A formação de capital social no meio rural : uma análise da participação das mulheres em grupos de mulheres rurais no município de São Sepé/RS.

Abstract

The discussions about the social capital and its contributions to the processes of local and regional development, as well as to the sustenance of democratic regimes, have been recurrent since the 1990 years. This dissertation inserts itself in this debate, from an investigation that seeks to analyze the effects of participation of women in the rural field in the Groups of Women created by EMATER/ASCAR-RS, in the municipality of São Sepé, in relation to their access to the social capital and in which way this has been altering their ways of life and their position inside the families and rural communities. The referential of research discusses: i) the main theoretical approaches in relation to the concept of social capital, taking back the work of Bourdieu (1983), Coleman (1988) and Putnam (1993); and ii) the relational perspective adopted in this research, according to which the social capital is perceived by the access that the individuals have to some resources socially valued by means of their sociability networks. The work also presents a reflection about the gender relations and the creation of participative spaces directed to women in the rural field, as well as their implications for the access to social capital. The research was developed from a phenomenological perspective that seeks to apprehend the meanings that distinct researched subjects attribute to their experiences. We used several research techniques to perform the data collection, among them there are the direct observation of monthly meetings of the groups of women, the application of questionnaires and the performance of semi-structured interviews with the participants of the investigated groups. We also performed a documentary research in meeting minutes, folders and documents of EMATER and Municipal Government of São Sepé. From the data obtained through the questionnaires, we constructed a socio-demographic profile of the women who integrate the groups and their relationship networks. The interviews revealed, in turn, the importance that the groups assume in the lives of these women, inasmuch as they provide that these women establish other types of social bonds (extensionists, trade unions, cooperative) and have access to resources that were not available before their entry in these spaces (information, trips, courses, learning, etc.). The investigation allowed examining the participation of rural women in groups and the repercussions of this process in the territories (rural communities), whose results point to a greater access of rural women to information of different nature (rights, public services, use of new informational technologies), besides the reinforcement of their sociability bonds and the expansion of their connections with actors external to the groups, what rebounds in the expansion of their social capital.