Relações de trabalho na comunidade Tikuna em Manaus (AM): um estudo de caso no bairro Cidade de Deus

Abstract

This work objects to understand the forms of indigenous organization in the city, in particular, the relations of work built in the territorialization process in Manaus by the Tikuna community. The built of the theoretical and methodological process of this research was based in a multidisciplinary perspective, with a qualitative and exploratory character. It was done open interviews with 23 social agents, in addition with direct observations in the community and the use of field diary, during the period of May 2007 to May 2009. In this study was observed that the Tikuna people migrated to Manaus due to some reasons such as, search for work and education to children looking forward the improving the quality of life. In the city, formation of community arises from shared feelings based in ethnicity and identity, permeated by kinship and solidarity ties among the Tikuna. In a second moment, the shared experience of several difficulties such as insecurity, unemployment and the lack of basic infrastructure in the neighborhood where they live, are motive to strengthening of a political and ethnic group identity character, characterizing the building of a specific territoriality. With the formation of Wotchimaücü Community Association (WCA), located in Cidade de Deus neighborhood, the indigenous people participate of an autonomy process whose cultural and identity characteristics are reformulated according to the own rules of the group, directed to an instrumental character in search of benefits to community. The work relations built by the subjects in the city can be divided for being constituted in the outside and inside the community. The sorts of works that are built outside the community are characterized by informality, individuality and precarious work, characteristics of the city capitalist world. The sorts of work observed inside the community are those established in the specific territoriality process, constituting themselves as alternative ways of work, configuring also in politic articulation as strategies of affirmation and visualization of the Tikuna in Manaus. That is what we called of cultural artistic work, being based in ethnicity and collectiveness where it is observed a satisfaction of the social agents in relation to their work, for this is not separated of their world. In these ways of work the Tikuna are still subjected to the precarious work and informality, for these are activities that depend on an exclusive labor market. Concluding this essay, relations of work built in the city by the indigenous people persuade us to reflect about the own nature of work conception lived by the modern man that live in the cities, based in change values and in separation of life world (family, leisure and culture), culminating directly or indirectly in the explosion of problems that ruin the biosphere and human life.