Peixe frito, Santos e Batuques: Bruno de Menezes em experiências etnográficas

Abstract

In this thesis, I undertake a study that primarily tries to present another reading key for the intellectual production of Bruno de Menezes (1893-1963), who gained prominence in the Amazon cultural scene as a great literary. Thus, I try to reconstitute important aspects of his life trajectory, I highlight representations of the daily life of the city of Belém coming from his social and political experiences and I focus the diversity and plurality of voices, coming from the latent interculturality in Belém of the first half of the twentieth century. In this exercise, I explore the ethnographic bias in some of his main compositions, an interpretive line chosen to resignify the studies on the black literate. In order to achieve the central objective of the research, in other words, the thesis that stitches the work, some questions became the north: What ethnographic experiences make up the life trajectories of Bruno de Menezes? How did the intellectual perceive himself and others in his writings? In what conditions and circuits did the writer conduct research and produce writings about the cultural dynamics in paraense scenarios of the Amazon? Finally, what is the importance of Bruno as a social thinker for the Amazon context in the first half of the twentieth century? The formulation and understanding of these issues are anchored in the theoretical-methodological cross-cutting of an ethnographic know-how that was aligned in the connections of Anthropology with Literature and Folklore, Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Oral History and it verticalizes in a field that literary works, folk surveys, photographs and oral reports reconstruct evidence of and about the writer on screen. In view of the above, I divide the academic text into two parts: in the first, I deal with Bruno's various paths throughout his life and emphasize established networks, which have contributed to the formation of his self-constitution and critical repertoire. In the second part, I approach three productions of Bruno de Menezes - Boi Bumba: auto popular; São Benedito da Praia: Folclore do Ver-o-Peso and Batuque. The intention is to reconstitute and analyze the ethnographic experience of these literary compositions and dare to include the black jurunense in the roll of the great thinkers about the culture in the Amazon, going, thus, beyond the literary aspect, facet which Bruno is really recognized. So, I think that from every epistemological background in which the thesis is supported, another Bruno de Menezes is unveiled, the esthete of the word is also an ethnographer of the paraense Amazon.