Semiotics of Cultural Heritage: case studies in the transitions from the liturgical to the popular drama in Brazilian folk traditions

The tradition of medieval liturgical drama, far from being limited to its cultural, historiographical, and/or even archeological importance, can be evaluated also by its evolution towards contemporary folk manifestations. The Officium Pastorum, side by side with the Officium Stellae, are examples of liturgical dramas that, long crystallized in fixed literary forms in most of the European semiosphere since the Middle Ages, continued to evolve in oral forms throughout centuries first in Colonial and them in independent Brazil until today. The liturgical topoi and tropes of those dramas discussed by Karl Young in his Officium pastorum : a study of the dramatic developments within the liturgy of Christmas (Young, 1900) were greatly enriched by humoristic contributions similar in nature to those identified by Mikhail Bakhtin in his work Rabelais and his world (Bakhtin, 1984) as carnival and grotesque realism. Nonetheless, another most important addendum to the liturgic references is a theme particularly important to the Ibero-American and North-African imagery: the religious wars between Christians and Moors during the 800 years of Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula and that ultimately led to the apparent collapse of the spectacular Al-Andalus civilization and its actual transition into the rise of Portugal and Spain as the first transoceanic empires in world history. If a superficial approach to the permanence of the Moorish x Christian dichotomy might suggest a prodigious case of anachronism, a deeper and more careful analysis suggests that its survival can be easily understood once the category “Muslim” is held as a metaphor to “Paganic”, thus allowing its immediate identification to the imagery of the enforced conversion of Native-Brazilians and African-Brazilians into Christianism since the Colonial Era. The present article will focus in some of the popular dramas that traditionally belonged to the liturgical Christmas festivals, and that today suffer a strong trend either to completely disappear suffocated by mediatic culture or to be somehow incorporated into it by means of permanent and commercially structured rather than seasonal and spontaneously organized presentations. One of them, the Chegança – a term that might roughly and tentatively be translated as The Arrival – involves some dozens of performers that give life to a play with more than ten characters that act, sing, dance and improvise around orally transmitted and memorized texts and songs. The plot can be roughly schematized into the meeting in the sea of a lost Christian ship with a Moorish vessel, that offers help but demands the Christians conversion into the Muslim faith in return. After the refusal of the Christians, a conflict ends up with the defeat and conversion of the Moors, and the safe arrival of the Cristian ship to firm land. The verbal, musical and performic texts will be analyzed also according to the principles of the Semiotics of Cultural Heritage project and canon proposed by Eero Tarasti (Tarasti, 2012), besides discussing some of the gender, social and ethnic tensions expressed in the syncretic text in the semiotic perspective proposed by the cultural studies of Stuart Hall (Hall, 1980, 1986).
País: 
Brasil
Temas y ejes de trabajo: 
Semiótica y antropología
Semióticas de la performatividad
Institución: 
Universidade Federal do Cariri - UFCA
Mail: 
ricardo.monteiro@ufca.edu.br

Estado del abstract

Estado del abstract: 
Accepted
Desarrollado por gcoop.