THE THE FESTIVAL OF SÃO PEDRO DE MACARANI-BA

INTERPRETING THE TRADITION'S IDENTITY AND RELIGIOSITY

Abstract

This article aims to present of the Festival de São Pedro de Macarani, which took place in 2018 through participant observation, the exercise of dense description and the analysis and interpretation of the acts and elements that compose it. Macarani is a municipality in the Middle Southwest of Bahia, 600 km from the capital Salvador and close to the border with the State of Minas Gerais. The Festa de São Pedro has been celebrated every year since 1921, in honor of the patron saint of the city, and has been writing its tradition for over a century. Choosing a Party as an ethnographic object opens up several different possibilities of approach. We will carry out an exercise of interpretation of the Fest de São Pedro in two lines of analysis – as a religious expression, focused on the dimension of the sacred, the ordering of the senses and connections with the church and the mystique of the city and another, as an expression of identity, historically constructed by classifications and social positions and by the expression of local memory, in which both point to different levels of social life, to the universe of beliefs and practices shared in space and time, constituting a coherent system of collective self-recognition, reaffirming in the realization of the Feast of São Pedro, his belonging to the same community, the same tradition, a social ethos.