O duelo entre Deus e o Diabo: um olhar discursivo sobre rezas/orações/benzedeiras da cultura popular brasileira

Abstract

Our work tried to capture the force that moves certain psychosocial and cultural imaginaries from the past, a force that keeps them alive even today. As this question is vast, the work focuses on a single point, which is: the ancestral practice of blessing practiced by healers and, above all, healers who take up – in a certain way – ancient words and gestures (even if they are not aware of it). To better examine this question, we conceived a corpus formed by prayers enunciated by such individuals that were found in the work of two Brazilian authors: “This is how people are blessed in Minas Gerais: a study on healing through the word” (GOMES; PEREIRA, 2004). We limit the work of discursive analysis of prayers to those that are made in the state of Minas Gerais/Brazil, because we take into account the strong Catholic tradition that exists there, even if this is occasionally crossed by religious syncretism, coming from prayers and beliefs of black Africans, victims of the curse of slavery, people who were taken from their homes and their African countries to be installed as prisoners in Colonial Brazil. As a work methodology, we used the semiolinguistic theory of discourse analysis by Charaudeau (1983, 1992, 2008). We also decided to examine the life narratives of some healers, a priest and a doctor. We found their stories in the above-mentioned book and in the work of Francimário Vito dos Santos, entitled: “The craft of healers; a study on therapeutic practices and the communion of beliefs in Cruzeta-RN”. To analyze some of them, we used concepts formulated by the researcher Machado (2018, 2020, 2022). It was she who had the idea of taking narratives or life stories as a possible discursive materiality. Machado also proposed analyzes that consider the transclass subjects of these narratives, following in the footsteps of the French philosopher Chantal Jaquet (2015). We also work, as far as possible, on some issues related to decolonization, according to researchers Quijano (1992) and Mignolo (2017). At the end of our research aimed at carrying out this thesis, we saw that our initial hypothesis was confirmed: there is a vast universe of beliefs formed by ancient psychosocial and cultural imaginaries (modified over time) inserted in each blessing; thus, the practice of healers contributes, in its own way, to maintaining Brazilian historical traditions. Here is a vast field of research, both for language uses and for discursive uses.