Brincar é coisa séria?: um estudo do brinquedo na cultura da modernidade

Abstract

This study searches toys as material and symbolic culture members aiming to discuss changes and meanings in modern culture before globalization of cultural industry. It focus this discussion in four categories of toys: traditional, industrial, regional and virtual, that nowadays make the act of playing. It is based on the affirmative that modern playing is fluid, quick and dislocated. People are only consumers in modern culture because toys are related to the things that happen in society, its beliefs, ideology, habits, ethics and system of language and values. So there is a disillusion about the world that operates in childhood through the toys. Children have in their hands an image that allows actions and manipulations in consonance with the representations suggested by industries of cultural possessions. It shows toys in this modern culture as a product and its images, senses and symbols are reflections of the perception of society about childhood. This study was done in São Luís, Maranhão, aiming to get the changes between two kinds of economical situations, parents of four different groups, shopkeepers and artisans. It is a qualitative research. Its results shows that toys nowadays have potential to seduce people to consume them, with senses and functions to fit all different places; therefore toys faces the problem of managing local and global characteristics. This study concludes that modern culture has brought loss and profit to the act of playing in the transition of the handiwork pattern to the industry work. It also concludes that changes we see in toys in the last four decades of the twentieth century are not restricted to them, but are restricted to a system that has been established and implies in changes in popular children’s culture, and moreover in the places of children in modern culture.