Narrativas de consumidores de cachaça de consumidores e representação social: Construção negociada de significados

Abstract

This thesis aims to evidence the relation between the meanings of the cachaça and the senses of its consumption. In this direction, the study is inserted, in the vision of the consumption, as a social practice, oriented both to the actions of everyday consumption and for the historical influences on practices and spaces of consumption. From the meaningsthat lead the person to consume or not a product, here called the "consumption / nonconsumption", it makes clear that there are collections of different meanings: the social representations. To achieve the proposed objective, it was set out the approach of the Anthropology of Consumption and of the Theory of Social Representations as theoreticalsupports of analysis of the meanings related to the consumption of cachaça. The data of the empirical inquiry, collected from historical research, observations and interviews, had been examined on the basis of the Content Analysis. Accordingly, the research explored the thematic of the narrative of the consumers of Minas Gerais, regarding there consumption. As result, it was gotten a set of materials that allows identifying three thematas of sensible: the dyad sacred/profane, the dyad duty/pleasure and the dyad public/private. From the thematas, the persons compose and express, through the objectification and anchoring, the themes that they take into account to participate in the process of social interaction, in terms of cachaça and its consumption. Five social representations was anchorage at the three thematas. At the dyad sacred/profane are anchored the social representations Cachaça, for me, is a drink of hard worker, Cachaça is the face of Brazil and They are not accustomed with the fact that woman drinks cachaça. At the dyad duty/pleasure are anchored the social representations I do want to show out, on the cover of Exame Magazine: how to turn a still into a gold mine and It is almost a transgress act. All the social representations are anchored at the dyad public/private. Moreover, results showed that the meanings are also produced by the naturalization of socially constructed practices and spaces in the consumption of cachaça - space of appreciation, space of distraction and miscellaneous space - and a separated circuit, in which organizations and individuals, personal or professional, are involved with the productive sector of cachaça. Theconsumption is argued as a cycle of exchanges, where economic, moral, religious and aesthetic exchanges happens simultaneously. In this cycle, the spaces and the circuit support practices and supplies speeches of which the people appropriates to form their own. However, not only the consumer is induced to get itself, in this imaginary, but also the one, that not consume, is invited to participate of this social construction. It is accepted that the social representations do not reflect simply or inform the reality, but turn out to be the realities that socially each person admits to be, therefore the realities are formed in the conflict and by the inter subjective cooperation. The results point out, by means of practices and social rules of behavior and techniques of appreciation, how social representations of cachaça are explicit and how important values are negotiated between the group(s) in the different spaces of consumption. These results served to stimulate the discussion on how the meanings attributed by consumers to objects are part of the consumption/notconsumption and its senses.