RURALITIES IN GRANDMA MARIA

(AUTO)ETHNOGRAPHY THROUGH THE MEMORIALISTIC TRAILS OF CHILDHOOD

Abstract

In this (Auto)ethnography, because it is written in the first person (auto = I), the author takes up the story of his matriarchal family, therefore an unusual community (ethnos) for the interior standards of the hinterlands of Bahia, to write (grapho = writing) and analyze the belonging to the semiotics of the rural area. The work was divided into two sections; the first one having the historiographical and contextual motto from the train tracks that somehow intersected the recent history of the author's family. The second part focused on the relationship of the main character, Grandma Maria, with the countryside, even after so many transits between the cultural elements and territorialities of the countryside-city. To this end, a subjective journey was undertaken through the locomotive of the personal memory of oneself (locus of the study) towards childhood and the important characters of this phase of life. Grandma Maria was the guiding thread of this narration, overlapping herself in the bifurcations: father and husband, countryside and city, objective and subjective, past and present, History and story, her (Grandma Maria) and the author (her grandson). At the end of the reading, it can be seen how much Grandma Maria was linked to the things of the farm: the managing of medicinal resources of plants, land and popular religiosity; (im)material space in which she moved in the dialogical synthesis of work-fruition-work, objectifying herself in the memory of the farm of that childhood left in the past, but reverberated, as an inheritance, in her grandson’s subjectivity.