Machines and machinations: the reconfigurations of family work in Caparaó cafeeiro, Minas Gerais (2016-2018)

Abstract

In the last two decades, “family farming” has been expanded and has become a reference for conducting social transformations related to the small peasantry in Latin America. In Brazil, as a State policy (Pronaf), especially since 2003, family farming has been politically and economically highlighted by offering subsidized microcredit to decapitalized family farmers. I address the changes experienced by small farmers in terms of their conception and day-to-day management of labor. They are inhabitants of a coffee community in the municipality of Espera Feliz. I focus the attention on the relationship between the increasing in individual crops and the growing acquisition of agricultural machinery, factors that would be contributing to a process of individualization and competition in labor domains and thus generating debates and tensions around the characterization itself, in the context, of the family farming in possible associations with the (capitalist) market. Ethnographic research was conducted among 19 family units of Caparaó mineiro coffee farmers (2015-2018).