"No galejo da remada": estudo etnográfico sobre a noção de aventura em Brotas, SP

Abstract

To investigate the use and development of the idea of adventure in brasilian sports field was the main goal of this study. Due to the enormous variability of the contemporary experience of adventure, I tried to follow the developments of a local version from where doubts about its specificity emerged. I started, then, on how this notion was thought and rationalized and, at the same time, on its practice in the city of Brotas (São Paulo state), self entitled the Brazilian capital of adventure. The study of adventure in this ambiance, undeniably embodied, led me to put my own body to work for its understanding and to focus on rafting practice in Brotas, as the condition of possibility of this experiment. However, during the experimentation I realized adventure held the sporting component only as one of the possible elements of its exploring. While making the effort to put in words so many angles, objects in dispute, categories of accusation and self praising discourses that circumscribe the hues on the concept of adventure I ended on acknowledging that the main concerns of adventure in Brotas regard not only the amateur sport, but also the professionalization of tourism and, before it all, an environmental project. Through the problematization of these themes, "adventure as work" came up as an unpredicted matter but a core question to the ethnographic research. And I noted that it is compromised with a peculiar notion of nature and that it is produced in opposition to the concept of radicality. But that, even though the exaltation of nature produces the detachment of radicality, the last one is regained as the contemporary notion of adventure is created so that, and it then demands, a certain type of tourist and a specific kind of worker, the adventure conductor, whose practices are related not to the avoidance, but to the facing of certain risks, mingled with the notions of safety and technique.