The MST’s mystique and the aporia of collective action

Abstract

Of unequivocally religious origin, Mystique is a key category to the political practices and conceptions of Movement of Landless Rural Workers/MST. Considered “the soul of the Movement”, it can be found in the multiple and diverse activities conducted by the Movement. In this article, I propose to investigate both the unfolding and implications of the use of this religious category as an organizational and a political action tool. For this purpose, I shall take into account some ethnographic fragments, which are discontinuous in time, about landless collective ceremonies that are also called mystique. Those fragments seem to allow the consideration of different facets of a kaleidoscope of meanings, practices and social phenomena that are triggered by mystique itself and are continuously recreated by its rituals. The herein analytical discussion is based on a broader historical-ethnographic interpretation that regards the MST as a political phenomenon, and about the role that the creation of events, understood as rituals, plays in it.