Tempos de chorar e de sorrir no espaço da morada: um estudo socioantropológico de mulheres resistentes marcadas pela tragédia em Macapá-AP

Abstract

This thesis offers a description and analysis of how four women experienced a major fire that occurred at Baixada do Perpétuo Socorro, an occupied neighborhood in Macapá, Amapá, in October 2013. These women are a part of the 250 families that witnessed the event. This social space was officially considered an environmental preservation area by the government and, therefore, unsuitable for housing. This critical event brought them pain, social suffering, humiliation and a new home far from their day-to-day routine that did not take into consideration their wishes and personal needs. This paper discusses how these four women describe this transient period starting with the loss of their homes, then their dignity, to how they had to reconfigure their everyday life in a new dwelling place, the government housing complex called Master Oscar Santos. The problematization in this work focus on the notion of person and subjective constructs in the social context of moving from home to another place; also in these women’s notion of self as they readjusted their attachments and sense of belonging to a new environment by practicing their day to day routines utilizing resistances, tactics, and micro-relationships in their transitory social spaces until they received their own home granted by the State, which were located far away from the place where these women felt comfortable and capable of using their agency. The ethnographic concepts that support these considerations are the practice of everyday life, tactics and resistances. Such concepts serve as basis to social suffering using such native categories as shack, home, baixada (pile dwellings), government housing and humiliation. The authors who inspired this discussion are Veena Das, Michel Foucault and Michel De Certeau, among others. The problematization of women is performed using methods proposed by Marilyn Strathern, whose work with women deals with categories which are not based on gender identity but in the physical female and male form. The method is sustained by ethnographic fieldwork and relies on intellectual and ethnobiographic tools proposed by Marco Antonio Gonçalves, Roberto Marques and Vania Cardoso, among others, where the individuals are subjectified and the sociocultural reality is perceived by the experience of characters that construct their own narrative as they practice the notion of self.