“Cada entidade é duma forma, nenhuma é igual a outra, então cada uma tem uma forma diferente de aprender e fez lá no passado pra trazer pro nosso presente”: pedagogias da congada no contexto de produção das identidades, diferenças, territórios e saberes em Lambari/MG

Abstract

Congada is a traditional popular festival that takes place in several regions of the country, especially in Southeast and Midwest Brazil. Despite all the attempts of making it featureless, the festival resists in Lambari (south of Minas Gerais) and annually, on May 13th, occupies the city’s streets with its drums, dances e songs in praise of its saints of devotion, such as Santa Efigênia, São Benedito and Nossa Senhora do Rosário. The present research aims to find which roles this popular manifestation assumes in the constitution of identities and how players experience this process of cultural, political, human and pedagogical formation. The research is qualitative, with explanatory nature. The methodological instruments chosen for the survey were participant observation, field diary and semi-structured interviews with those who take part of Congada. The post-structuralist theory gave the basis for the research, which sought to know the subjectivity and identity’s processes the Congada participants build and to understand how race/ethnicity e gender questions intertwine and constitute themselves part of this development. Besides that, it aim to find what kind of pedagogies the Congada festival powers in the formation, transmission and reframing of knowledges. Assuming the identities’ formation as a place of disputes, it was possible to detect different ways of thinking (and experiencing) the meaning of being a “congadeira/o” (the player of the Congada). Religion question was one of the deepest struggles that prevailed through almost all the research. With the post-structuralist literature support and the collected interviews, it was possible to know how Congada’s participants activated these elements (formation of identities and of non-formal knowledge transmission) and in what ways they enable the Congada's permanence and resistance as a popular manifestation and as an occupation of public space in a different way from the usual and daily life.