Abstract
Louis Herns Marcelin’s Ph.D. thesis has been a key source of inspiration for my work with traditional communities, land conflicts, and violence in Pinhão, Paraná. In this article, I reflect on the notion of “house configuration” and the questions that it raises for my fieldwork, where houses are inseparable from lands and from land struggles. Considering the importance of mothers and their activities for these configurations, I intend to engage Marcelin’s approach to gender relations in the Recôncavo Baiano. I aim to build a conversation between the author’s argument, the experiences of mothers who live through land conflicts in Pinhão, and recent ethnographies of gender, motherhood, violence, and land in Brazil.
Keywords:
house configuration; land; conflict; gender