Mulheres negras: religiosidade, atividades artístico-culturais, consciência

Abstract

This research sought to know the artistic and cultural achievements of the quilombola women of Coronel Xavier Chaves, who, together in an association called COSNEC (Black Consciousness Group of Coronel Xavier Chaves), seek to perpetuate, disseminate, and culture the Negro through cultural manifestations aimed at the maintenance of a religious and popular tradition, which at the present time means the values of their slave ancestors and the valorization of women. The integrates stand out, in their structure and activities for their artistic manifestations: dances, maculelê and bate-paus, congadeiras legacies, and the accomplishment of the Incentive Mass, even if in practice there is integration with other cultural manifestations. These actions were stimulated by the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988, which, through article 68, provided the blacks with new status, that is, the remaining communities became a matter of Law. The objectives of qualitative research, participant observation and data analysis through the method of discourse analysis were based on the verification of the ways in which these women recreate their meanings in the religious and artistic practices they carry out, surrounded by aesthetics and performance derived from their inheritances Afro-Brazilian women. The research also proposed to know how the relationship between art and religiosity is constituted in the activities of quilombola women, besides pointing out the details of these practices, religious and artistic, experienced by the group studied. The interweaving of art, religion and faith, of interreligious activities and cultural exchanges of the group inserted in the internal system of power relations within the Vila Fátima community and as mediator of community relations with the outside, re-significances of religious symbols and the search for their cultural inheritances in a new context, characterized by the conquest of political consciousness and becoming black, in which the identity of the group, through tensions and dichotomies, is rebuilt through its cultural practices enveloped by emotion and sensitivity.