Drawing on references from political geography, anthropology, and the sociology of social movements, we will mobilize the analytical roles of the categories "territorial conflicts," "territorial identity," and "territorialities" that are objectified in political actions. We argue that territory is a primary source of identity resources and a fundamental analytical dimension for understanding environmental conflicts. It emerges as a field intersected by diverse political projects and social forces, a place that allows us to see the materiality of disputes over resources and the various forms of collective resistance. This centrality of territory deserves adequate theoretical treatment, not always available in the literature in this field, and we have made it explicit here in the development of a preliminary analytical model that articulates the dynamics of environmental conflicts and the territorialities that emerge from them. In the second moment, the intention was to apply this proposal in a brief analysis of the territorialities of traditional populations in the Amazon, suggesting that territories marked by contradictions and territorial conflicts, with the intense processes of expropriation and deterritorialization of their communities, have given rise, within these disputes, to a kind of “learning through conflict” with the formation of territorialities with strong sociopolitical expressions in the region.