Abstract:
This article is about “need”, a word that announces some adversities faced by people in Maranhão countryside. I discuss this category based on an ethnography carried out, in the last years, in Codó, with people of Afro-Brazilian religion and with babaçu coconut breakers. I invest in an ethnographic approach to institutional policy, seen from the “need”, which reveals how distant ordinary people and politicians are, the forms of “exploitation” and the strategies used to maintain life. I argue that politics are been seeing as a gamble or “path”, within the scope of a sophisticated way of perceiving social relations.
Keywords:
Ethnography; Need; Politics; State