A vida dos artefatos: arte/artesanato de palha na Feira de São Joaquim, Salvador, Bahia

Abstract

Straw is a kind of material very expressive in too many parts of Feira de São Joaquim, in Bahia. It composes an infinity of things used to many finallities: diferent kinds of straw composes lots of products in use or for sale at the marketplace. The straw artefacts that in its lines of life pass at that fair are constantly in social interaction. It‘s involved by a very big web of social relations and it exercises its own agency power, influencing human actions and being receptacles of the effects of that same human actions. The social life of straw artefacts at the Feira de São Joaquim, Bahia, is the high point that this work aims to achieve. We will discuss, from a biographical approach, aspects of artesanal arts, from production to its consumption, in diverse contexts. However, we will emphatically address the phase of circulation of the social life of this straw craft found in São Joaquim. The sound ethnography is an ally in doing research on things surrounded by the fairgoers and their arts of doing, by the regulars, customers, consumers, passers-by, tourists, artists and curious who circulate through this immense, intense and intriguing traditional street market in the city of Salvador. It proposes an incursion attentive to the sounds in the space of the market, as well as the images, which is why photography, an important mediator between art and science, gains prominence in the imagery chronicles that visually present the fair on the edge of the Baía de Todos os Santos, the interior part of the market and, prominently, the straw craftsmanship on which the research turns its attention. Situating in artistic, historical, political, religious, cosmological, economic and sociocultural terms the Feira de São Joaquim is part of the framework intended by this anthropological research.