Abstract EN:

This research is a contribution to an aesthetic anthropology in an interdisciplinary perspective, where aesthetics is questioned in relation to its socializing and individuating competences. In a constant criticism of language, this work is about performing practices of popular culture observing how communities gathered around one aesthetic (form and affect) define it, appropriate it and socialize themselves through it. The maracatu-de-baque-solto is a performing art from Pernambuco (Brazil), which was created by sugar cane plantation workers at the beginning of the 20th century. Once it was incorporated into the urban institution of the carnival, it went through formal and symbolic transformations that are now accelerated by the logics of entertainment and increasing professionalism. The first part of this work analyses the constitution of the Pernambucana society where the structure of domination is understood according to a socio-aesthetical approach. The second part is a deconstruction of the imagetico-discursive system of poverty resulting from social, political and racial ideologies in which the maracatu took form. The third part is an ethnography of the performance in its two forms: the razzmatazz of the carnival and the ordinary of more common celebrations in which it is still practised. The modes of doing are distinctively negotiated according to the logics of the spectacle and the creative processes. These resound in the brincadeira, a common notion defining the maracatu as a live spectacle and as patterns of creation. In the Maracatuzeira society, it represents a mode of being and a mode of doing based upon the demands of a personal contribution to the group in the limits of tradition. The rhythms, or singular manners of flowing, of communities, observed from the production, distribution and transmission of aesthetical forms and norms which are collectively invested, enable us to understand the making of a culture beyond the game of its institutionalization.