THE BODY AND THE SOCIAL ACTION OF BABIES IN THE NURSERY

This article has as its subject the social action of babies in the context of the nursery. It is based on the idea that the body is a central category in this action and is placed at the interaction between two main areas: the children’s education and the Sociology of Childhood. To investigate the social action in the nursery, it was chosen the development of an ethnographic study among a group of babies and the professionals that attended them in a nursery in Braga-Portugal. The gathering of data was made by participating observations recorded on a field diary and on video, which allowed a very fruitful approach to the children’s everyday experiences. In this article the choice is to discuss the idea of social action by deepening the analysis from the body, understood as a component of social action.