Neighbourhood solidarity and class opposition in a rural environment

Abstract

The importance of interknowledge relations in the configuration of the main local social processi is one of the features that, according to the experts, may define the specifity of the rural social space. Through a series of remarks with a generical character (without excluding a reference to the points of view of sociology classics) about the nature of the neighbourhood relations in peasant collective organizations, as well as about their desintegration by means of changes in the local class structures, it discussed, in the first part of the present text, the scope of that characterizing feature, mainly bearing in mind the corresponding symbolic-ideologic dimension. Though without abandoning this perspective, the second part of this article also includes elements obtained in an empirical research about a rural freguesia (parish) of the Penafiel concelho (municipality): Fonte Arcada, heavily marked, in its social structures, by significant migrant phenomena with a pendular nature and by the preservation of an agricultural sector in part-time. Trying to see to which point the foundations of the neighbourhood solidarity are affected by the changes in the structure of class situations in that region and in the corresponding perception, valuation and action schemes, the author analyses then, in some detail, the change factors and manifestations at the level of traditional peasant sociability and culture (mutual aid, forms of social contact, subcommunities of neighbourhood, language clothes and corporal gesture, habitat, etc.).