Resenha do Identidades Traduzidas: Cultura e Docência Teuto-Brasileiro-Evangélica no Rio Grande do Sul, por Dagmar Meyer

Abstract

This book explores the representations of culture, school and teaching involved in the production, reproduction and reformulation of the German-Brazilian-Evangelical teaching identity in the State of Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) in the first decades of the 20th century. The discussion is based on Women's and Cultural Studies, particularly on those theories that have argued in favor of a critical use of post-structuralism. The wider framework of the investigation was defined on the basis of two assumptions. The first one has to do with the argument that "history" is a field of knowledge which is itself involved in the production of the facts and events that it supposedly analyses and/or describes. The second one suggests that we understand "culture" as a contested field in which the meanings and subjects that constitute the specificity of social groups are produced. The discussion of the representations analyzed in this study has shown that one of the marks that is constitutive of this teaching identity - the masculine gender - was inscribed on it by the German nationality and by the Protestant religion. It has also shown that the mark of "the masculine gender" was reinforced by the intensity which the rural mark (with its different meanings) has acquired in the debate which involved the elementary school and the activity of teaching in this cultural group.