Cinema afrocentrado projetada nos terreiros de Portugal

Cinema afrocentrado projetada nos terreiros de Portugal
Caboclos are spiritual entities present in afro-brazilian religions based on the concept of miscegenation and hybridism. Nkisi can be translated as “spirit”, being also figurines of sacred substances from the natural world that activate supernatural forces. The union of caboclos and nkisis and their relations between the two sides of this continuous migratory flow is the base os this performance that revisits crystallized concepts such as “creolization” and “hybridism”, in a perspective that escapes the atavism that segments societies “pure”, on the one hand, and “miscegenated societies ”, on the other hand, perpetuating the discourse of unique origins.
From the quilombolas, the inhabitants of the quilombos, I listened (especially from the local hunters) that the hunt (deers, tatus, monkeys, among other large animals) were becoming rare because the forest was not taken care of. Older women said that the rivers and springs were drying out because the population was using tap water and as no one was using these water sources, their loneliness meant their slow “death”.
This can be understood knowing that animals and forests have their own spirits. It does not mean that they are the inhabiting place of certain spirits but that they, themselves, possess their own spirit and, consequently, their own agency, even if distinct from that of humans. In Mbanza Congo I found similar narratives: many accounts mention that the Kulumbimbi (the old cathedral of Sao Salvador built by the Portuguese in 1492) lost its force and became a ruin since it ceased to be surrounded by thick forest (mainly during the long civil war between 1976 and 2002). This means that the spirits of the trees were the ones that gave strength to the maintenance of the religiosity, as Philippe Descola (1994) extensively describes regarding the Achua, who “socialize” their nature expanding the social human relations to the forest living beings.
Yala Nkuwu, the local sacred tree, presents a particularly interesting history of agency: after one of its trunks being cut it began to pour a thick and red sap inundating the old street built by the Portuguese in the sixteen century. Oral histories affirm that a Portuguese doctor, dr. Barracas, was called to stop the pouring because any cutting object can touch the tree without being asked permission and rituals being performed. In 2007 the flight between Luanda and Mbanza Congo met with a serious accident causing the death of the municipal administrator, Antônio Paciência, and the Superior of the Catholic Mission, the Italian George Azulano. Months earlier the above mentioned municipal administrator had ordered the deworming of the tree without consulting the so-called traditional authorities (interlocutors between the humans and the forest) and calling the mentioned Catholic priest for the blessing of the event. The local community has no doubt that the cuts in the trunk of the tree performed during this process are related with the tragic death of the two men.
These are two example among many other accounts that have building up my ethnographic field notes, highlighting the agency of non-human living beings, although in distinct modes.
Departing of the hypothesis that all living beings, and not only humans, engage with the world and other selves we will have what Kohn (2016) calls the “ecology of selves”, in other words, a niche where the ecological relations are not products of mechanic interactions of cause-effect between beings treated as objects but as results of interactions of “phenomenal” worlds (Von Uexkul, 1993) – ontologies linked to the perception and corporality, to intentions and exchanges between different kinds of beings. And the music, how it flows and provoque the trances in/by the spirits?
By observing, thus, the relationships between diverse beings under this perspective, we will not have a clear distinction between a world void of intrinsic meanings, on one side, and humans as the only beings capable of culture on the other side, occupying a hierarchically superior position and being the only beings capable of giving meaning to the world (Sahlins, 1976:12).
What some authors have been pointing out, even if though distinct modes (Deacon: 2003; Haraway: 2003, Latour: 2004) is the fact that “intentionality” (and, thus, representations) are not privileges of human beings and that the biological world is constituted by the ways that innumerable beings – human and non-human – perceive and represent their environments.
This implies a radical changing of perspective, because “meaningfulness” will not be exclusive of humans and an anthropology that takes this into account will not be the anthropology as we know it today, becoming a discipline that articulates several distinctive human attributes, as language, culture, society and history, and uses them as tools to understand the variety of living beings.
Assuming this position allows us to observe the diverse ways humans are, in fact, connected to wider living worlds and to critically think how this assumption transforms what means to be “human”. As Kohn (2003:6) mentions, “This is not an appeal to a sociobiological reductionism, on the contrary, is a claim to expand the scope of ethnography. An ethnographic focus not only in humans or animals, but in how the interactions between humans and animals explode that closed self-referenciated circuit”
This approach is not exactly new (to rethink concepts/categories apparently opposed and to rethink binaries as nature and culture and, specifically, about the universe of non-human beings) but has been widened in the recent years. Mainly after the second half of the last century, this field of research was developed in anthropology following the dominant paradigms of Western science, being by assuming nature and non-human beings as a field of human knowledge – a direct inheritance of a structuralist Levi-Straussian anthropology (1975, 1989) , being through a relational field, in which the affects of these relations are highlighted in the social, material and ritual/religious spheres of diverse human groups and societies as, for example, in the classic ethnographies of Malinowski, (1935) or Evans-Pritchard, (1940).
