The vazanteiros, the agricultura de vazante and dams of destruction in the mid-Tocantins River: ethnoecological perspectives

Os vazanteiros, a agricultura de vazante e as barragens da destruição no Médio Rio Tocantins: perspectivas etnoecológicas

Abstract

Human societies are distinguished by their ways of living and dealing with nature. While western society seeks at all costs to exhaust natural resources, the vazanteiros-fishers in the mid-Tocantins deal with nature sustained by mutual respect. Our purpose in this text is to identify and analyze the particularities of a millenarian cultivation system that is still exercised and is called agricultura de vazante or "Vazantes" (floodplain agriculture). The data were collected between 2007 and 2017 within the master’s degree and the development of the doctoral thesis concluded at the beginning of 2018, through participant observation and semi-structured and unstructured interviews. The results show that the vazanteiros developed their cultivation in “vazantes” in accord with their peculiarities, which include specific measures between the hills for seed planting, the number of seeds, taboos, exchanges and reciprocities inherent in agricultural cultivation and social relations thatdenote their local mode of living. Besides being sustainable, in this mode of cultivation, the earth seems to understand them and they also seem to understand the earth and its limitations, to the extent that they plant only plants that best suit each soil type. The local reality shows that the vazanteiros, their customs and traditions. have been addressed in an agenda that seems to promote, at whatever cost, their disappearance in the coming years. This is due to the unconditional increase in dams and Small Hydroelectric Power Plants (SHP) in national rivers, especially during the last few decades. It is becoming increasingly clear to us that this phenomenon known as agricultura de vazante may have its days numbered in Brazil.