Discurso e poder nas denominações de bairros de Fortaleza

Abstract

This study aims at analyzing the relation between discourse and power in the names of Fortaleza neighborhoods with proper names of people regarding the act of naming a place, the choices of names and the relation between names and social condition. This work will be guided by the theoretical perspective of Critical Discourse Studies, more specifically, by a sociocognitive bias based especially on Dijk (2015) and a methodological attitude based on Content Analysis (GUERRA, 2012). We analyze the access to the act of naming neighborhoods in Fortaleza based on the legislation about the procedures to name a neighborhood and the legislation that names neighborhoods. We sought to identify the most frequent social groups represented in the names of Fortaleza neighborhoods based on the regularities of the online biographical knowledge of those people. Finally, we will seek to analyze the relationship between the social conditions of neighborhoods and their names based on the Human Development Index (HDI) of each neighborhood. Thus, we intend to insert in our research questions that concern the place of institutions in the naming process of neighborhoods, the biographical knowledge about the people whose names were adopted for the neighborhoods and their relationship with the space they constitute. Our results point to a small participation of the residents in the act of naming neighborhoods face the power of the parliamentarians. The chosen names revolve mainly around the group of politicians and businessmen, validating their power also in the symbolic scope of the memory of the city. There is, however, no correspondence between more frequent groups and time. We cannot say that the name of the neighborhood is given according to the social condition of the neighborhood, although isolated cases could follow this pattern.