A epifania da contemporaneidade do milênio: um estudo da superstição em Luís da Câmara Cascudo

Abstract

Historically, the superstition distrusted by religious, philosophical, and scientific institutions established as absurds beliefs, improper cult or ignorance. The absence of logical or rational structure, inevitably, triggers its disappearance. However, the superstitions remain in contemporaneity in continuous and autonomous manners. The objectives of the present thesis are to analyze this phenomenon through the Potiguar intellectual from the beginning of the 20th century, Luís da Câmara Cascudo, increasing the common considerations about these manifestations. In face of these considerations, the hypothesis is that religion is an unfolding of superstition. The term christianism, for example, selected certain superstitions legitimating them to achieve and maintain specific interests. Despite its distinguishing status, its major coverage in front of religions makes one been seen as inserted in another. The bibliographic review of the author’s ethnographic work on superstition aligned with other thinkers, this research emphasizes the existence of clear and functional logic, responsible for the maintenance and prospection of the phenomenon. Existing in the thinking structures of popular religiosities the superstitions remained in the collective memory, bringing to the present the ancestry from humanity, maintaining formulas, habits, and cosmovision from distant times. This dynamic would be comprehended by the expression contemporaneity from millennium, suggested by Cascudo. It is fundamental to this study the interpretation of time as the duration of permanence and acting past conditioning the present acts. It was concluded that the superstitions established as social norms developed through fable function as well as religions. Its autonomy in face of institutions grants major acceptability even if in an unconscious way. The superstitions, present since the primordial times, still play a fundamental role in contemporary thought. The survival status of the superstitions is the result of their functionality despite their efficacy.