Pobreza, cidadania e a política social de renda nos territórios sertanejos de Água Branca em Alagoas

Abstract

The Bolsa Família Program – PBF has been subject of different interpretations. In this paper we analyze the social effects of this public policy, thinking poverty and citizenship as categories of analysis and considering them as multidimensional and influenced by the characteristics of the modernity and the territoriality demarcation. This study aimed to clarify the issues of "social income policy" in the context we are naming, based in Bauman, Liquid Modernity. The hypothesis that guided our work focuses on the possibility of the PBF to be a policy of reproduction of poverty, becoming an obstacle to the achievement of full citizenship and, consequently, positioning itself as an instrument for maintaining the relations of dependency among beneficiaries and promoters of PBF in the municipal power. We’ve used as methodolical support some assumptions of ethnomethodology. The sampling of our research aiming an answer to our essay guiding question, was made up of 17 families beneficiary of the PBF in the municipality of Água Branca, territory of the interior of the State of Alagoas. Our work proposes a discussion of the notion of poverty in an attempt to show the need for an approach that goes beyond its purely material dimension, as well as it discusses the concept of citizenship, pointing out that it should not be limited to issues of social rights, but must also include the the subject formation dimension. We believe that this issue touches the advancements reached by the access to income that should be an instrument of freedom and material existence but that has has just the opposite direction, hampering the construction of a political subject, in a perspective of autonomy and self-determination. We conclude that the highest poverty of the population of Água Branca is the immaterial one, that makes difficult the construction of the subject of public interest - the citizen. From this viwepoint, even with the real gains of PBF, we believe that such poverty has a material and immaterial character thus furthering the reproduction of traditional power, while the society remains under the protection of the State.