Entre contadores de história tradicionais e contemporâneos: memórias, narrativas, aquisição de saberes e performances.

Abstract

This study investigates the life trajectory of male and female storytellers who live in the cities of Araguaína (TO), Marabá (PA) and Imperatriz (MA), with a view to recording their training stories as storytellers and experiences with oral narratives. The research was born from studies on memory during the “Seminar on Semiotics and Teaching”, from discussions within the scope of the Grupo de Estudos do Sentido (GESTO) and Coletivas Raimundas, a group of women teachers, researchers and writers. In addition, it is linked to the teaching experiences and the researcher's role as a subject in the practice of storytelling. As a methodology for generating data, Oral History was mobilized, taking into account both the theoretical assumptions that favor social actors from the popular classes, and the recording of the subjects' memory and history from oral reports. Of an interdisciplinary character, from the point of view of the theoretical foundations related to memory, teaching practice and storytelling, studies based on storytelling and memory support the research. For the analysis of the reports, categories of discursive semiotics are mobilized, through the bias of this theoretical approach, mobilizing above all categories related to narrative syntax, the reports of the participants who narrated their life stories and were building meanings in and through memory for the experience are analyzed. The corpus of the work is composed of reports from eight people interviewed, men and women, over 35 years old, four residing in Araguaína, two residing in Imperatriz and two residing in Marabá. Data generation took place through semi-structured interviews carried out in two stages: pre-test and in-depth interviews. The work highlights the continuity of practices linked to storytelling, having as a common reference for their training as storytellers (narrative phase that corresponds to the acquisition of the competence demanded by performance) the experience with family members such as parents or grandparents, not arising from school practices. They would, therefore, be the addressees, responsible for donating the know-how to count. With regard to their performance, they were organized into two groups, which we call traditional storytellers, who reproduce oral tradition narratives and place their work in the most familiar space, and contemporary storytellers, who incorporate contemporary media, participate in training to improve techniques for the act of telling, use cyberspace as a support for storytelling. This second group is partly made up of professors, who use storytelling in their pedagogical practice as a way of seducing young readers to a specific form of experience with literature. What the research reveals is the strong presence of this tradition in this micro-region, even if reformatted by technology strategies, considering the charm that narrative listening exerts on the recipients: spectators and listeners of all kinds.