The rituals/festivals of the Quilombola Magalhães Community: on stage the performance of the revelry of São Sebastião
Keywords: Body, Ritual, Performance and Quilombola Communities.
This research analyzes the ritual symbols of the revelry of Folia de São Sebastião from their performances, as well as their interfaces with three other rituals/festivals of the Quilombola Magalhães Community. The ethnographic method was used as a methodological resource, using the field diary, participant observation and audiovisual record as data collection instruments. The revelry of São Sebastião is characterized by three periods, namely: the pre-liminal (separation-structure) related to the exit of the flag at the house of the incumbent, the injunction (margin-anti-structure) composed by the turning of the flag in the villages of the municipality of Nova Roma/GO and the post-liminal (aggregation) with the delivery of the flag at the house of the parties. The flag of the revelry of São Sebastião is the ritual symbol in its smallest (dominant) unit, not only being a representation of the divinity itself, but its presence before men with the ability to change the reality of the social group. The polarization of the ritual process occurs through the performances, in which the coat, the song for the owner of the house, the blessed table, the farewell, the sparse, the litany, the prayer and the raising of the mast (they are related to the ideological pole ) and games (sussa, curraleira and corrido), in addition to lining (they are related to the sensory pole). These performances are subdivided into the three periods of the rite, with the table blessed and the sussa being the only ones that make up the three moments. Revelry is a ritual characterized by the gift, in which the exchanged exchanges of giving, receiving and repaying occur through reciprocity and mediated by the dominant symbol (the flag). In the other three rituals/festivals of the Quilombola Magalhães Community, we have the pre-liminal period (separation-structure) in the sacrifice of the animal and preparations for the prayer, the liminal (margin-anti-structure) in the prayer and dinner and the post-liminal (aggregation ) in the lining and collective organization of the space in which the rite took place. These four rituals/festivals share the performance of prayer and forro in their ritual processes, as they come from a cultural hybridization between the two oldest rituals/festivals of the quilombola community, that is, the revelry of São Sebastião and the prayer for Nossa Senhora da Conceição that structure the other two.