Experências, memórias e performances: a construção cotidiana do "ser feirante" na feira de Campina Grande-PB.

Abstract

This research is a result of four years of studying and researching next to marketers of the biggest street market of Campina Grande-PB, the Central Street Market, also known as “big street market”, due to its large territorial extension and its commercial, historical, culturaland demographic relevance. The main objective of this ethnographic research is to analyze the experience of being a marketer. For this purpose, observations and analyses of the dimensions that are daily driven by those marketers were developed, namely: the dimension of work, of sociabilities, of things, of memories and of performance. The last category was used as inspiration and theoretical foundation, guided by authors such as Richard Schechner (2006, 2012, 2013) and Richard Bauman (2008). Concerning the methodological instrument, which, together with everyday observations, semi-structured interviews with 21 marketers and many formal and informal conversations with other traders, customers and municipal officials, helped us to understand how marketers experience on a daily basis and, at the same time, act out what it is like to be a marketer. The theatrical perspective used in this research and inspired in authors as Erving Goffman (1985), helped to perceive and conceive the Central Street Market as a large open-air public scenario. This scenario is created, organized and assembled daily through the work and the things that are carefully commercialized, cared for, organized and exhibited by the hands of the marketers, as the artists they show themselves to be. In this diversified scenario, the knowledges and performances take place at the same time as memories emerge and take shape, sometimes impregnated in things, sometimes reflected in the marketer's own body. In this sense, it is possible to affirm that being a marketer is directly related to the performances and practices of daily life. Something that is learned by being and is taught by demonstrating, doing, organizing, decorating, piling, living, feeling in one's own body, be it the tiredness or the emotion of realizing and assuming oneself as one of them in one of the biggest street markets in the Northeast region of Brazil. It is a scenario that embraces and, at the same time, interferes significantly in the process of formation and identification of the marketers, who act as protagonists both of that market space and of this thesis.