Corpo de Cristo, máscaras de diabos: etnopolítica e espaços de performance nos Diablos Danzantes de Yare, Venezuela

Abstract

This research analyzes the social relations of the Diablos Danzantes de Yare, eucharistic brotherhood from Venezuelan Center-North, through which it situates and elucidates the symbolic and sociopolitical complexity of this festival and its respective social field, called the Festive Field of the Diablos de Yare. Its proposal aims to understand the experience of being in the world and the meaning production of the Diablos de Yare, in face of the assemblages and reflexivities they go through, considering their historical-social trajectory, which made them occupy the center of the party of Corpus Christi in Venezuela. Characterized as an interdisciplinary research, this study is guided by three fundamental principles, mutually influenced and organically linked, which consist of relational thinking in the social construction of research; in the “new social cartography” as a fundamental ethnography for research; and in the proposition of a possibility of praxiological integration between the theoretical references and the frameworks obtained from the empirical works performed, denominated as ensemble experience. The research was done in a small parish called San Francisco de Yare, of Simón Bolívar Municipality (Miranda State, Venezuela), and the survey collected data on fieldwork through non-directive interview, directive interview, direct observation, audiovisual and photographic records, georeferencing, and cartography workshop, as also bibliographical and documentary research. In its course, the study realize the contextual presentation of the set of parties known as Diablos Danzantes of Corpus Christi from Venezuela. It presents a dense ethnographic report about the Diablos de Yare, discusses the realization of the second life, and the Christian upcoming in the locality throughout party, and also discusses the practices of constitution, spatial distribution and activation of political and social meanings of expressions embodied in performance spaces, set up through what is defined as the ethnopolitical process of the Diablos de Yare. Finally, the research goes beyond the understanding of the feast-fact onto the apprehension of the feast-question in the evidence of the Diablos de Yare as bodies that resonate historical, symbolic and political specificities, for understanding sociopolitical and cultural processes that constitute and shape the local and the national in Venezuela.