Relações entre práticas tradicionais e práticas escolares de saúde das populações rurais em Minas Gerais (Ibirité, 1940 a 1970)

Abstract

This study aims to identify and understand the relationships between traditional practices and school practices of health of rural populations between the decades of 40 and 70 of the 20th century in Ibirité, Minas Gerais. For this purpose, the actions and prescriptions related to health, which were accomplished in the Training Courses given at the Fazenda do Rosário ( Rosary Farm ), were at first analysed since this is one of the first rural teachers training initiatives in Minas Gerais in which emphasis was given to the implementation of new health and hygiene habits of the rural population. In a second step, the health practices performed by the local community were analysed. Written sources were consulted such as documents relating to the organization and curriculum of the Training Courses; texts written by Helena Antipoff; newspapers and internal circulation magazines to the Fazenda do Rosário; laws and pedagogic forms. Interviews were conducted with former teachers-students and local women through the methodology of Oral History. The study is based, theoretically and methodologically in the assumptions of Cultural History; in particular, in the concept of representation according to the perspective of Roger Chartier, and the tactics and strategies of Michel de Certeau. Also the concepts of schooling and school culture were used. In the first chapter, we have discussed the strategies used in the formation of rural teachers in order to instrumentalize them so that they could intervene in the ways of life of the population. In the second chapter, the health practices carried out by the community were approached as well as the ways of transmission and learning of these practices. In the third chapter, the relationships between the school practices and the community practices for health care and hygiene were analysed, and how these practices were carried out not only in the Training Courses, but also in the community daily life, and the spaces in which they were lived, in an attempt to show shares and tensions. The research identified the silencing of traditional health knowledge throughout the training of teachers, because rare were the moments where it appeared in the consulted sources, references - and even criticisms to this knowledge. This does not mean that this knowledge did not circulate and was not carried out by the community and / or by the teachers-students. In an attempt to assert the knowledge of classical medicine, the strategy used was to not give voice and expression to the traditional health practices in the curriculum of the Training Courses. There was a hygienist medical ideal to be disseminated and assimilated by the subjects. It is, therefore, this discourse that will circulate in the prescriptions that guided the activities directed to the teachers-students, aimed at the formation of a sanitized, healthy and civilized citizen. However, interviews with former pupils and teachers and with community women show that traditional knowledge about health was used in a meaningful way everyday. This knowledge was invented and reinvented in community livelihoods, by the teachers-students and even by doctors and nurses responsible for the training of these people.