Collective discourses and power relations in rural youth: a case study in the Bebida Velha community, Pureza, RN

Abstract

Studies about youth have gained greater relevance in academia in recent years, expanding the possibilities of analysis of this category, consolidating the idea of youth as a political and social actor. This expansion of studies has highlighted the heterogeneity of young people, fostering research on the various aspects of youth. Rural youth are part of the diversity of social actors that make up the youth, and studying their dynamics and social phenomena has been an emerging need. In this sense, this article seeks to analyze rural youth under the concept of symbolic power (BOURDIEU, 1989), in an attempt to understand how power relations and symbolic domination are present in the lives of young people from Bebida Velha, a traditional rural community located in Pureza, RN. We used as analytical methodology the Discourse of the Collective Subject, which is a technique with qualitative and/or quantitative bias that aims to build a collective discourse based on individual speeches of the same social group.  From the analysis of the Discourse of the Collective Subject in a qualitative way, built through 15 semi-structured interviews conducted with rural youth, we realize that the main spaces of socialization of rural youth (education, work, family, and leisure groups) can be reproducers of symbolic relations of power and domination, while representing spaces of sociability and opportunities for social change.