From sharecropping to equal shares: transforming the sharing economy in northeastern Brazil
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From sharecropping to equal shares: transforming the sharing economy in northeastern Brazil Jonathan DeVore 1 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
Concepts of sharing and commons are normatively and historically ambivalent. Some forms of sharing, such as sharecropping or alms-giving, proceed from and sustain asymmetrical relations to the means of life. Access to commons in other social contexts merely serves to make unequal forms of life more bearable. In other words, some expressions of sharing and commons are “functional” within hierarchical societies. Departing from these observations, this contribution traces contests over the logic of sharing, and apportioned shares of common land, from Brazil’s slave period through contemporary land rights movements in the northeastern state of Bahia. For former slaves and their descendants, “freedom” often meant sharecropping on the same plantations from which they had been released. However, rural Brazilians have also succeeded in transforming shared land into more equal and equitable distributions, from “peasant breaches” that emerged in slave gardens from the early colonial period through the abolition of slavery, to land occupations that occurred in the late twentieth century. By sharing land and other material resources—especially tree seeds, seedlings, and cuttings—rural laborers have established unexpected reconfigurations in distributions of property and social recognition that exceed institutionalized norms of sharing common land. With such outcomes in view, this contribution distinguishes socially replicative and transformative sharing. Keywords Sharing economy . Land rights . Property democratization . Post-slavery . Brazil
Introduction Ongoing economic restructuring, new enclosures, and the erosion of social protections into the twenty-first century continue to sunder people’s access to and control over means for
* Jonathan DeVore [email protected]
1
Department of Anthropology, Department of Global & Intercultural Studies, Miami University, Oxford, OH 45056, USA
J. DeVore
sustaining life (Bartels 2008; Orser 2012). Meanwhile, the means of life themselves are threatened by the undeniable consequences of climate change, and the looming specter of the infelicitously named “Anthropocene” (see Malm and Hornborg 2014; Moore 2017, 2018).1 These circumstances compel us to reexamine old and new forms of distribution, while reconsidering our relation to the means of life as mere means; for that upon which we are radically dependent can hardly be mere. As we rethink key concepts and ideas, the familiar and well-worn political antinomies of the past century (e.g., individualism and collectivism, private and collective property) will no longer serve us (DeVore 2017b); that ideological field of correlated but apparently opposed concepts served parallel logics of accumulation over the twentieth century that contributed to the destruction of human and other nature (Foster 2015). As we reconstruct core political practices and institutions, concepts such as sharing and
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