A caminhada como modo de existir na Festa de São Marçal: poéticas moventes, espetacularidades e geração de outros mundos possíveis em São Luís/MA

Abstract

This writing explores the modes of existence experienced by the playful bodies that walk at the Festa de São Marçal, in São Luís, capital of Maranhão. The party, also known as Encontro de Bois de Matraca, takes place annually on June 30, São Marçal day, in the neighborhood of João Paulo. Based on this festive and walking context, the research looks for other ways of making and saying epistemic ones attentive to the wisdom of the streets (SIMAS, 2019) amidst the inventions produced by the groups of Bumba meu boi. In this context, I elaborated turns, whirls, crosses and ruminations, generating the methodological proposition of ethnowalk, a notion that has epistemic and affective proximity to the motive of thought in ethnocenology (SANTA BRÍGIDA, 2016, 2015; BIÃO, 2009, 2007). It is through the ethnowalk that I perceive the strength of the aesthetic, devotional, ritualistic, poetic and political processes nurtured in the Festa de São Marçal, mainly of the playing body in its movements and gestures settled in spiral time (MARTINS, 2021). In addition, the ethnowalk made emerge, as a methodological event, my status as a walker-ethno-researcher, which is when I walk in a festive immersion with the intense desire for the crossroads, folds, crevices and edges of the spectacular phenomenon and for the encounters generated from the to be together collectively (MAFFESOLI, 2014; 1998). The study also seeks to know the tactics elaborated (DE CERTEAU, 1994) by the slow men (SANTOS, 1996) and their bodies generated (JACQUES E BRITTO, 2006) in the urban and walking environment of São Marçal as a festive experience that generates microresistance. The pandemic context and the new typologies of partying also moved this investigation, which is about the inventiveness employed and the expansion of the festive model, deeply affecting by the pandemic. Therefore, the research aims to understand how walking activates inventive ways of existing, transforming the festive landscape of São Marçal into a space - physical and virtual - of emotional exchanges, nomadic creation and generation of other possible worlds (KRENAK, 2019; ROLNIK, 2019).