Public space and moral regulations in a formation of a community of Germans from Encosta da Serra, Southern Brazil

Abstract

This project has the objective to investigate the socialities that link public space and moral regulations in the formation of a community. Specifically, it seeks to do an ethnographically description about the socialites and disputes that map the social, moral and political boundaries of this community - one German colony - mainly through three dimensions ethnographically related: 1) the production process of a person; 2) activities that constitute groups and territorial and historical limits and; 3) political disputes arround the morally referenced production of a public administration. For both, the field research will be conducted in a municipality located in the Encosta da Serra, Southern Brazil, strongly marked by the German colonization during the nineteenth century. It is assumed that the notion of community used by most of its residents implies, at the same time, the boundaries of the group; the social production of persons and their bodies; a particular religious and moral universe; as a bureaucracy and a political discourse referenced to it. It seeks to discuss, on one hand, with much of the literature that analyzes the constitution of social groups as associated to heterogeneous analytical processes , relative to the body, the subject, the moral and political and bureaucratic practices, and, on the other hand, with the authors that seek to analyze bureaucratic processes such as coupled to other political rationales for regulation, such as kinship, family, moral and religion. (AU)