A caminhada como objeto múltiplo: uma etnografia sobre corpo e saúde na Praça do Campo Grande em Salvador-BA

Abstract

The practice of walking is often seen as something intrinsically positive, both in the field of health and in common sense and public debate. Thought as a simple and democratic way of exercising movement and avoiding a sedentary lifestyle, walking is usually encouraged by health professionals. This thesis seeks to understand how health is produced from walking practices, declining from the assumption that the relationship between walking and health is given or that it is natural. Aiming to capture how and when this relationship is formed, methodological questions are introduced about research on walking, placing the literature of this field of work in the social sciences. At first, a discussion about the multiple ontologies that walking can assume in the same place is carried out, then moving on to the search, through the ethnographic narrative, of the strategies that walkers in the studied place use to maintain regularity in this practice and, more than that, how they produce the good walk, thought in the spinozist terms of the good encounter. Then, also from the wanderings in the field, it is questioned how care and self-care are important categories to produce a walking policy. From the ethnographic description, it is demonstrated how walking presents itself as an interdependent practice and with a strict relationship with accesses and resources. Then, from the ethnographic encounters, I put the question of how walking can produce the common, reviving the power of the public sphere and collective care. Techniques and skills related to walking are also discussed and how they change based on issues such as gender, generational markers, and temporalities, in addition to putting on the agenda how food and walking are directly linked, considering that eating so much as walking, I argue, are practices that make visible how the body is distributed in the environment, blurring traditional notions of the self. Later, it is discussed how the Covid-19 pandemic changed the ways of walking, with emphasis on the ways in which breathing differs in this period through the mediation of instruments such as masks in public places. In the end, the work resumes the relationship between health and walking, discussing under what conditions the health of walking emerges, highlighting, based on ethnographic data, that walking has an inventive and transformative potential in certain conditions that allow the practice to be a process of experimentation. It is emphasized that the relationships that are made in the walk can enable the creation of bodies open to life changes, allowing the invention of people and worlds that appear beyond previously defined identities.