Dos campos do Marajó aos campos do discurso: sentidos sobre o trabalho do vaqueiro na tradição e na contemporaneidade

Abstract

This thesis triggers the reins of a study course designed to investigate the discourses about the work of the Marajoara cowherd in the tension between traditional and contemporary meanings about the profession. To apprehend the senses effects of the discursive experiences in the work context, there is the guiding question: How to understand the tension inherent to the discourses that imply the figure of the cowherd, still rooted to the traditions, and the contemporary, more distanced from them? For this purpose, the theoretical and analytical path is intertwined with the theoretical and methodological framework of Discourse Analysis (DA), based on the postulates of Dominique Maingueneau, focusing on the concepts of de deixis, discursive practice, enunciation scenes, simulacrum, and polemic, to think about productive activities in the labor universe, in a construction that is mediated discursively. Added to these contributions are the principles of Ergology, based on the postulates of Yves Schwartz, to think about the relationship between language and work, in the reference made to the prescriptions of work and the performance of the cowherd in the daily toil. The narratives of life, based on the postulates of Daniel Bertaux, are used to think about the access to the discourses about the work of the cowherd, in the telling of the experiences of the work in a space in which the enunciation acquires meaning. The investigation was carried out through narrative interviews, with subsequent transcription, which constituted a point of articulation between the phenomena of language and the work of the cowherd and how professional identity is constructed in a discursive practice. The choice of the theme is justified by the relevance of the studies on Marajoara cowherding, and to contribute to the discussion around a discursive subject thought from a place. In this direction, the locus of the investigation concentrates on ten farms located in the fields in Marajó, municipality of Soure. The focus is on the articulation of two analytical corpora: the life narratives of sixteen Marajoara cowherds, distributed in four categories of professionals, whether they are day laborers, effective, foremen, and retired; and Law 12870/2013, which regulates the profession of the cowherd. This deepens the recognition of an interdiscursive operation between the meanings produced in the legal field and the meanings produced in the labor field. In the foundations on which the analyses are built, the voices that narrate weave a network of discursive relations implied in the saying of oneself and of work with a register of significant marks in the production of meanings in the historically marked activity of cowherding in this region of the fields of Marajó.