Fragmented becoming. A Deleuzian reading of becoming-child in Brazil

Abstract

This research project is based on the empirical data I gathered in the course of a year (2003-2004) of ethnographical fieldwork research conducted in the Northeastern city of Recife in the state of Pernambuco in Brazil. I worked with twenty-five children, eleven girls and fourteen boys from poor, low middle-class and middle class families. The fieldwork research had been conducted primarily in educational settings. I worked once a week at Arco-Íris private primary school, Magalhães Bastos public municipal school and Daruê alungo cultural and literacy centre NGO. I started the research by asking to the children what was important for them. From their answers I selected the most recurrent ones and organised a monthly theme schedule. Each week, the children approach the theme differently; they drew, they told me a story and I filmed images surrounding the theme. With the material I gathered, I produced a DVD composed of five minutes images, sound and drawings for each child that participated most, in terms of time, of the project. I organised this ethnographical research setting with the aim of testing and exploring a series of theoretical issues with direct social and political consequences on doing research with children and more broadly with minority groups. The main hypothesis of this research project is to test the ethnographical application of the schizoanalysis concept of post-structuralist philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The schizoanalysis or micropolitics concentrates on individual singularities from minority groups before going back to dominant institutional discourses and practices. I first questioned the place of children in academic works prior to the category children be granted the status of a minority group. To answer this question I first looked at children position within western philosophical history, psychoanalytic interpretative method as well as traditional socialisation and developmental theoretical models. I also traced back the use of the ethnographical method in cultural/social anthropology and I did an historical survey of the place of children within the discipline. I then concentrated on minority group formation and its definition within academic and political discourses. I took the second wave feminist movement for the definition consolidation and implications of/on minority group formation, and its theoretical echoes within children studies in social sciences. The development of a symmetrical power relation between the children and myself is described through Deleuze philosophical assistance from the so-called "ontology process". Finally these answers also shaped the way I looked at the place of children within Brazilian history and its international media representation as a minority group through three films and one documentary from Brazil. I explored how the schizoanalysis as a method can enlighten and transform the interpretation of ethnographical fieldwork experiment. These observations of children life experiences are made through the prism of a feminist approach applying an interactive grammar in which geographic location, legal rights, socio-economical class, race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, and age are brought into consideration. This research has been conducted through the rereading of the post-structuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze's (1925-1995) concepts of becoming child, difference, experiment, affect, intuition, ethic of life, and nomadism. I concentrated on the singular life narratives, fragments and practices of seven year-old children from the city of Recife, Brazil. I divided the ethnographical material among the themes the children voiced as being important in their lives. The transformation of schizoanalysis or micropolitics into an ethnographical method directed me towards the creation of a new term corresponding to the merging of this philosophical concept with empirical research. I coined this new term Fragmented Becoming. Fragmented becoming is about the positivity of differences and the respect of each singularity as part of a Universal human condition.