Os batuques que ecoam e ladrilham pelas ruas de Natal (RN): a Nação Zambêracatu e a experiência do estar-e-do-fazer-em-comum

Abstract

This thesis aims to learn about the experience of being-and-doing-in-common in the daily life of Natal's first and only Maracatu-Nação, the Zambêracatu Nation, with the ambition of: a) narrate how Zambêracatu's cultural and afro-religious traditions help to compose the experience of being-and-doing-in-common; b) follow the networks of sociability, the politics of familiarity and friendship and the power relations of the Nation's experience of being-and-doing-incommon; and c) discuss the reverberations of the contemporary, informational, mediatized and pandemic scenario in Zambêracatu's experience of being-and-doing-in-common, as well as in its cultural and religious traditions. To do this, ethnographic experience was used through participant observation, open-ended interviews and informal conversations. Between 2020- 2021, during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the fieldwork took place digitally and, in 2022, faceto-face. The traditions of the Nation, due to the link with the Orixás, the relationship with time, ancestry, the importance of food, the body and matriarchy, made it possible to perceive the being-and-doing-in-common in scenes of hospitality, in the idea of family and in the transmission of knowledge through orality. Their sociability, politics of familiarity/friendship and power relations are presented with conflicts, disputes, divergences, polarizations, antagonisms, coalitions, alliances and affections. When it drums in the streets, between the terror of the colonial, racist and eugenicist projects that cross the city, whether through the state, civil society or other channels, and the joy and strength of ancestral traditions, the Nation transforms the city into a shrine, making it the home of Exu. In the pandemic scenario, the body and subjectivity have been subjected to biomolecular, microprosthetic and digital technologies. In this mediatized scene, in this city of bits and pixels, devices of visibility, surveillance and control prevail, which encourage spectacularization and self-exposure. We are therefore betting on a Psychology that is built by dialoguing with cultural and religious practices on the margins of social circuits, as well as revisiting its references and moving towards the construction of other productions of knowledge.