Clio: Revista de Pesquisa Histórica (Jun 2003)
PRACTICES AND REPRESENTATIONS IN SHOCK: THE SOCIAL PLACE OF MARACATUS IN THE CITY OF RECIFE, IN THE YEARS FROM 1890 TO 1930.
Abstract
In the early years of the twentieth century, a renowned folklorist, Pereira da Costa, discussed the maracatus, predicting their likely end, mainly due to changes in society with the end of slavery and the disappearance of the last Africans. Maracatu is considered reminiscent of old practices directly linked to the slave past and, therefore, doomed to disappear. However, by compiling the lists of licenses provided by the police so that the carnival associations were allowed to parade, we noticed the existence of a significant amount of maracatus, demonstrating that the social practice was endowed with a dynamic opposed to the representations built on the Afro- descendant, notably the maracatus. The objective of this work is to discuss how these representations create a social place for Afro-descendant culture, especially maracatus, and its relation with social practices.
