As (re)significações que a festa de Iemanjá expressa ao bairro do Rio Vermelho-Salvador-Bahia: cultura e religião afrobrasileiras como vetores de (tras)formação urbana.

Abstract

Rio Vermelho neighborhood, Salvador, Bahia. This is the scenario where the present study takes place. Before the arrival of European colonizers, it was home to the Tupinambá ethnic group. After that, it went through several processes and gradually gained new guises: from a fishing village to a summer resort, it became a subject of desire for real estate speculation and at the same time it became popular among the artistic class and became a stronghold of local bohemia. As it has a fishing tradition, it gave way to paying homage to Iemanjá, the Orixá favored by the fishing community who, at the beginning of the last century, began to celebrate the day of the Queen of Waters on February 2nd, despite friction with the Catholic Church. What began in an unpretentious way became popular with the local population, gaining power and national fame, whether through the lyrics and music of Dorival Caymmi, the novels of Jorge Amado, the paintings of Caribé and so many others that we could mention. Until then, the party took place in an intimate and improvised way, but there came a point where the organizers no longer had the resources to cope with the growing demand from the public and in the 1960s the fisherman Flaviano decided to ask the City Hall for support. The process of organizing the celebration would begin there, where the State gains the status of producing and organizing agent of the festival. Parallel to these events, the state government promotes a policy of “valuing” local culture, making it profitable, which would be the beginning of Cultural, Ethnic or Roots Tourism. Not far from this, from the 1990s onwards, Salvador City Hall (PMS) began to establish partnerships with large Breweries, where they would begin to have exclusivity in the sale of their brands. Then, together with the hotel chain and other industries, the new protagonists of the “commodification” of the Festa de Iemanjá emerged. Therefore, in order to understand the vast field (which receives more than a million people on February 2nd, according to the PMS) to be studied, I understood that a cut would need to be made and so I did: One of temporal order and another space. They would be the vectors of the party. The first data is based on time where there are two notable points, which are the festive Dawn in the early hours of the morning and the delivery of the “Main Gift” in the late afternoon where a maritime procession leaves. The second vector is related to spatiality, where I choose three sites: the “asphalt”, the “sand” and the “sea”. Each with its specificities. In this way, the study seeks to establish the relationships between: festival, Afro-Brazilian ritual and the city of Salvador and its hypothesis and thesis proposition is the fact that the festivities bring urban and cultural elements to the neighborhood that influence the landscape and social, religious and affective dynamics of the place, whether through memory and other devices such as the changes and transformations of Salvador's architecture. Thus, I propose that the party brings new elements and textures to the neighborhood, as on the day of the celebration it gains new configurations and outfits that leave residue after February 2nd. Thus, I use the Ethnographic Method using a description that I call “self-participatory”, where I use the devices of “Participant Observation” and “Autoethnography”. Through dialogue with interlocutors, I seek to unveil the city based on an aesthetic language analyzed using maps, photos, footage and drawings, whether of processions, people, monuments, facades of houses and buildings and images of Iemanjá. Finally, the paintings, statues, clothing and others are artistic productions made from the imagination in order to carry out the cult of Iemanjá which, in addition to coloring the neighborhood, make up the aesthetic and ethnic image of Salvador.