Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Jorge Mauricio Herrera Acuna
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | São Paulo. |
| Institution: | Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD) |
| Defense date: | 2011-03-18 |
| Examining board members: |
Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz;
Fernanda Arêas Peixoto;
Omar Ribeiro Thomaz
|
| Advisor: | Lilia Katri Moritz Schwarcz |
| Abstract | |
The aim of this thesis is to analyze how Bahias capoeira started to be imagined as a symbol of Brazilians identity by intellectuals and capoeira players between the decades of 1930s and 1960s trying to answer two main questions: which were the aspects that motivated some intellectuals from this period to study Bahias capoeira, thereby selecting some features, especially the music aspect, in the search to interpret capoeira as a symbol of regional and national identity? How some of the most influential Bahias capoeira players explored the relations and interpretations of these intellectuals and power authorities, confirming or refuting their ideas? The study follows mainly the bibliographic method and explores a wide range of source material and resources produced by the people who are the focus of this thesis. From these resources we can outline literary and scientific works, interviews, newspaper reports, memories, testimonies, epistles, correspondence, movies, documentaries and music records. Parts of the documents analyzed, such as capoeira songs and magazines, and the trajectory of some of the intellectuals and capoeira players, were organized in a chronological series. The theoretical approach was inspired by works that put their emphasis on the comprehension of the social activism and the creativity of the actors in front of coercion and limits imposed by power mechanisms. Works that looked at the symbolical construction of African purity, identifying its uses and abuses were important guides as well as reflections about disputes for cultural hegemony or about the relationships between the elite and members of popular classes. At the same time the reconstruction of the trajectory of some of the main characters contributed to establishing an important link between the cultural and the political dimension chosen by some individuals. Using the diachrony, the authors also searched to explore some synchronic aspects of the relations between the individuals involved, analyzing, for example, the wide penetration of the capoeira theme in various forms of cultural expressions. The results of this analyses point to a detailed description of how the intellectuals and States representatives began to imagine and to appropriate the popular manifestations as symbols of regional and national identity. We have identified that between these two social groups the actions were not as homogenous as it may have looked, as it were also true in the case of the capoeira players to whom the strategies revealed to be more creative and diversified. The conclusion which this work demonstrates is that the Bahias capoeira, popularized in a period of massive appropriation of the popular manifestations by the State, was also able to constitute itself as a cultural strategy, able to make the difference to people who were producing it, shifting in this manner power dispositions. In the innumerable battles that capoeira players, intellectuals and other actors were involved, they tried to maintain or shift status, always trying to harmonize the imagination they had about capoeira with the perspectives of others involved in the dispute. Fight and art of encounter and separation. (AU) | |