Resumo: O presente artigo aborda a atividade do vaqueiro no trabalho com o búfalo do pântano (Bubalus bubalis) em uma região de várzea amazônica a partir de pesquisa etnográfica. Em diálogo com o debate sobre a domesticação, primeiramente descrevo alguns aspectos do trabalho dos vaqueiros com os rebanhos de búfalos, como dobrar, derrubar e marcar o gado. Ao considerar essas atividades, destaco um termo que aparece constantemente na descrição que vaqueiros fazem dos búfalos e de seu trabalho com eles, o bruto. Ao propor a centralidade da expressão brutidade, que os vaqueiros utilizam em sua compreensão dos búfalos, proponho que essa noção é um conceito que intermedia e orienta as ações e interações entre os dois seres. Nesse processo, a brutidade acaba por constituir como o próprio vaqueiro pensa a si e a sua atividade.

Abstract: This article is based on original ethnographical research and discusses the activity of the cowboy in his work with the swamp buffalo (Bubalus bubalis) in an Amazonian lowland region. In order do stablish a dialogue with the current debate on the topic of domestication, I firstly describe some aspects of the cowboys’ work with the herds of buffaloes, such as dobrar, derrubar and the marking of the cattle. While presenting these activities, I highlight a term that constantly appears in the description that the cowboys make of the buffalos and of their work with them, the term brute. Thus, I emphasize the centrality of the expression brutidade (brutality) that the cowboys use in their understanding of the buffalo. I propose that this term is a concept that intermediates and guides the actions and interactions between the two beings. While doing so, the brutidade ultimately constitutes how the cowboy thinks about himself and his activity.

Nesta análise, partiu-se do pressuposto de que o alcance político de um movimento estruturado em rede relaciona-se com sua capacidade de articular as diversas escalas organizacionais (do local ao regional, ao nacional e ao transnacional) e com as diversas formas de atuação política (nos níveis das organizações coletivas, das articulações políticas e das mobilizações na esfera pública). A partir desse pressuposto, buscou-se examinar quais atores coletivos do mundo rural são, atualmente, os mais expressivos em cada um desses níveis; quais os atores políticos estratégicos na formação de redes interorganizacionais; quais as demandas, lutas e desafios políticos enfrentados pelos movimentos sociais no campo e, finalmente, como se desenvolve a difícil e contraditória relação entre algumas dessas redes de movimentos sociais com o Estado e elites rurais na atual conjuntura política.

The starting point of this paper is that the political reach of a network-structured movement is related to its capacity to articulate several organizational scales (from local to regional, national and transnational), and to develop various forms of political action (at the levels of collective organizations, political articulations and mobilizations in the public sphere). From this, the paper then examines which rural collective actors are the most expressive at each level, the strategic political actors in the formation of interorganizational networks, the rural social movement's demands, struggles and political challenges, and, finally, the mode of development of the difficult and contradictory relationship between some of these social movement networks, the State and rural elites in the present political conjunture.

This article is based on a research developed during 1996/97 in the Grande Sertão Veredas National Park / MG, focused on different groups involved in the process of implantation of the Conservation Unit. Inspired by the analogy developed by Michel de Certeau between the act of speaking and the act of walking, I describe some of the routes in Santa Rita, an area of the National Park, walking in the patrol, formal and programmed itinerary of the park guards. Following this spatial practice and walking through a way articulated by crossed references - from guards, inhabitants, researcher - it was possible to register memories and narratives motivated by the paths. The option of taking these routes and movements as an analytical unit, seeking the style suggested by the 'rhetoric of walking', permitted the perception of different accounts from common steps, concerning both links between memory and territoriality and the connections between traditional context of the locality and new social/cultural contexts, in this case, the expansion of the agricultural frontier in the 1970s and the creation of the Park in the 1980s.

This article will treat two dimensions of social relations: death at the hospital , and the way in which health professionals manage their emotions regarding death and suffering. The hospital has been chosen as a privileged location for this research for it is a central and almost naturalized place concerning services directed to health, disease and death. Accounting that this institution has become, in contemporary western society, the place of social delegation of care for the sick, especially those who are about to die, two public hospital units where taken as subject of ethnographic research: an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and a Palliative Care hospital (PC), which attends patients with cancer "out of therapeutic possibilities". The two units present different forms of caring for the patients, in which the space and value given to the expression of feelings are also different. The analysis is centered on the way that the staff's emotions are managed, as well as on discussions regarding the contact with suffering, death and feelings wich involves the social actors.