Poético, afetivo e semiótico: o significado de quintal em narrativas de duas gerações de famílias

Abstract

Some aspects justify the need to study the permanence of backyards in the big cities: a) the remaining yards are important iconic and symbolic resources for socialization and transmission of culture to families and their descendants; so they are development environments; b) the yards may be the key to access to a deeper knowledge from the subjects’ life, rescuing relevant memories in an increasingly perfunctory world, automated and without affection; and (c) by the gaps observed in studies dealing with this topic, regarding the focus on subjectivity. Thus, the present study aimed to investigate the meanings assigned to backyards in narratives of different generations of families living in urban areas in the 21st century, in the city of Salvador, Bahia. The present study clearly ranks as an ethnographic and autoethnographic approach. On the symbolic processes, the different ways highlighted in which the person identifies itself with its surroundings, values and preserves the place by affective processes that are related to the attraction to the place-how this is "effected" and gives its personal well-being. The backyard is composite and modeled by its residents on the basis of these meanings attributed to the place. Therefore, it is a micro system built by the people who live in it. It is a cultural space that depends on the reviews, first, and then cognitive affective, because it seems to be associated, in the participants’ perspective, the desire for freedom, solidarity and love. The care given to the yard and the feeling dispensed with it were present in all age groups assessed, what constitutes an important finding. Differently from the agroforestry backyards, studied by various authors submitted, the urban backyards contribute very short for feeding households’ members. However, this process was not reflected in the disuse of itself, since other semiotic meanings, most affective character, enabled it to constitute like a "biographical space".