Uma genealogia do dispositivo de assistência aos pobres em Belém do Pará

Abstract

With this thesis, I propose to think about what I call the device of assistance to the poor through concepts and categories from the work of Michel Foucault and the history of Belém do Pará, more precisely, from the experience of the Fundação Papa João XXIII (Funpapa), created in 1966 and, since 2004, responsible for the management of the National Social Assistance Policy in the municipality. In the class of March 17, 1976 of the course In Defense of Society, Michel Foucault differentiated the large-scale assistance, which was at the same time massive and incomplete, essentially linked to the Church, from a new model of assistance, based on more subtle and economically much more rational mechanisms, which according to the author himself had a lot to do with the development of a liberal-neoliberal art of governing. In this regard, I tried to understand the extent to which these mechanisms were incorporated into the device of assistance to the poor throughout the history of Belém do Pará. To this end, I proposed to rescue this story. With this, I was able to analyze the new assistance model. And, finally, I was able to investigate the reason for the change. The research was carried out in the archives of a series of municipal departments and in the collections of public libraries, including the sections of rare works, works from Pará and microfilms. By recovering this history, I found clues to the origins of the large-scale assistance in a very specific type of hunting down the poor that, over time, was clothed in pastoral techniques and set the tone for the new assistance model, whose emergence was marked by major events in the world and in the country between the 1960s and 1970s, but also by local events and disputes, whose discourses and practices made viable those more subtle and economically rational mechanisms that capture and guide the poorest population, especially at the turn of the 2000s.