Tambor de Mina no ciberespaço: o cotidiano de Pai Denilson de Oxaguiã como forma de resistência

Abstract

This research aims to study the presence of Traditional Peoples of African Descent in cyberspace, from a multi-sited ethnography perspective. Assuming the role of a native researcher, being a priest of Tambor de Mina, I experienced and observed the interactions and daily life of Pai Denilson de Oxaguiã, priest and activist, both online and offline. In addition to mapping the digital reality of the terreiro community present in the Metropolitan Region of Belém, the study sought to understand the process of socialization, interaction, and resistance, allowing this Afro-Amazonian tradition to adapt to new technological contexts without losing its ancestral roots. The research also analyzes the tensions and potentials arising from this process, questioning how digitalization influences the preservation, innovation, and visibility of Tambor de Mina in the 21st century. The study demonstrated that migration to the digital environment plays a dual and contradictory role in resisting religious racism, here termed traditional racism. On the one hand, cyberspace offers tools for visibility and organization, creating support networks and allowing the circulation of knowledge, configuring a digital insurgency. Examples include pedagogical dissemination and the work of Pai Denilson de Oxaguiã, who constructs a memorialist pedagogical cyber-terreiro (religious center). On the other hand, cyberspace intensifies and modernizes racism, acting as an efficient tool for silencing and symbolic extermination. The findings reveal profound material barriers: most access the internet via basic Android smartphones (84.3%) and poor connections, creating a technological ceiling that limits the production of quality content. The community adapts by massively using WhatsApp (61.4%) as a lightweight digital infrastructure for internal communication. However, it suffers from structural algorithmic censorship, where 32.9% report content removal, a mechanism described as digital necropolitics. It is concluded that online racism is more efficient, combining anonymity, persecution, and automated censorship. Overcoming this requires public policies that guarantee quality digital access, critical literacy, algorithmic transparency, and the recognition that religious intolerance is an expression of structural racism. The documented resistance shows a tradition in reinvention, learning to codify its ancestry in the contemporary hybrid world so as not to be silenced.