“Em busca do bamburro”: memórias do trabalho, reciprocidade e a construção da masculinidade em garimpos amazônicos

Abstract

This is an interdisciplinary study on gold mining in the Amazon, an economic front that from the 1960s represented the country's largest gold rush. This fact goes beyond the economic dimension, in practice, has promoted the attraction of large groups of workers, together with their families to dedicate themselves to this work and impress on the cities of the region deep territorial, cultural and demographic transformations. The research reflects the social dynamics inherent in the social formation of the garimpeira in the Brazilian Amazon and aims to understand how the memories of the garimpeiros are reconstituted from the notion of reciprocity in gender relations, taking as focal reference the idea of hegemonic masculinity in Amazonian garimpos. Based on the methodological bases of ethnography and life history, the analyzes are based on the social memory and the trajectories narrated by the workers who lived the concrete experience of acting in this activity and who currently live in Santarém, Pará, municipality locus da research given to the fact that it is one of the main investment centers and fixation of residence of the prospectors in previous years. The masculine values of masculinity were identified as courage, restraint of emotions, hardness, honor and generosity as structuring in the social relations of the garimpeiras and encampados under the native category "goat-male". It was noticed that the sociabilities established in the space of work and conspicuous consumption practices promoted by garimpeiros with action awareness, with strategies and different scenarios to trigger the ideal predicates of the notion of man in the garimpo. In the context of the work, the way to obtain distinction and respect as a man is not to complain about the service and not to grow back in the face of the hard days in the bass. As for conspicuous consumption, this is part of an ample gift system, which regulates and constitutes personal ties and is important in the representation of the masculine ideal of the garimpeiros, who, by demonstrating to themselves, and by publicly executing the payment of large expenses in the brothels of the corrutelas at the same time, they generate approximations through camaraderie and rivalries among social equals, who at another moment must show generosity in consumption in order to acquire the signs of distinction.