TESSITURAS FUNERÁRIAS: UM COTEJO SOBRE AS ENCOMENDAS DE ALMAS ENTRE BRASIL (VILA DE IGATU - CHAPADA DIAMANTINA-BA) E PORTUGAL (ALDEIA DE CARÇÃO, NORDESTE TRANSMONTANO)

Abstract

Funeral Weavings: a collation on the Dispatching of Souls between Brazil (Vila de Igatu – Chapada Diamantina – BA and Portugal (Aldeia de Carção, Northeast Trasmontano) captures the Lenten funeral rites known as Dispatching of Souls with a view on the evidences regarding the proposal of the souls in the mentioned performances. When we ponder about the subjective potency of the dead over the discursive construction of the rictus itself, we admit to the multivocality constructed by both human and non-human entities on the dynamics of a range of liminal communication which were presented on the experience of the ethnographic undertaking. The expansion of the relational field beyond tombs (in front to which the agencying produced by the souls was evident) led us to a review of what we used to understand, at first, as a devotional act dedicated to the dead by the living, aiming to relieve the purgatorial pains. Dispatching of the soul, as the thesis sustains, are communication circuits and processes that happen between bodied and disembodied individuals that aim to reorder the worlds and “existences” by proposing a weaving of reciprocities, in a way that all the ones involved, jointly, are affected by the suffrage – in ecclesiastic language suffrages are prayers for the dead. What is highlighted in our critical reading is the restorative ability in a communal scope, in which performative gestures some very specific enunciation language and places are produced, since living and dead ones, allied in the flux of sociability brought up by the ritual, have their own respective demand towards the helplessness deflagrated by the event of death. It is from the recognition of this creative complicity, supporter of a gregarious regimen of affection between bodied and disembodied entities, that other realities are constructed for both; the ritual co-habited passage zone, after being crossed, repositions them, in a fairly appeasingly way, in their own worlds. The comparative study between the Brazilian and the Portuguese modalities revealed that Villages of Igatu and Carção, respectively, narrate ways of existence of souls and constitute liturgical apparatus and framings which attend the local cosmovisions, given that the singularities on the devotions accomplished in the studied environments share a dialogue with the cultural ecosystems from which they emerge. The multidimensional poetic composition of the Dispatching of souls expose the need of an intellectual platform which will embrace the oral text in its globality, since the proliferation of signs meets, in the performative scene, a multidimensional composition which semantic connections are generated by the “body structuring” – an expression coined by Paul Zumthor, a theoretical mark of our scripture (ZUMTHOR, 2010, p. 217). Gesture, sonorities, voice, tones, melodies, body movements, dressings, musical instruments, the environment of the scene… there are many instances of significance which are integrated in a “symbolic space code “(ZUMTHOR, 2010, p.232), just like the zumthorian episteme also postulates. Dispatching of souls, thus, are included in the vast repertoire of the poetic diversity of oral tradition and our research reiterates the interrelationship between literary textuality and other symbolic systems.