O lúdico na ciranda da vida adulta

Abstract

A lot has been written and said about children and amusement, bur our challenge in this piece of work is to think about adults and amusement. If we want to be able to talk about adults and amusement, we need to go back to the emergence of childhood, the reference being the period starting from industrialization and urbanization, which is marked by a more declared feeling about childhood, by children as a social or generational group.O lúdido na ciranda da vida adulta tries to discover what generated the dichotomy between adult daily life and the space of amusement; the distinction and separation between these moments and routine are increasing. It also locates this influence of capitalist means of production in the formation of the being through the merchandizing of amusement. This piece of work shows interest in demystifying some opportunist and/or originally romantie speeches about children or adults? realities, especially those that describe a child as an immature, innocent and irrational being and that transfer and relate the space of amusement to this period only and exclusively, showing the adult as serious, efficient and strict in his attitudes. It is possible to date this existential dichotomy at the birth of industrialization processes, when man was supposed to be a work machine and not a human being, when work became the primacy in a person?s social and private life. The fundamental importance of this dissertation is therefore to introduce the relation that arose between amusement and work. The theoretical base for this study is located in the field of materialistic dialectic, as well as in the development of this argument supported by research in this area: contrary to common sense, work can be a reference point as far as amusement in human life is concerned. As to methodological option, the scheme is a qualitative research with a structural dialectic and phenomenological character, and a case study has been chosen. The locus of this research was a community composed of three blind alleys that belongs to the northern district of Porto Alegre, and where it is evident that the adults who live there, through union and integration in the community allied with a regional affinity in the origins, succeed in showing that it is possible to maintain the space of amusement as a source of vital and regenerating energy in their lives, all this through their work, street parties, competitions that are part of the Residents´ Association yearly calendar, cooperative activities, jokes involving adults and children, and a lot of happenings that the reader will discover when reading this piece of work.