Artes de fazer a feira: práticas e representações de negociação na feira central de Campina Grande (PB).

Abstract

The practices of the people reveal peculiar forms of sociability and interaction and they are constituent of different social spaces. This work takes the daily practices of negotiation between merchants and customers to evidence the symbolic aspects (gestures, actions and speeches) of the social interactions and of the changes that grow in the multiples spaces of the Feira Central of Campina Grande. In this sense, it looks to differentiate of other works that analyze the free markets in the Northeast stating from a perspective predominantly mercantile, in that the economical relationships are stood out. The choice of the Feira Central of Campina Grande as point of the research for this work is justified in first place for its historical, economical and social-cultural meaning, not just for the municipal district, but for the whole area of the rural Northeastemer. On the other hand, the Feira Central is configured as a permanent market and diversified, already distant of traditional Feiras, marked by the countless resulting contradiction of the process of modernization of the Northeastern urban nets. The use that I do of the notion of negotiation inspired in the works of Goffman and in the perspective of the microssociology, it allows us to analize the actions and the social actors' representation, and the rituals of changes that develop in public. The negotiation show us the impressions and coherent information with the intentions and they're necessary to a good or positive ending of the interaction. The actions of the people that "fazem a Feira" ("make the fair": actors that participate of the daily construction of the fair), have their spaces as stage and scenery for the negotiation plots that involve symbolic changes and of merchadises, it allows us to understand the appeal and/or maintenance of the Feira Central of Campina Grande as place of social interaction face to the specificities and social-historical forces that part their small spaces without disarticulating them or disaggregating them.