Chaos, crisis, and the ethnography of samba schools in Rio de Janeiro

Authors

  • Renata de Castro Menezes Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

Keywords:

Rio de Janeiro. Samba Schools. Religion and Culture.

Abstract

This essay discusses the ideas of chaos and crisis in contemporary Brazil, with data from an ongoing research on the relationship between religion and culture in the Carnival of samba
schools in Rio de Janeiro. It comprises a brief introduction to Brazilian anthropological literature on samba schools, followed by the presentation of the research universe – the World of Carnival – as well as the perspectives, objective conditions and procedures that characterize the research. The discussion uses in general team materials obtained from 2017 and, in the analysis of a specific situation, individual ethnographic notes. Finally, tracing paths opened by the anthropological theories of the ritual, we seek to understand the plots in parades as critical events, which would be, according to Bruce Kapferer, those in which conflicts and intransigencies are made explicit and in which new forms of social framing can be produced.

Published

2020-06-15

How to Cite

DE CASTRO MENEZES, R. Chaos, crisis, and the ethnography of samba schools in Rio de Janeiro. Hawò, v. 1, p. 1–38, 15 Jun.2020.