Namoro, gravidez e casamento : repensando família e moralidade a partir de duas localidades amazonenses

Abstract

This ethnographic work results from interviews, social interactions, observations, and reflections - recorded in field notebooks - with residents of the following Amazonian communities: Lago do Limão (Rio Limão) – Iranduba/AM and Osório da Fonseca (Rio Paraconi) – Maués/AM, between the years 2017 - 2021. The aim of this work consisted in accessing, through the life trajectories of the interlocutors, patterns of morality stemming from the social context in which they grew up and the influence of these patterns on how they formed their own families. Notions such as dating, pregnancy, and marriage were explored in the interviews as a methodological strategy to encourage the interlocutors to narrate their lived experiences regarding these concepts. In this sense, dating and early pregnancy emerge as an emic perspective in intergenerational narratives. I add to the notion of pregnancy a connection with the gender perspective, which emerged from the speeches of the interlocutors. Finally, marriage is presented in some accounts as a means to achieve freedom, recognition, inheritance transmission, and to confer responsibility on those who have offspring. It was observed that the various ways in which families and kinship can be formed in Amazonas state are linked to a web of moralities (actions, practices, discourses, and values understood within a social group) that do not isolate families in an atomized core with purely economic functions, but rather in relationships of intergenerational care and neighborhood relations. Therefore, this work contributes to the studies of Family and Morality in Amazonas from a relativized perspective, respecting the complexity of the experiences of diverse social groups inhabiting the rural areas of the Amazon.