The rhetoric of hygiene: emotions and feelings in school textbooks

• Grant number: 17/04684-2
• Support type: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Effective date (Start): September 01, 2017
• Effective date (End): February 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Fundamentals of Education
• Principal researcher: Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha
• Grantee: Heloísa Helena Pimenta Rocha
• Host: Rafael Huertas
• Home Institution: Faculdade de Educação (FE). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Research place: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), Spain

Abstract

The purpose of this project is the development of a Post-Doctorate research internship abroad at the Instituto de Historia (Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales) of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC/Spain), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rafael Huertas. This project is associated to the research that is currently in execution with a funding grant of "productivity in research" from CNPq, and focuses on the analysis of textbooks about health and hygiene produced in Brazil, during the first decade of the 20th century, to teach children in primary schools. We aim at comprehending the role played by the emotional and sentimental appeal in the socialization process conducted by schools and, particularly, in the investments aiming at inculcating healthy and morally accepted habits. In order to do so, we take as a starting point the inquiry on the rhetorical and discursive procedures by which the authors and editors tried to conduct how these materials were read, and tried to turn the selected themes and motifs into formative contents. Our selected references go from the history of education to the history of emotions, in an attempt to deal with the emotions and feelings by which the authors built their hygienist interpellation, taken as a set of guidelines to regulate life in society and that circulated in the school setting through the textbooks. The work plan for the post-doctorate internship aims at increasing the theoretical and methodological references that support the analysis of the language used by the authors, as they combined texts and images, intending to make obvious the emotional charge present when they dealt with subjects such as cleanliness, food, diseases and the forms of prevention of the illnesses that affect the body, as well as of those considered as debauchery.