Comida, comunicação e vinculação: atravessamentos na construção de novas territorialidades

Abstract

The objective of thesis is to verify how food, cultural element, communication and mediation of sociocultural relations, can favour the process of attachment, both physical and symbolic, of the refugee immigrants who settled in the city of Rio de Janeiro. Going beyond its nutritional aspects, food has always accompanied the social development of man. It is part of a symbolic and complex system, being permeated by plural meanings. What one eats, with whom one eats and how one eats are cultural practices that, as such, are shrouded in symbolic biases, responsible for establishing the relationships of men with each other and man with his environment. From the communicational perspective, it promotes interactions and socialities that in the mediation between the refugee immigrants and the carioca society. Has the power to build a path of conviviality between differences, placing them in a dialogical and altering space. The research subjects are immigrants-refugees, victims of forced diasporas and residents in the city of Rio de Janeiro, who produce their livelihoods through the production and marketing of typical foods from their places of origin. The locus of observation was the Feira Chega Junto, which even before the coronavirus pandemic occurred once a month at the Anglican Church Christ Church Rio, located in the neighborhood of Botafogo. The purpose of the Fair, which had food as a protagonist, was to promote the socio-cultural integration of immigrants-refugees in the carioca scenario through the typical gastronomy, reinforcing the role of food as an element that values interculturality and the empowerment of refugees. As for the methodology, I used the literature review to support the concepts worked and participant observation and open interviews for data collection. The fieldwork took place between 2018 and 2019, in a total of 10 visits. The research confirmed its main hypothesis concluding that food is a cultural and communication element that favours the physical and symbolic attachment of immigrants-refugees in the city by enabling the development of expanded spaces of participation, enhancing the intercultural vocation of the city.