Antropologia Social

Este artigo é resultado de pesquisas etnográficas que partiram da análise do consumo cultural em instituições culturais na Luz, em São Paulo, com a finalidade de apreender usos, representações e possíveis interações entre o público das instituições com o entorno e com a população local. Tendo como base observações de campo e entrevistas realizadas na Sala São Paulo, na Pinacoteca do Estado e também no Parque da Luz, foi possível conhecer usos que os frequentadores fazem da região. A partir de tal conhecimento, concepções apriorísticas que muitas vezes tendem a caracterizar a Luz ou como um bairro cultural ou como uma região degradada, marcada pela presença da cracolândia e alvo, a partir de 2005, do Projeto Nova Luz, puderam ser repensadas.

For South American indigenous peoples, music making is intimately linked to

the idea of “vital breath” as a central means of knowing and experiencing the

world—a reason why voices and aerophone ensembles are such emblematic

acoustic instruments throughout the continent. Ethnological studies have

increasingly recognized and reaffirmed this expressive link between musicality

and life, suggesting that for millennia acoustic-musical practices and

repertoires have played a key role in engendering indigenous lifeways.

However, continuing to live as an indigenous people on the continent today

requires more than ever a determined resistance to the expropriation and

violence endemic to capitalism’s seemingly relentless invasion of the geographic

and existential territories of these peoples. At the core of this resistance we find

musical practices. These range from ritual chants and aerophones to other

sound forms employed in the fight to avert annihilation. Formed in this context

of political intransigence, our collective project “The Work of Memory through

Songs” is a partial response to the request voiced by various indigenous ethnic groups to document and discuss these musical practices. In our view, the urgency and importance of such a project reside in the ways in which it engages with the aesthetic-musical forms of indigenous peoples, recognizing their diverse modes of being and acting in the world, going beyond the merely museological aims of material collection. Assisted by a diverse group of researchers, both indigenous and non-indigenous, the Sound Documentation Project (ProDocson) has been supported since 2011 by the Museu do Índio, a state institution run by the Fundação Nacional do Indio (FUNAI), as a pilot program in documenting and analyzing indigenous sounds. Currently working with six indigenous groups (Tikmũ’ũn, Guarani Kaiowa, Guarani-Mbyá, Enawene Nawe, Baniwa, and Krahô), the project comes on the heels of an extensive program of cultural and linguistic documentation (Programa de Documentação de Línguas e Culturas Indígenas, PROGDOC) already completed by this institution, and aims to attend to the need for more comprehensive policies regarding the documentation of musical-ritual activities.