Cattlemen and animals representations in the Pantanal da Nhecolândia

Abstract

The permanent contact with the natural world turns the “Nhecolandia” farms’ cattlemen into great experts on their living environment. Besides the practical knowledge, the workers build on symbolic representations about nature that determine a proper way of conceiving and getting around with the surrounding space. This article is an effort to demonstrate how some of these representations, specifically about the animals, are built up, and what determines the cattlemen’s attitudes to the fauna on the daily of the “Pantanal da N hecolandia” (Corumbá-MS).