Biblioteca pública, identidade e enraizamento: elaborações intersubjetivas ancoradas em torno da Luiz de Bessa

Abstract

This research aimed to discuss the participation of public libraries in the intersubjective development process of identity references. It was tailored as theoretical framework the concepts of reading, memory, sociability, rootedness and identity. To these guiding factors it was combined the assumption that such institutions are historically constituted as an important instrument of preservation and dissemination of frames of meaning that modulate social life, as well as symbolic representations that emerge from the interaction among individuals in the public space. In Order to prove or deny this thesis, I performed a systemization of the aspects related to its historical emergence and consolidation, trying to emphasize the attributes and practical functions responsible for delimiting its possibilities of action under the different contexts in which it operates. This way, it is pointed out its relevance as an institution dedicated to the promotion of reading and encouraging educational activities, organization and dissemination of information, the preservation of the documental memory and cultural heritage, also in the constitution of leisure space, sociability and rooting destined to the appropriation and constant redefinition by its users. Systematization which allowed us to bring them together with the issues that mobilize intersubjective formulation of identity references. For such, it was adopted as a premise that identity is to be seen as a discourse in constant development, expressed and enhanced through the contact with each other in many spheres of socialization that ensure the existence of a collectivity, stimulated dynamic, also by public libraries because of the representational status that crosses their collections and services sectors. The propositions were confirmed by the analysis of the life stories of seven users of the library Biblioteca Pública Estadual Luiz de Bessa, sample intentionally set from immersion in the everyday life of this library unit, and the data were collected through semi-structured interviews. It has been shown, finally, that when evidencing in the statements the different anchor points that support their interpersonal references and the importance of Luiz de Bessa - symbolic dimensions, affective and structural - throughout this formative process, the narratives erected by the deponents reveal that the Library exerts a force of impregnating on their individual biographies and put itself as a place of rooting of the identity discourses forged by them.