Uma fenomenologia do corpo na educação física brasileira
This dissertation examines the production of knowledge concerning the body through a phenomenological lens, analyzing works presented in the Thematic Working Group on Body and Culture (GTTCC) of the Brazilian Congress of Sport Sciences (Conbrace) between 2015 and 2023. It operates on the premise that the body transcends biological and instrumental dimensions, constituting itself as an experiential, culturally and symbolically situated reality. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology provides a fundamental theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the body as a subject of experience. The research, anchored in the phenomenological method, mapped and analyzed the selected works through description, reduction, interpretation, and comprehension, delineating three units of meaning body, expression, and culture aesthetically articulated through Newton Navarro's artwork Vento Nordeste, which functioned as a phenomenological device. The first chapter establishes the epistemological foundation of the investigation, engaging in dialogue with Bachelard, Popper, Merleau-Ponty, and Morin. It critiques Cartesian rationalism and scientific determinism, proposing a non-Cartesian epistemology that values imagination, subjectivity, and sensory experience as constitutive dimensions of knowledge. Bachelard provides the basis for a science open to the sensible and the poetic, while Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the lived body as a medium for accessing the world, thereby substantiating the advocacy for a "new educational spirit" in Physical Education that integrates reason and sensibility. The second chapter presents a phenomenological cartography of the examined production. The unit on the body addresses experiences such as pilgrimages, yoga, and artistic expressions, revealing the body as a field of meaning, memory, and subjectivity. The unit on expression focuses on manifestations such as dance, circus, and capoeira, understanding gesture as language and the production of pre-verbal meaning. The unit on culture examines corporeality in contexts such as quilombo traditions and martial practices, highlighting it as a locus of memory, identity, and belonging. The analysis identifies a predominance of researchers from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), a national distribution of the production, and a recurrent vocabulary centered on terms such as lived body, intercorporeality, and being-in-the-world, alongside a methodological combination of phenomenology with ethnography, art, and discourse analysis. The concluding considerations reaffirm the potency of phenomenology to reimagine Physical Education as a sensitive, ethical, and political field. By valuing lived experience and the diversity of knowledge, this approach overcomes reductionist perspectives, repositioning the body as the origin of meaning and relation to the world. The proposed reinvention entails re-signifying traditional practices through a logic that integrates rigor and imagination, technique and poetics, concluding with the urgency of a Physical Education committed to listening to differences and to epistemic justice, in which the lived body remains an inexhaustible source of knowledge and transformation.
Fenomenologia, Corpo, Educação física, Epistemologia
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte