Agroecology, land and identity: an example from MST’s mística

Abstract

This work aims to explore agroecological theory and its potential to reflect, or even to reconfigure
the relationship of identity with the land in the political subjects of the field. The relation
with the land is taken here beyond the relationship with nature, but also in its symbolic and
affective sense, allowing to overcome the productivist notion engendered by the Green Revolution.
Agroecology, insofar as it constitutes both a model of resistance and struggle of social
movements, as an interdisciplinary and trans-epistemological scientific-political movement in
opposition to the hegemonic model of agriculture-agronomy, develops a proposal of social
transformation and an endogenous perspective of resisting and existing by cultivating the soil.
The brazilian social rural movement MST, as one of the important actors of agroecology in the
Brazilian context, seems to value the symbolic dimension of the land, and this can be seen
from its mística.