Le carnaval des écoles de samba au Brésil

Abstract

This article analyzes the carnival of Brazil’s samba schools through different dimensions. It aims to understand carnival as an artistic and cultural phenomenon in its commercial breadth and touristic resonance, through the city of Rio de Janeiro, its formative locus and also the site of its national and international projection. With this aim, we seek to elucidate certain key characteristics of samba schools as a unique social reality – their social heterogeneity, their artistic and expressive nature, as well as the complexity of the processes of commercialization that run through them. We also aim to outline the main conceptual contributions that the study of Brazilian carnival has brought to the social sciences in general. In doing so, we note the central place occupied by samba schools in the construction of the very idea of a Brazilian carnival throughout the twentieth century. The ways in which identity has been symbolized through cultural expression changed significantly at the end of the twentieth century and the start of the twenty-first, clearly demonstrating the diversity of expression in Brazilian carnival. In this new context, we analyze the re-signification of samba schools, which nonetheless continue to express a Brazilian singularity on the international stage, namely: a means of conjugating differences by placing them in tense, dynamic relation to one another, rather than by dissociating and contrasting them.

Keywords

• carnival
• samba schools
• symbolization of identity
• cultural diversity
• Rio de Janeiro
• Brazil