Quem comanda os trupés?: disputas simbólicas pela “tradição do coco de roda alagoano”

Abstract

This work investigates the symbolic disputes fought by masters and masters, leaders of youth groups and playovers around the legitimation of a "tradition of the Alagoas wheel coconut". The delimitation of the theme arose from the observation of musical and dancing expressions of the coconut wheel in urban and rural spaces in different cities of Alagoas. I considered the local connections of my interlocutors with the phenomenon of intense field-city migration and the most extensive – global networks. It is intended to investigate, through symbolic disputes, the resignification of this tradition in the production, circulation, reception of knowledge and the power relations that go through these moments, the intersection between generation/gender/ethnicity/social class and space in popular culture, and the construction of the social memory of the communities in which the research is being developed. The methodological approach is qualitative, associating principles and techniques of Oral History and Ethnography aligned with the intersectional approach. To understand this object of study, we will go through central concepts that guide the study of popular cultures, legitimation and delegitimization processes, discourses of justification, territoriality, resignification and reinvention of popular cultural manifestations and the social construction of collective memory. Thus, what we had as results is that there is a diversity of ways of understanding in the reinvented traditions that resignify the coconut in Alagoas. We cross a field of disputes for social and state recognition, public policies and political clientelism, entering into discursive devices of ethnicity and representations of social roles that allegorize gender in dance.