Patrimonialização de terreiros de candomblé na Bahia: agentes, agências e mediadoras.

Abstract

This dissertation is part of an ethnographic research of the government, documents and bureaucracy studying public policies for the heritagization of Candomblé terreiros in Bahia. The first terreiro was declared a heritage site in the 1980ties, however, after the new Federal Constitution of 1988 the landmarks of heritage recognition changed and some cultural assets linked to ethnic groups and minorities began to be recognized, especially in their immaterial dimensions. Beginning in 2003, new sociopolitical conditions for the recognition and appreciation of cultural heritage emerged, with successive listings of some “mother-houses”, federal and state agencies are undergoing broad instrumental and technical reforms; assets, now cultural references, represent the immanence of the practices of once-neglected groups. At this stage, anthropology professionals are increasingly working in government careers, sometimes in fragile work situations; their technical work operates traditionally with ethnographic resources and methods, but they face new challenges: the operationalization of public policy based on a truncated bureaucracy cluttered with documents, forms, protocols, and systems. These are simultaneously products of labor and devices endowed with agency, sensoriality, and acting through the power of humans and non-humans. Therefore, we investigate, based on Bruno Latour's actor-network theory, the legal and bureaucratic mediations in heritagization processes. Through a bibliographic and documentary review, we analyze the listing of Nagô houses, which we compare with other research and the demands that Bantu traditions must reaffirm their uniqueness not through purity, but through a blend that dispenses with rethinking the criteria for recognition and protection. It is understood the role of institutional actions, such as the GTIT - Interdepartmental Group for the Preservation of Terreiros - within the scope of IPHAN (National Institute of Historical and Artistic Heritage), and their impacts on the heritage field of terreiros with a view to producing bureaucratic efficiencies. The activities of other projects, such as Itoju, Pergunte a Onilé, and Milonga, are also reconsidered. Strategic actions by terreiro groups aim to pressure and, at the same time, collaborate with the government to overcome the structural racism that persists in the underrepresentation of cultural assets of African origin. Finally, we observe a treatment of documents, papers and bureaucratic systems that is not completely detached from coloniality, despite the efforts of both the academic discipline and part of the state's normative composition, which become agents, together with other beings and entities of Afro-Brazilian cosmology, in the task of heritage recognition.