Por uma infância simbólico-cultural: um grupo macrossocial como testemunha simbólica de uma época.

Abstract

This research is inserted in the Group of Studies and Research on Imaginary, Education and Memory (GEPIEM) and, therefore, in a proposal of instituting and amplifier symbolic hermeneutics. It aims to investigate the images of the notebooks covers of children from childhood education to the third grade/year of elementary education, from 1991 to 2010. The notebooks researched are part of the collection of notebooks of the research group History of Literacy, Reading, Writing and Schoolbooks (HISALES). In order to develop the research, the following problematization was drawn: What emerges in the images of the notebooks covers of children from childhood education to third grade/year of elementary education in the Southeast of Rio Grande do Sul between the last decade of the 20th century and first decade of the 21st century? In order to answer to this questioning and to deal with the proposed objective, it was listed as master theory the Imaginary Studies developed by Gilbert Durand's in dialogue with other theoretical perspectives such as history and sociology. Methodologically it was adopted the Durandian myth-analysis to develop the investigation, considering that this is a methodology that is applied to the macro analysis of a social context under the prism of the imaginary. This way, the thesis defended is that of a Symbolic-Cultural Childhood, in which an artifact of the cultures of childhood allowed to analyze the symbolism present in the childhood of the chosen time. The artifact referred here are the notebooks covers, characterized as symbolic artifacts replete with imaginary projections. Thus, if the child is a witness of history, childhood, in this perspective, is a symbolic witness of a certain era. Moreover, the idea of transcendental childhood is materialized, since it escapes the common time and perpetuates itself, it keeps and renews itself, without ending its existence, in the same way as the imaginary that preconizes Gilbert Durand's Imaginary Studies. It is possible to assert, then, that the notebooks are constituted as artifacts of the cultures of childhood that reflect the anthropological path preconized by the author-guide of this study. This is because the symbols that appear in the notebooks covers carry with them the objective and subjective intimations that emanate from the social environment, which allowed to glimpse the symbolic-cultural path of the childhood in the studied period, presenting the childhood from the pregnancies emerged from the symbolic constellations, configuring the following symbolic-cultural pregnancies: natural and animic childhood; adultized childhood; childhood in the depths; childhood and social interaction; childhood in balance; and unifying childhood. It’s defended that Symbolic-Cultural Childhood unites symbolic dynamisms and polarities, presenting childhood as: the symbolic and social structure of a society, that seems to reveal a period of the human unconscious, as resilient, as dreamlike, as a representation of the adult world, as an interactionist, as a mediator and balancer act of a society. This means that the childhood of the turn of the millennium (decades of 1990 and 2000) brings with it the symbolic power that allows to see a refracted society, problematized by children, that challenge the adult being. The anthropological path of childhood, therefore, is characterized by the symbolic and cultural relation that the environment allows, in this case, the cover of the notebooks is an artifact that makes this path visible.