Search

This work deals with different ways of understanding cattle stealing conducted by popular sectors. The study of this crime aims to go deep into the subordinated mentality and to acknowledge its essential implications. The work is focused in the economic structure of cattle stealing that states the cattle thieves acted pursuing profit out of such practices and made of theft a business. This does not invalidate the fact that cattle stealing was also part of the peasant insurgency aimed to change part of the unequal social order to obtain a better quality of life, which did not stop a permanent trade with the elite. What lies beneath this is the dialectics found when contrasting the ideas of legality imposed by the hegemonic order and the concepts of legitimacy that moved the subordinated peasant sector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]