ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on possible trails inside a quasi-pristine forest. It is well known that social sciences are a multidisciplinary scientific field fractured by intense disagreements. The chapter provides a broad overview about some of the main vicissitudes of intellectual trajectories worth mentioning coupled with a few anecdotal facts by concerning Brazilian rural changes. It argues that the period covered by the book was characterized by a process of continuous agricultural growth and the productive background is the real battlefield of ideas fighting to explain the essence of historical agrarian development. Rural themes were ostensibly ingrained in the public agenda in the 1950s and 1960s. One must bring to mind the fact that most Brazilians lived in rural areas and under a dominant agricultural economy, centred mostly on coffee production with a second orbit around the Northeastern sugarcane regions.
