Besides the great proprietors, many mid dwellers inhabited the plateau of Santa Catarina. Who lived at the border of pastorals large estates and obtain their principal source of living upon subsistence agriculture and in practices connected to the exploitation of communal resources of the fields and forests. The access to those resources, as well as the possession of the land and the social life, which were transmitted from generation to generation in which orality and customary rights exerted fundamental importance, were regulated by practices, norms and habits, which were impossible to be examined only by economic means. This undergoes a process of destabilization, as a new socio-spatial dynamics connected with the capitalist economy starts to be established in the region, perceptible such as colonization, the legal property, the demarcation of the estates and the devastation of forests.
Caboclos; Customs; Common use of land; Natural resources