“In these analysis the nature is the fundamental link to the human existence and knowledge, being described and analysed as a stable and univocal universe but with differentiated and less sophisticated forms of agency than those of humans. Nature, therefore, is conceived as a stable reality shared by the human diversity” (Scaramuzzi, 2019).
These movements, which have been rethinking the boundaries between the concepts of nature and culture, take us, inevitably, to a (re)elaboration of approaches that allow questioning the presumptions of non-agency, stability and homogeneity.
Authors as Descola (1986, 1996), Viveiros de Castro, Kohn (2013), among others, whose ethnographies of American indigenous populations (especially from Amazonia) have been fundamental for their own theoretical reflections, have as philosophical premises that plants and animals embody attributes that the dominant discourses of modern Western science take as exclusive of the human species. In fact, in these societies, the relationships between human and non-human happen in symmetric ways as the ones between individual and “human collectives of these societies” (Scaramuzzi, 2019). Therefore, the research of these relationships his sustained by the assumption of humanity as a condition and the non-humans beings, as the humans, occupy a position of subjects which, following the perspectivist theory of Viveiros de Castro, means that all non-humans beings see themselves as humans. Other authors as Ingold (2000, 2007, 2011) or Latour (1994, 2004) will problematize the relation among the domains of “nature and culture”, widening the scope of the discussions to dichotomies as “body and mind” or “organism and environment”, reflecting with and towards and anthropology “beyond the human” and creating concepts as weaves, lines, fluxes, even moving towards more complex discussions regarding the concept of “life” and a radical dissolution of what a Western science advocates as “living” versus “non-living”.
Anthropology, then, becomes an important analytical tool for debates regarding environmental and health (both in body and spirit) politics, for example, going beyond ethnographies of “distant” and minority populations, which clearly indicates that ontological questions also reefer to modern and industrialized societies and, thus, the assumed epistemological separations are an illusion.
In this way, thinking on the concept of life itself in a non anthropocentric mode (Danowski & Viveiros de Castro, 2014), the possibilities of dealing with environmental crisis in a macro scale seems to have more possibilities.
In this situation, an “anthropology beyond the human” (Kohn, 2013) or a “multispecies ethnography” (Kirksey e Helmreich, 2010) has gained space in the theoretical context as fields of study to be developed from the relationship with other areas of knowledge as biology, ecology, philosophy, but in the spiritaul issues too.
Cumpleaños – Shangô – casa do Tata Nkisi Julio César, Sacavém, Lisboa
Lisboa esconde muitas Lisboas. Em cada bairro há sempre um agrupamento, uma casa, um terreiro, onde podemos ouvir tambores, a goma, o batá. Onde o incenso queima e a esteira está estendida. Mas o racismo religioso não permite que se fale sobre a presença negra, presença invisibilizada. Há muitas Lisboa dentro de Lisboa.
Festa de Iemanjá, Terreiro Pai João Godinho, Casal do Sapo
Desde a manhã a casa recebia gente. Os filhos e filhas de santo, os familiares e os antropólogxs (pela tarde éramos quatro, naquele terreiro) com suas roupas brancas, flores na mão, bolos, frutas.
O Terreiro do Pai João Godinho preparava-se para a sua festa de Iemanjá. Conheci naquele dia o ogã Carlinhos, feito na casa de Mãe Stela de Oxóssi, que vive em Portugal há mais de 15 anos. Estavam também na casa os filhos do Pai Jomar, conhecido Pai de santo de Portugal.
Feita as obrigações na casa seguimos para o mar, lançar os cestos de flores brancas para a Mãe Iemanjá, odoyá!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0rKMEor2g#t=28
In Cuba spirits are everywhere, and for the religious islanders there seems to be little room for doubt regarding the matter. For religious Cubans, spirits not only inhabit their houses, eat their food and join them in their festivities, but also walk along with them on the street and take part in their daily activities, sharing their world with them. However, communication with these entities is not easy, as not everyone has the faculties to understand the distinct forms of spiritual communication.
In this respect, conversations between spirits and humans are almost always mediated by a religious figure, and these are carried out in a language distinctly different from the medium’s ordinary language (Keane 1997), with characteristics rather different to those observed in everyday use (Rappaport 1979; Schieffelin 1985).
From the analysis of a specific kind of communication, I intend to demonstrate how processes of identity formation are constructed through language inside this religious context (Edwards 2009). With that in mind, I propose an excursion through the world of the Congomuertos, a category within many of the ‘possibilities’ (or comisiones) found in the Palo Monte spirit world. This ‘excursion’ begins via a brief description of Palo Monte and its relationship to other ‘Afro-Cuban’ religions, followed by a discussion of the conceptual differences between muertosand espíritus(the ‘dead’ and the ‘spirits’). Beyond a question of semantics, this distinction is entangled with categories that, while nominally synonymous (religiososcall both the ‘higher’ or ‘elevated’ spirits as well as the more ‘earthly’, ‘attached’ kinds of spirits, muertos), refer to distinct ontological universes, and this distinction is reflected also in the speeches or talks of the muertos. As a way of giving continuity to this discussion, I proceed, in the third section of this chapter, with a description of the language used by the Palo Monte muertos. Here I will seek to analyse both the context in which it is produced (misas espirituales, initiations, consultations and religious ceremonies and parties), and the (spoken) language itself, namely from a morphosyntactic to a more pragmatic level. The point here is to highlight the ways in which linguistic innovations relate to, or juxtapose with, collective memory, from a religious point of view.
