The institutional basis of german-brazilian communities (picadas): the commons and social capital

Abstract

The historiography of German immigration to Brazil knows just a little about the structures that animated social life in Germany before the process of immigration. Therefore, the americanização of the German-Brazilian settlers is considered solely from the perspective of the host society, creating a gap that needs to be filled in order to understand another dimension of German immigration, the European side and influence over it. In this sense, it is possible to perceive that generally the social origins of German-Brazilian settlers is linked to a village context experience, especially those who came from Western and Southwestern Germany. Historically these villages were social organizations able to control natural and economic resources under their jurisdictions with a great political and economic autonomy. The so called commons were a feature of the German agrarian history, and its institutions of participatory, mutual, protectionist, communal management had the effect to generate social capital, one social attribute that supported the formation of the German-Brazilian communities in Southern Brazil. Thus, the German-Brazilian communities were forged under a solid institutional tradition and under a substrate of social capital, facilitating the emergence of autonomous and cooperative behaviors that resulted on the communitarian structures and on the associativism phenomenon. The method was the analytical descriptive based on research in primary sources in Brazilian and German Archives.