“Este aqui é o mingau das almas”: um estudo sobre o ritual de iluminação aos mortos e o consumo do mingau de manicuera em Vigia de Nazaré – PA

Abstract

This dissertation analyses the ritual of the iluminação aos mortos (illumination of the dead) in the Vigia de Nazaré City, in the northeast of the state of Pará, emphasizing the consumption of mingau de manicuera in the context of All Souls’Day. The research takes as its point of departure the understanding of death as a social and ritual phenomenon, addressing the pratices carried out in the city’s public cemeteries as organized forms of relationship between the living and the dead, marked by material care, the circulation of affects, the production of memory, and sociability. The central objective of the study is to analyze the consuption of mingau de manicuera and the ritual of ilumination, understading this food practice as a constitutive elemento f the ritual event and as the resulto of historical processo of cultural ressignification. The investigation considers the Tupinambá Indigenous tradition as a historical matrix of reference for the ritual use of varieties of cassava and their beverages, without treating this heritage as a direct contiuity or cultural survival. The analytical focus is devoted to understanding the ways in which these references are reworked in the Amazonian caboclo context, articulating agricultural practices, culinary knowledge, and contemporary ritual uses. In this sense, the presence of manicuera in cassava fields, in domestic preparation, and in consumption concentrated on All Souls’ Day is analyzed as part of a symbolic system that associates food articulated with memory and related, albeit incidentally, to death, producing specific meanings within the ritual of “illumination.” The research seeks to construct an ethnographic narrative developed through direct observation, employing a “floating observation” approach during the period preceding and culminating in All Souls’ Day, especially in the two public cemeteries of the urban area of Vigia de Nazaré. Fieldwork included semi-structured interviews and narratives with local residents, makers of the mingau, consumers, cemetery workers, and other subjects involved in the dynamics of the ritual. Observations of the preparation of manicuera in domestic contexts and visits to cassava (mandiocaba) fields were also conducted, allowing the practice to be situated beyond the cemetery space and enabling an understanding of its insertion in local productive and symbolic everyday life. The empirical material produced between 2024 and 2025 is articulated with bibliographic and documentary research on the ritual of illumination, funerary practices, food, and popular religiosity in the northeast of Pará. On the analytical level, the dissertation engages with contributions from the anthropology of death, rites of passage, and interpretations of Brazilian relational society, articulating these perspectives with reflections on commensality, memory, affects, and consumption. It is argued that mingau de manicuera operates, in the context of the illumination of the dead, as a ritual and relational mediator, organizing forms of sociability, reinforcing family and community ties, and reinscribing the dead within social space. The study concludes that the illumination of the dead in Vigia de Nazaré constitutes a complex and processual ritual, in which food practices, material care, and memory operate jointly in the production of meanings about death and the continuity of social relations.