“Arca das Letras”: itineraries of a research in the rural area of Teresina

Abstract

The debate about rural and rural-urban relations - in the representations of rural as peripheral - can not ignore inflections turned to the perspective of cultural citizenship. This implies thinking cultural policies in the countryside with the same attention given to urbanized areas, since the rural areas still do not play a leading role. We take rural and urban as categories for the classification of geosymbolic spaces, as concept and as social representation. We point the importance of cultural policies turned to rural people and, focusing on a specific policy, the Programa Arca das Letras (Ark of letters in Portuguese), of the extinct MDA, as a cultural policy which intends to expand the experience of reading texts written in rural locations. The empirical locus is the rural side of Teresina, Piauí, a Brazilian capital whose rural area is, in relative terms, the largest one among the capitals of the country. The partial results of this research point to the new investiments of the research itself, focusing on the meanings and significations that people and localities assign to the program.