Dinheiro doce, combustão viva : uma reflexão sobre a monocultura da cana-de-açúcar em território Potiguara

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the socio-environmental and cultural impacts of sugarcane cultivation on the Potiguara people in the northern coast of Paraíba, with an emphasis on the conflicts between traditional Indigenous worldviews – and their respective ways of living and understanding the world – and capitalist hegemony linked to colonialism, along with all its effects on the ecosystems. This issue is examined through the conception of territorialization (Oliveira, 1998), criticisms of Eurocentrism and coloniality (Quijano, 1991, 2009), interpretative culture and the “the struggle for the real” (Geertz, 2008), the understanding of sugarcane monoculture as a “monocrop desert” formed by scalable patterns (Tsing, 2019), and the imposition of commodity fetishism logics on traditional communities (Taussig, 2010). To carry out this work, field visits were conducted from 2019 to 2025 – with sugarcane-related analyses starting in 2022 – which supported participant observations fundamental to the analyses, as well as the development of social cartographies, interviews, and informal conversations. Thus, questions arise concerning what cultural, historical, and socio-environmental impacts affect the Potiguara territory, and to which social dynamics they are related.