Collective Mobilization and the Social Memory of Environmental Destruction

Resumo

In the aftermath of the 25th April 1974 Revolution, a rural village in the Portuguese region of Beira Baixa staged a six-year conflict between peasant landowners and a mining company. The former, discontent with the company’s financial proposals, organized a protest taking advantage of the opportunities generated by the ongoing national political changes. This paper’s purpose is to present the methodological and theoretical frames underlying the research and analysis of the above-mentioned socio-environmental conflict. The methodological approach combined ethnographic fieldwork, oral history and research in private, corporate and institutional archives. As for the theoretical device, it was intended to analyze collective mobilization in the context of breaking political structural changes, identity processes and social memory frames – a theoretical apparatus built from multiple disciplinary proposals, articulating environmental history and anthropology, as well as social movements theories.