"Nestes termos, pede deferimento" : uma etnografia das dinâmicas de intervenção e das práticas da assistência em uma instituição de ensino agrícola, na cidade de Pelotas, RS, Brasil (1923-1990)

Abstract

"Under which terms grant is requested" is a documental ethnography study of intervention practices about poor children, taking as the starting point the documental collection about an agricultural educational institution located in the municipality of Pelotas/RS, Brazil. The Agricultural Educational Institution is about one hundred years old. The expression frequently found in the studied documents, inspires the thesis title. This expression submits deeper bureaucratic process around the selection and inclusion of the students. I tried to investigate in that documents, the voices that, in dialogue with the public power, was documented in the official agencies, with the intention to answer "Who were the students and what were they searching for?" This investigation had an anthropologic way, focused in the individual who was object standarly of government intervention - the poor children and their families. Over those people concerned conceptions, practices, regulations, decisions and rules that not depended on their will, and is about this dynamic that this research pondered, an ethnography the routine lived by boys and girls that found the Visconde da Graça Educational Institution. Stablished with the Agricultural Patronage Visconde da Graça in the 1920s decade. Nowadays, the Institution works and has boarding school vacancy for young people who wants to live in, but notice the profile stablished to entrance is needed, the first of all, those poorest children as the beginning. Long years go by and the Institution has been going throughout changes as its name, in accordance with government and then changed the working dynamics, and as in the boarding school. Besides the changes in the Educational Institution, this investigation approachs the boarding school as the study object, with the aim of relativize it. Studying the intern dynamics and particularities of boarding school practice in the context of an agricultural Educational Institution, was the way to realize others aspects that could introduce the boarding school over the poverty, of the abandonment and the vulnerability. Without however to leave the perspective that notice the boarding school with the antique strategy and with extensively used for state agents to solve the problem of poor children and their families.