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Abstract

: This paper utilizes a relational approach to discusses practical and symbolic aspects of bureaucratic and political activities by rubber tappers from communities in extractive reserves in Alto Acre, in a frontier region of agricultural expansion into the Amazon. Documentary research, observations, and interviews with residents of communities in agroextractive settlement projects and the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve highlight tensions between the principles and perspectives of government and market actors and the rubber tappers, who selectively incorporate new elements to maintain their peasant condition into their habitus . After tracing the creation of the legal instrument that regulated logging within extractive reserves and political disputes for local power involving rubber tappers via the Workers' Party over the past three decades, we conclude that these processes were decisive in expanding the symbolic capital of these peasants and incorporated communitarianism into the public debate, modernizing the peasant condition and thus allowing them to remain part of the agrarian scenario in Alto Acre.