Our project results from the bringing together of a set of already consolidated research experiences concerning personhood and territorial relations. In particular, work by Susana de Matos Viegas among the Tupinambá of Olivença on kinship, gender and territory (Bahia - Viegas 2003, 2005, 2007, 2008); by Pina-Cabral on personhood and naming in Bahia (Pina-Cabral 2005, 2007, 2008 and Pina-Cabral and Viegas 2007); by Emilia Pietrafesa de Godoi in Piauí on rural relations and gender (Godoi e Nymeyer 1998; Godoi 1999, 2001); and, finally, by Vanda Aparecida da Silva on rural life and youth in the lower valley of the Jequitinhonha (MG, Brazil - 2008). Attitudes to work "are becoming an increasingly relevant topic of research in terms of the human mobility that the present global crisis is bringing to the fore" (Antunes e Alves 2004, Hirata e Kergoat 2007). Brazilian sociologists have argued that, "When we examine the reality of today's work situations we must recognize that we are facing transformations that require a revision of concepts, a constitution of new alternatives and considerable sociological imagination. It seems difficult to formulate alternatives on the basis of past models."; (Larangeira 2004: 16) We aim to relate work with territorial mobility and access to resources as previous research experience suggested that a multidimensional approach must be adopted. On the one hand, one must take into consideration how natural resources relate to social networks based on kinship, work and local belonging (M. Harris 2000; Olivia Harris 2000); on the other hand, one must overcome the dichotomization implicit in categories such as urban/rural, indigenous/mixed blood, land as politics/land as living (S. Nugent and M. Harris 2004). The relation between household and work has a long tradition in Brazilian rural studies and needs to be reconsidered in the light of new developments (e.g. Palmeira 1977). From the point of view of land as lived experience, in which emotions and politics interfere upon each other, anthropological approaches to territorial belonging based on concepts such as "landscape" (Hirsh and O'Hanlon 1995) appear to have limited explanatory value: "the defining aspect of landscape is the distanciation of the viewer from the object viewed" (Leach 2004: 196). One should revise notions of kinship and person by giving a priority to "what kinds of relations people have with, or to, the land itself" (Leach 2004: 29). In this light, Comerford's work on mapping, familiarization and reputation provides an interesting entry into the question (2003). The relationship between ownership, relatedness and the lived experience of place (including economic and sociocultural dimensions) will also studied in terms of how property is legally constructed and informally used. We follow here a suggestion already present in one of the classical monographs of our discipline: "A group of Bemba walking from place to place through their tribal territory view surroundings from an entirely different standpoint from our own. (...) This general attitude of the people towards their environment is important to describe. It expresses the line of their economic interests, and ultimately determines the legal rules by which their land is used."; (Richards 1969 [1939]: 230). The centrality of the relation between mobility and work has been stressed: "mobility becomes important for its meaning in the life history of the people (...) because it is part of their shared understanding of the person, its states of mind and existential conditions."; (Pissolato 2007: 123) Individual biographies are granting increasing importance to a panoply of different types of mobility: regional, national within Brazil and international (cf. Gardner 1995; Ong 1999).