As narrações ausentes das parteiras anciãs do Rio Grande do Sul: um resgate emergente feito em coletivo

Abstract

The present investigation is an approximation to the narratives and life's experiences around a women's trade: midwifery, understanding that these women are the holders of popular feminine knowledge, sustained until now by oral transmission, observation and experimentation, from generation to generation. They are experiences wasted or left aside from the non-existent and produced as absences by modern science. This is a thesis that works from the nonconformity produced by the capitalist, patriarchal and colonial ways of doing, and the positivist forms of modern science where we do not find tools for social emancipation. Against this we use the southern epistemologies, community feminism and ecofeminism to develop a sociology of absences and emergencies that rescue the diversity in the social experience of the elderly midwife and the collective work involved in this research, to achieve an expanded present and a contracted future. The methodology of this thesis is narrative, exploratory and qualitative, has extensive field work carried out collectively with the "Grupo de Resgate de Parteiras do RS" constituted by young midwives and doulas in the tradition, in the months of march to august 2017, where seven elderly midwives from different cities of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, quilombola women, afro-descendants and european descendants were visited. We worked in each encounter with the techniques of direct and comprehensive interview, and participant observation, videos and audios were made that resulted in seven life stories about the office of midwifery and a general mapping from twenty living older midwifes in this state. This research is guided by two general questions: 1- How are the absent and emerging experiences identifiable in the life stories of elderly female midwives? 2- Why and how does it become necessary to rescue these popular feminine knowledge? For the analysis of the results we worked on three axes: the realization of narrations that make present the absences in the words of each midwife, the categorization of the popular feminine knowledge, knowledge of the pachamama and knowledge of the body from the proposal of the knowledge ecology and the absences sociology, and the analysis of participatory and group work from the sociology of emergencies. In the conclusions, a possible dialogue between popular feminine knowledge and academic knowledge was assessed as necessary extension and translation work.