The Estate Narratives: an ethnography of the fandango caiçara and their cultural "loss"

• Grant number: 11/15798-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: July 01, 2012
• End date: June 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Anthropology
• Principal Investigator: Luiz Henrique de Toledo
• Grantee: Gabriel Bertolo
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project has as its main theme the development of a research on the Fandango caiçara centered in the seaside town of Cananea-SP and seeks to discuss the ethnographic point of view their native conceptualizations, such as the notion of "pessimism" of the masters. I accept in principle two points of view, an "internal" and other "external" to observe what is commonly called a "culture caiçara." From the point of view there is seen outside a certain literature covering the subject, and more contemporaneously some actions of the state sector and NGO-inducing "cultural policy", which establish relations with what I call the internal point of view, the native population of their own. Similarities and differences streamline all of these relationships around the phenomenon fandango. From this, these diverse views on the Fandango will be taken here as native perspectives, and, instead of using terms like "popular culture" and "folklore" in a coded key sociological debate known, will be taken as native categories of operating several discourses in conflict. Other common notions such as "transformation", "rescue", "maintenance" and "preservation" also dictate cultural formations and popular spoken about conditions of production and reproduction of the Fandango caiçara and its surroundings.