Para além da farinhada: práticas educativas de gênero nas casas de farinha em Alvorada do Gurguéia-Piauí (1994-2020)

Abstract

This quest work aims to discuss flour mills as places where various phenomena happen, not just the production of flour and tapioca. In this sense, we approach these spaces, giving notoriety to the elements that compose them, women and men from the countryside, to say these establishments are producers of life, work, income, education and appear as institutions of resistance against agribusiness in the southern region from the state of Piauí-Brazil. Moreover, it is necessary to highlight the need to reflect non-city locations as places of movement, life, existence and resistance as we understand that these marginalized and silenced spaces need to be increasingly included in academic-scientific discussions. With this, we highlight the female figure, as we understand who, historically, they comprised and were essential in the emergence of flour mills in Brazil, from the original peoples and their communities who, to deal with the cassava root, developed techniques and locations within the villages themselves. Based on this thought, the configurations that emerged show the influences that appeared from this workplace, and that reverberate in contemporary times, such as the sexual division of labor, the educational practices that manifest themselves through these women. Moreover, we allow us to perceive these flour producing establishments as builders of educational practices, through family teachings that are projected through generations, the teachings that women share with sons and daughters, nephews, godchildren, grandchildren, and which corroborate the “Farinhadas” continue to happen throughout Brazil. We are talking about an education that is born outside the four walls of the school, one that emerges in the exchange of experiences, in day-to-day work, in everyday life. Thus, in an attempt to relate different areas of knowledge, we covered the fields of education, rural sociology and anthropology in an interdisciplinary process, for a better understanding of the discussions proposed here. The study in question uses flour mills located in the southwest of the state of Piauí, precisely in the Vale do Gurguéia region, as the research site. The houses included in this study are located in the municipality of Alvorada do Gurguéia and together they total three flour manufacturing establishments. We are going to work with a time span of 26 years, from 1994 to 2020. The houses are private and differ in terms of cassava handling techniques. The study is a qualitative research. We used Oral History as the methodology of this dissertation, as well as data collection techniques such as document analysis and semi-structured interviews. The interviews were carried out with thirteen women farmers from the region covered so that we can understand ways of working, concepts, techniques that provide us with answers and paths. We mentioned that in this process of listening to farinheira women, memory will occupy a prominent place, after all, these women will need to remember, recall past experiences, at the time of dialogue. In view of the above, this research was guided by the following problem: how flour mills operate as places of gender educational practices, through female scrapers. As a general objective, we seek to investigate how in the flour house, as a place of educational practices, knowledge and genres are produced in the relationships formed in these spaces by women scrapers. With regard to specific objectives: to characterize the flour mill as a space for the production of gender knowledge; identify the gender knowledge produced by scrapers in the constitutive relationships of the flour house; discuss the strategies produced by the flour mill's scrapers for the construction of gender knowledge in the flour mills. Nevertheless, we realized that thescenarios mentioned here are not made up only of women, despite their great importance in these establishments. We also noted the male figure as a conductor of teachings in the rural world. We found that the man still figures as leader in the family field, but that in the flour house the existence of this command does not arise in relation to the work of making flour and tapioca, what is understood is a collaboration of men and women, yet, despite the the idea of mutual aid, the mechanisms of female submission imposed by a sexist society, remain in the flour mill institution, such as lower salaries