The party as a space of sociality: knowledge and celebrations in the rural black community of Mulungu de Boninal - Bahia

Abstract

A festive event becomes a privileged field for understanding the importance of the different forms of sociability which reveal cultural, belongingness and identity marks of a people in their way of acting, thinking, celebrating, being and being in the world. From this perspective, our objective is to understand the party as a space for sociability, for parties are understood as a social practice aimed at promoting and organizing the mechanisms that establish the individual's relationship with their culture, with a view to creating the necessary conditions to celebrating, and to relate individually and collectively in a given social context. In this sense, ethnographic research was my methodological choice, since it seems to be the path that best reflects the daily routine and special events that lead us to an understanding of the networks of meanings between the party and the “celebration mode” and of collectivity, the beliefs, the ways of living that are shared by the subject and with his social group. Therefore, celebrating, commemorating means, above all, on the gathering of people who come together for the same purpose, in which the beginning of the party appropriately constitutes itself through different paths or perspectives, because for each of those involved (the reveler, the visitor, the party-goer, the promise-giver, the devotee, the local resident, the researcher) is aroused by interests and subjective perspectives, revealing different meanings, hence the polysemy promoted by or by the word party.