Migrantes Libaneses Drusos em contexto paulistano: entre rupturas e continuidades

Abstract

This doctoral thesis aims to analyses and to undestand how Lebanese and Druze immigrants located in the city of São Paulo live and meaning their migrant condition focusing their insertion in brazilian society. This insertion of immigrants is conceived as a set of actions and social processes in which these individuals build boundaries, set limits in this external interaction with others and internally maintain and recreate representations and strategies of ethnic identification in their relationships with a new social structure. The theoretical and methodological perspective underlying this thesis is similar to contributions from certain authors Azzam (1995), Cuche (1999), Cohen (1988), Khuri (2004 e 2005) Leenhardt (2002) e Martins (1973). In this doctoral thesis, the Druse Lebanese migrants are conceived as an ethnic group. The investigation and analysis of the object were based on the construction of a hardwon, unprecedented, international literature review on the Druze, resulting from travel between Brazil and Lebanon, several trips to the country of origin, participation in events organized by the Lar Druso Brasileiro (LDB) in the gleam that permeates 2007 and 2012, and also from oral reports of certain men and women immigrants, residents of the capital of São Paulo, arriving between 1950 and 1990. The reseacher’s also built on her experience as the daughter of Lebanese and Druze immigrants. These oral reports of immigrants and their children, added to the author’s observation as a participant in the two previously-mentioned collective events, emphatically demonstrate the existence of complex and diverse interpretations with regard to the ruptures and continuities in their Druze identification. The complexity must be assumed in order to learn and understand the boundaries constructed in the different spheres of social interaction, challenges, underlying conflicts and tensions, strategies adopted by immigrants in their relationships with others and certain internal divisions between and among themselves. The interpretive diversity in terms of the subjectivities of the immigrants points to the active role of individuals as they reinterpret and negotiate the Druze identity, under the influence of a society and culture different from their own. Complexity and diversity are dialectically unveiled with each step, giving depth to the object of the study, while reaffirming one of the hard, primeval, charming lessons of sociology: social reality is not necessarily what it appears to be. In this clash and in the search to understand its consequences, this science of societies, as the intellectual craftsmanship that it is, is justified!