Hibridização cultural, turismo rural e desenvolvimento local no Engenho Itamatamirim, em Pernambuco

Abstract

This study analyzed the process of cultural hybridization to which are submitted the agricultural workers of the Engenho Itamatamirim, in Victória de Santo Antão, Pernambuco. The analysis was specifically directed to the understanding of the cultural reconversions that this population, consisting of sugar cane ex-workers, suffered throughout the passage from the labor condition of sugar cane cutter to the rural tourism worker. Such reconversion is understood as the cultural hybridization processes materialization in which practical cultural that existed separately combine to generate new practices and structures. The theoretical support on cultural hybridization and reconversion was essentially based on Canclini‘s theory that starts to consider the popular in the contemporary as a political category and that appropriates the economic and cultural goods of the society in a different form. The works of Tauk Santos were also considered, with the intention of observing how these cultural reconversion strategies happen in rural popular contexts, in the Rural Extension direction to the local development. The perspective of the local development was discussed in this work based on Tauk Santos‘, Pablo de Jesus‘, Tânia Bacelar‘s, Carlos Jara‘s and Frank Augustus‘ studies. The rural tourism question as a phenomenon of the new rural present in the concerns of the National Politics of Technical Assistance and Rural Extension (PNATER), while activity that can contribute for the construction of the local development in the rural environment was discussed based on Graziano Da Silva‘s, Anécio Almeida‘s, Adyr Rodrigues‘, Adonis Zimmermann‘s, and Fontana and Dencker‘s works. Combined techniques of data collection such as: the half-structured interview, oral history and diary of the field were used as methodological procedures. The results of this inquiry demonstrated that the reconversions processed in the fields of work and life of the sugar cane ex-workers of the Engenho Itamatamirim had influence on the income, housing conditions, use of free time, leisure, access to new technologies of communication and information, ways of political participation and organization, auto-esteem and daily family life. The research also revealed that this population is submitted to a multipurpose work condition, that is, these workers develop simultaneous activities in the fields of cattle rural tourism. Such labor condition reproduces characteristics of paternalism, authoritarianism and exploration that historically marked the Zona da Mata of Pernambuco, in the golden times of the sugar cane culture. At the same time, it was observed that the Engenho Itamatamirim experience constitutes a process under construction, a scene of possibilities for the Rural Extension, to work the rural tourism as an important inductor in the local development construction.