"Linguagem do sofrimento": uma interpretação sócioantropológica do Instituto Juvino Barreto em Natal-RN

Abstract

This is a research that aims to understand the way it constitutes what is interpreted as a "language of suffering" within a long-term institution for the elderly in the city of Natal. We undertake a socio-anthropological approach that, based on an ethnographic experience involving participant observation, informal conversations and narratives of old and old "residents", seeks to carry out a description of the Instituto Juvino Barreto Paying attention to institutional elements that led to the proposition of the Analytical category "Language of suffering" as a useful interpretive key for the comprehension of life in place. The researcher tries to highlight the strength of a linguistic structure that conforms to the institutional culture, revealing itself in the smell, in the fights, in the food, in the physical structure, in the bodies and in peculiar aspects of the total institution. There is talk of a structure-structuring that acted so insidious being able to profoundly affect the researcher, which led to a necessary discussion about the method of research, above all, questions of objectivity, written subjectivity and emotions that Have crossed the experience. The study also seeks to highlight forms of resistance to the language that predominated in the daily life of the elderly and older adults. Finally, the possibility that the "language of suffering" is not isolated phenomenon, on the contrary, would be linked to broader dimensions of the social, involving a state and society inserted in what Marx Weber (1999) called "Disenchantment of the World" Which, hypothetically, would cross with contemporary phenomena such as: rationalization of life, control of bodies, social indifference, insensitivity to "others", lack of recognition and precarization of existences. A scenario that is compatible with the discussions of anthropological literature on old age and aging that point to the tendency constructed that older people would be a "social problem".