SAÚDE, HIGIENE E EDUCAÇÃO NO MARANHÃO DURANTE A PRIMEIRA REPÚBLICA (1889–1930)

Abstract

This thesis investigates the interrelationship between health, hygiene, and education in Maranhão during the First Republic (1889–1930), focusing on hygienist ideology and its translation into practices and representations within the school environment. The general objective is to analyze how conceptions of health, hygiene, and education translated into the implementation, legitimization, and representation of hygienist practices in Maranhão schools, linking them to the political-pedagogical project of the First Republic. Methodologically, the research is grounded in the History of Education, with an emphasis on Cultural History, guided by the contributions of Chartier (1990), Bourdieu (1980, 1983, 1989, 1990), Barros (2016), and Castro & Castellanos (2020). The study mobilized a diverse document corpus composed of legal sources (laws, decrees, and regulations), administrative sources (reports from governors and school inspectors), and journalistic sources (educational and general press), enabling a critical analysis of hygienist representations and practices within the educational context of Maranhão during the First Republic. The critical analysis of these sources allowed for an examination of the meanings attributed to hygienism in daily school life, the identification of its legitimizing agents, and the capture of local forms of appropriation and resistance. The results demonstrate that hygienism assumed specific configurations, impacted by regional inequalities, structural precarity, and the fragility of the republican State. This research contributes to the historiography of education by showing that school hygienism was not a uniform and centralized policy, but rather a phenomenon appropriated, reinterpreted, and contested at local levels. The experience in Maranhão reveals specificities that challenge linear narratives of the history of Brazilian education, reinforcing the importance of regional readings to understand the processes of institutionalizing health and education in republican Brazil.