A Land of Love and Exhaustion: making a home for a collective project of hope
Júlia Aricó Savarego

This article delves into the enduring question of what propels people to keep fighting when failure, to a certain extent, seems inevitable. I draw specifically from the case of the Capão das Antas Camp—a rural occupation in the state of São Paulo, Brazil—entangled in a repossession process since 2011. Amid a complex relationship with the land that both exhausts and heals, the residents are not merely seeking land rights but are fundamentally engaged in a struggle for home. Positioned within what I term ethnographies of endless struggles, I argue that the fight for their home is also the fight for a collective dream of agrarian reform that unites people in the present and across time. This is why, despite—or perhaps because of—the inevitability of failure, people choose to stay.

Edição, volume, número
v. 81, n. 2
Ano
2025
Periódico
Journal Of Anthropological Research
Editora
University of Chicago Press
Páginas
220-246