On Experience with Crabs

This work opens a fissure in a structure of erasure and silencing: an echo of the contestation of human groups, an attempt to reorganize the territory according to other logics, other epistemologies, with the mangrove as its main stage and the bodies and minds of shellfish gatherers and crab catchers as living libraries.

Flávio Santana was not content to understand the crab merely as a media product, one that aroused interest in consumption and in its different uses. The author went in search of what was submerged, hidden away — that is, the processes of survival, existence, and resistance of social groups from the village of Coqueiro, in São Cristóvão, Sergipe — proposing transformative actions aimed at realizing the interests of the community.

The author understands that it is necessary to comprehend the multiple cultural identities present there, the social contradictions, respect for differences, and the need to strengthen their distinct forms of organization. After all, the small achievements and practices of resistance to the processes of neglect by public authorities emerged from this sense of belonging, principles of citizenship, and idea of community.

Organized shellfish gatherers and crab catchers from Coqueiro may be able to disrupt this structure of exclusion, erasure, and silencing imposed by dominant sectors of society.