Entre o público e o rural : dos gabinetes de comunicação ao campo da folkcomunicação

Abstract

This research proposes a theoretical and reflective crossing between Public Communication and Folk Communication in order to understand the dialogical processes established between the State and beneficiares of land reform. While the first focus on meeting the needs of citizens, the Brazilian theory of communication, by Luiz Beltrão, values handcraft and horizontal broadcasting methodologies, in which data is encoded and transferred via family channels and languages to the audience. In this sense, we investigate the route of the official message from a federal agency to rural communities in Rio Grande do Sul’s countryside, and describes how these land workers receive the information from the regional superintendence of the Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária (Incra-RS) and what values they assign to it. The interpretation is based on Paulo Freire’s conscience-raising thought, recognizing the interaction of dialectical practices with reality, and Juan Bordenave’s ideas of social and democratic participation. Through an anthropological gaze, anchored in the method chosen - Winkin (1998), Angrosino (2009) and Geertz’s (1989) Ethnography – communication is shown through the eyes of the recipient. As data gathering technique, we used in-depth interviews with 19 participants: 6 families from Guajuviras settlement (in São Gabriel) and 9 from Novo Horizonte II (in Santa Margarida do Sul), 3 agricultural extension professionals that meet these locations and one employee from Incra-RS working in the region. We found out that the Public Communication among the investigated population is mediated by folk comunicational practices, supported essentially in orality, since, in most cases, official contents do not reach the public through conventional media, such as newspapers, for example. Television is the main vehicle used by settlers, given the precariousness of phone, internet and radio signals, and mail services. Thus, the diffusion of information is done by several external agents, drawing a nonlinear path between sender (Incra-RS) and receivers (settled families), which demand an increasingly relational and interactive communication with the public and appropriate to the specificities of the rural world.