TRANSFORMAÇÕES E PERMANÊNCIAS DE SÍMBOLOS RESIDUAIS CULTURAIS DE NIKKEYS NO NORTE DO PARANÁ

Abstract

This essay aims to understand how the transformations and permanencies of residual cultural symbols constitute the experiences of nikkey in Northern Paraná. The theme of japoneses culture has been little exploited by the brazilian scientific production, with most of the research involves a historical understanding of nikkey narratives, but not a geographical understanding. Thus, this research also seeks to fill this thematic gap and give visibility to nikkey group, which we conceive as being both native Japanese as Japanese descendants. Accordingly, we performed this research from the spatial area in Northern Paraná, which delimit two groupings of municipalities with significant presence of nikkey: Londrina – Maringa and Uraí –Assaí. We conducted 43 in-depth interviews with nikkey of these municipalities, both with men and with women, of first, second, third and fourth generation of Japanese,in other words, with issei, nissei, sansei and yonssei respectively, as the japanese terminology. We followed the methodology Sá (1996), the criterion of saturation to operationalize the fieldwork, where we did interviews until we get to a point where the content of the speech was repeated. Finished the process of interviews recording, we utilized the second procedure characterized by Bardin (1977) content analysis. This method oriented to producing inferences about the utterances of the interviewd through logical-semantic resource, selecting the most significant thematic units, which we called evocations. We identified a total of 749 evocations, which were organized and stored in a database, whose construction was carried out by the Libre Office software. The data showed that transformations and permanencies of residual cultural symbols differ by inter-generational, gendered, space relationships. We concluded that nikkey walk preferably in the constitution of a more Brazilian identity, when we analyze its inter-generational and gendered transformations, which were more significant than their respective permanencies. On the other hand, nikkey approach a more japanese identity when faced with cultural permanencies of municipalities groups of Londrina – Maringa and Uraí – Assaí. In general, the transformations and permanencies of residual cultural symbols of nikkey consist, in their experiences in Northern Paraná, by a dynamic balance of equivalent forces, occurring simultaneously between equitable transformations and permanencies of residual cultural symbols.