Afetividade e resistência: vínculo, transformações socioambientais e oposição capital-lugar na cidade de Galinhos-RN

Abstract

The city of Galinhos has gone through significant transformations in recent years. The transition from a community organized by artisanal fishing to a tourism-driven one, catalyzed by the impact of the expansion of a salt industry in the 1980s, and the implementation of the Rei dos Ventos I wind farm in 2012 had important local impacts and resistance movements by the population: fishermen manifestation due to saline expansion; manifestation contrary to the presence of a tour boat of a tourism company in 2010, and; manifestations contrary to the implementation of the wind farm on the Capim’s Dunes, an important place for local tourism. The objective of this study was to investigate the relationship between residents’ affective bonds with Galinhos and the disputes concerning the local social and environmental transformations. As specific objectives, I sought: (a) to identify the main socio-environmental transformations in Galinhos and their impact on local ways of life; (b) to investigate residents’ affections in relation to such transformations and how these affects participate in the meaning production about the place; (c) to understand how these meanings are mobilized in the resistance movements due to socio-environmental transformations. I adopted an ethnographic approach, living for three months at the place and counting on the support of two local informants. I described these experiences in 21 field diaries. In addition, I interviewed 23 residents, focusing on life stories. The corpus’ analysis was ontoepistemologically sustained by critical realism, and I used a multilevel analysis, considering the extradiscursive and discursive levels articulated in the understanding of the conflicts. The records in the diaries allowed a characterization of local dynamics, highlighting important aspects of context in the day to day. In addition, I identified local discourses that function as shared meanings, and help to organize local life. Using Espinosa's category of affectivity as an extradiscursive ethical-political and immanent element in the transition between ways of life, it was possible to understand: the attachment to the place as constitutive of the artisanal fishing way of life; the expansion of saline as a disarticulation of this way of life; tourism as an articulator of the new way of life with its own meanings and practices, and maintaining and recovering aspects of the fishing way of life; the implementation of the wind farm as a threat of rupture with aspects of such a way of life. At the level of the discourses, to understand the emergence of conflicts, I made a critical discourse analysis, understanding discourses as action, but articulated to the extradiscursive level as its condition of possibility. It was possible to note that the historical-social nature of the enterprises led to an opposition between capital and place, which implied the identification of these enterprises as invaders by the residents. The fact that tourism is made and controlled by residents, supporting the sense that it is an activity that links them to the place, together with local knowledge, helped to signify the tourist company and the wind farm as threats to local life. The resistances to the actions of such companies had the different ways’ of life contents of attachment as organizers of both local consciousness about such capital-place opposition and initiatives of contestation. I understand, therefore, that the fundamental relations of these activities, when in contact with the specificities of local relations and knowledge, have produced an opposition sustained by the sense that they are companies that alienate the place, understood as part of their lives, from people.