Given that Palo Monte is a Bantu-based religion extensively practised in Cuba in varied and complex ways, I am particularly interested in observing how so-called Palo Monte brujos(‘witches’), who are known as palerosor nganguleros, appropriate verbal language in order to confer an identity to spirits (rather than simply using it as a means for the transmission of messages), as well as in understanding the underlying processes of linguistic creation versus religious tradition.
In order to achieve these goals it is imperative to understand who these religious people that talk with the dead are, and who these ‘dead’ are that speak; and in what circumstances they communicate, or what compels them to do so. I will focus my attention on conversations occurring between the religious person in a state of trance (as he or she channels the muerto) and the client who seeks in religion and in the muertosa solution for a problem of spiritual or material origin.
Although other types of communication between the spirit world and humans are available in Palo Monte, namely through questions asked duringchamalongosor spell-breaking rituals such as rompimientosor rayamientos,I will deal exclusively with the kinds of conversation that take place between the muerto(the spirit), channelled by the religious practitioner (the medium), and the client. I will make use of all the linguistic knowledge surrounding the Regla– mambos,rezos(prayers) and other forms – in order to test my hypothesis that the dual nature of the verbal languages used by mediums when in a state of trance – in other words, the language of the Congo spirits – plays an extremely important role in the constitution of the religious Cuban imaginary. On the one hand, they can be classified as linguistic innovations in as much as they are languages that are no longer spoken in Cuba and which were brought into the country in a very specific social and chronological context; on the other hand they validate the ancestral character of the spirits, bestowing them with a distinctive identity.
O projeto, proposto por Ana Stela Cunha, com financiamento da FAPEMA, atua no terceiro setor, através das Associações quilombolas e a produção pautada na estética local, das comunidades da zona rural de Guimarães, Maranhão, presente tanto nas pinturas de paredes de terreiros de Mina e Pajé quanto nos bordados do Bumba Boi sotaque de zabumba.
Com a colaboração da Associação Cultural e Folclórica Vimarense (ACFV), os pesquisadores Katerina Chatzikidi (Oxford University), Camila Sampaio (UFMA), Bergson Utta (UFMA), além de bordadores de Central, Cururupu e Guimarães.
O projeto, financiado pela FAPEMA e com coordenação da Profª Drª Ana Stela Cunha trabalhará com as comunidades quilombolas de Guimarães, em parceria com a Associação dos Produtores Rurais de Guimarães, considerando as dimensões social e cultural como importantes espaços de memória gustativa, preservando modos de fazer culinário a partir dos alimentos e a tecnologia envolvida em seu plantio.
Contamos ainda com a colaboração e parceria de pesquisadores de outras Universidades, como a Profª Drª Kátia Pacheco, da ESALQ/USP, UNB, Profª Drª Nádja Murta, da UFVJM, Profª Drª Camila Sampaio da UFMA.
Finhani MC Igreja, um rapper que canta em crioulo da Guiné Bissau mostra parte de seu repertório em novo EP que está a ser lançado em Paris.
O projeto, que faz parte de um Ponto de Memória no Exterior (IBRAM), busca compreender as relações religiosas entre brasileiros e portugueses, unidos pela identidade de ascendência negro-africana.
Estaremos entre os dias 3 e 5 de julho no Centro Cultural de Carnide, atuando com a Associação GINGA BRASIL em rodas de conversa, projeção de documentários, exposição fotográfica e muito aprendizado!
Programação em Lisboa:
Jornadas culturais Associação Ginga
Dia 3 (sexta) de Julho
19:00 Sexta Roda de abertura
20:30 Filme Caboclos Nkisis – a territorialidade banto no Brasil e em Cuba
21:30 Debate com Ana Stela Cunha
Dia 4 (sábado) de julho
9:30 Palestra com mãe Antónia – a trajetória de uma mãe de santo em Portugal.
10:30 Musicalidade afrobrasileira – Mestre Chapão.
11:40 Roda
14:00 Dança Afro- Mandingo – Mafalda
15:300 Filme Mandou me chamar, eu vim! Estética e Performance nos candomblés em Portugal
16:30 Rodas de conversa: O espaço, a ancestralidade e a (re) criação das identidades: religião e pertencimento Ana Stela Cunha (UFMA/CRIA)
17:30 Musicalidades e danças do nordeste brasileiro. Mestre Chapão
Mercado Municipal do Bairro Padre Cruz
22:00 Roda e bate papoeira.
Dia 5 ( Domingo) de julho
10:00 Aula de capoeira com os instrutores do grupo ( crianças e adultos)
11:30 Roda
14: 00 Batizado