The image of the field: representations to farmer and to agriculture from the visual grammar perspective

Abstract

This paper aims to verify social representations to the farmer and agriculture evidenced in two multimodal texts concerning congratulations or the Farmer’s Day, published in two websites from the agricultural sector: ‘Canal do Produtor’ and ‘Portal do Agronegócio’. As theoretical assumptions, representational and interactive metafunction categories of the Visual Grammar from Kress e van Leeuwen (2006) we used, as well as the notion of context of situation, from Halliday (1989), the Theory of Social Representations of Moscovici (2009), with focus on the process of anchoring, and concepts and categories of them Systemic Functional Grammar from Halliday e Matthiessen (2004). The analysis course consists, respectively, of the description of contextual variables (field, mode and relations) in the texts, the identification and classification of processes, participants and circumstances, the gaze, distance and perspective analysis, and from the data obtained, the verification of social representations expressed in the images for the agricultural sector and its agents. Thus, the data indicated the choice for conceptual constructions which evidenced social representations to the farmer and agriculture as providers of food and promoters of the country development.