About the “unity of the struggles”: the social movements’ politics and theirs meetings

Abstract

The effort to unite or articulate is present in almost all social movements in the Brazilian rural world, not only in the universe of congresses and Meetings, but also in other modalities of collective action, like marches and occupations. Through analyzing the processes of construction and realization of two social movements’ meetings – events that gather a great number of collectives, movements, unions – we aim at understanding how the symbologies and values related to union are actually produced, reproduced and transformed by the actors at issue. We seek to work the notion of unity/union in a polissemic way, trying to delineate the multiple practices, values, sentiments and groups that it engenders in the context of these events. We believe that this contribution can bring new questions to the study of social movements, by proposing that the analysis of political experience and its narratives only acquire intelligibility by being associated with other relations and spheres of life