From sharecropping to equal shares: transforming the sharing economy in northeastern Brazil

Concepts of sharing and commons are normatively and historically ambivalent. Some forms of sharing, such as sharecropping or alms-giving, proceed from and sustain asymmetrical relations to the means of life. Access to commons in other social contexts merely serves to make unequal forms of life more bearable. In other words, some expressions of sharing and commons are “functional” within hierarchical societies. Departing from these observations, this contribution traces contests over the logic of sharing, and apportioned shares of common land, from Brazil’s slave period through contemporary land rights movements in the northeastern state of Bahia. For former slaves and their descendants, “freedom” often meant sharecropping on the same plantations from which they had been released. However, rural Brazilians have also succeeded in transforming shared land into more equal and equitable distributions, from “peasant breaches” that emerged in slave gardens from the early colonial period through the abolition of slavery, to land occupations that occurred in the late twentieth century. By sharing land and other material resources—especially tree seeds, seedlings, and cuttings—rural laborers have established unexpected reconfigurations in distributions of property and social recognition that exceed institutionalized norms of sharing common land. With such outcomes in view, this contribution distinguishes socially replicative and transformative sharing.