Gestão social e racionalidade comunicativa: análise da prática cultural de coletar água mineral na fonte

Abstract

This paper analyzes how the cultural practice of collecting mineral water can reveal, with its stock of knowledge and values, historical social consensuses and, through these consensuses, reveal the interpreters community’s social rationalization level. Specifically, it seeks to answer, how this practice can reflect culturally inherited consensual horizons and how these consensus influence the ability to act under the aegis of communicative rationality. Under the focus of Jürgen Habermas’s communicative action theory, it start from the hypothesis that the consensual situational definitions underlying those of cultural practices are indicators of the social rationalization’s level of the communities of interpreters. In summary, it is understood that cultural practices express social values and knowledge that, at a meta-level, reveal the aptitude’s level of that community to communicative rationality, a fundamental element for management guided by the principles of enlightened and emancipated public interest, which here receives the name of Social Management. Knowing the level of social rationalization can be an instrument of moderation in the public sphere. Data collection was performed through bibliographic review, participant observation and semi-structured interview. The field research was carried out between September 2018 and March 2019 in the municipalities of Cambuquira, Lambari and Caxambu and 108 mineral water collectors were interviewed. The day-by-day and informal conversations with other collectors and non-collectors were noted in the field notebook. The information collected was systematized and submitted to content analysis and organized through an analysis model that divides the theory of knowledge into three major fields, in a continuum that goes from total determinism to total relativism. The model was tested in the bibliographic review on the theme of mineral waters in the studied municipalities. After the typification and comparative analysis of five historical periods, as well as the qualitative analysis of five situations collected during immersion in the field, it was concluded that the current consensual horizon reflected by the studied cultural practice presents in an ecological, scientific and affective characteristics at a meta-level. These characteristics indicate that today, these communities of interpreters have a level of social rationalization that is more decentralized in relation to previous historical periods in the World of Life, and more centered than that of the previous history period in the System.