Maracatu é candomblé na rua

Abstract

This dissertation investigates the relationship between Brazilian traditional popular cultures and the production of contemporary urban space, taking maracatu de baque virado as its main empirical and theoretical thread. Starting from an epistemological reflection on the urban, the study narrows its focus to the Brazilian context and to the ways in which these cultures construct, update, and dispute meanings, memories, and territorialities within the city. The research also emerges from an autobiographical and intellectual concern: the realization that academic training in geography, in the institutional context experienced by the author, has offered few tools to think about popular cultures as legitimate objects of geographical analysis. One of the central aims of the dissertation, therefore, is to make explicit and elaborate the kind of geography that arises from the author’s everyday practice as a cultural geographer and cultural activist, articulating its theoretical, epistemological, and methodological foundations. From this perspective, the work is structured around three interconnected axes: a theory of knowledge and of the urban, from which a method is derived; the historical trajectory of maracatu; and its contemporary experience in Belo Horizonte. These axes are interwoven in order to analyze how tradition, invention, reproducibility, and resistance are articulated in the constitution of this cultural manifestation over time. Maracatu is understood not as a fixed or essentialized object, but as a historical form in constant transformation, whose continuities and ruptures are mediated by social, economic, symbolic, and political processes. Within the context of globalization and the expansion of cultural circuits, the dissertation examines how maracatu becomes part of a contemporary network shaped by phenomena such as cultural appropriation, the fragmentation and displacement of identities, the formation of artistic groups, spectacularization, and insertion into economic circuits. These elements are not seen merely as distortions, but as constitutive dimensions of the culture’s current functionality, which also carries critical potentials and disputes over meaning. Belo Horizonte occupies a central place in the analysis. A planned city without a consolidated carnival tradition until the early twenty-first century, Belo Horizonte has, since 2009, undergone an intense process of reinvention of festivity, in which maracatu de baque virado plays a significant role. The research presents this process as a cartography of material and subjective flows, in which memories, bodies, sounds, affects, and cultural politics intertwine, producing new urban cultural landscapes. Finally, the dissertation argues that multiple territorialities are at stake in this process. By bringing together epistemology, history, and cultural practice, the study seeks to reveal insurgent methodologies and critical potentials that persist within traditional territories mobilized through cultural identities. At the same time, it questions what is able to endure of these virtues within the contemporary context of displacement, hybridization, and interpenetration of cultural systems, contributing to a more complex understanding of contemporary Brazilian cultural geography.