Performance by the Fulni-ô cafurnas in the "Cantos dos Guerreiros Reserve"

Abstract

The Fulni-ô ethnic group is located in the São Francisco hydrographic region, in the sub-basin of the Ipanema river, in the sertão and agreste northeast, surrounded by the municipality of Águas Belas, in the State of Pernambuco. The ethnic group has four centuries of cultural contact in its history (DÍAZ, 2015), in which it has developed over the years ways of adapting and obtaining resources in a 'society of scarce means' (REESINK, REESINK, 2007). Indigenous community tourism and performances by cafurnas - which emerged in the 1980s - are forms of socioeconomic insertion in the artistic and religious context, which seek to improve the quality of ethnic life through territorial self-management through “alliances” between social groups. Therefore, the environment of the caatingas and the sertão, which is seen from the national hegemonic point of view as an inhospitable, dry and difficult place to live, gains new projections. Well, the Fulni-ô model of territorial coexistence reveals adaptations and unique means of production that gain new possibilities for symbolic exchanges and cultural production.

Generally, in the context of indigenous and ethnic tourism there is an exoticization of indigenous life (MAGNANI, 2014; GRUNEWALD, 2009, 2020), however, it is possible to highlight the cultural dynamism through practices that demonstrate a 'continuity in transformation' (REESINK, 2016), like the indigenous person who uses body paint for protection while recording the act of painting himself with his cell phone. Or, the transformation of the thatched houses that were the old dwellings and that today are used as sacred places of the ancestors and of remembrance of the historical paths experienced. Such actions show cultural contact (FERNANDES, 2009 [1975]) and the ways in which the Fulni-ô deal with their tradition (HOBSBAWN, 1997), which creatively safeguards an organization model that selects cultural characteristics and emblems (BARTH, 1969 ).

In these indigenous tourism activities, the Fulni-ô, through cafurnas and other cultural expressions, tell, sing and dance their ethnohistory, dramatizing indigenous life and performing pedagogical ways of learning for “tourists” by highlighting how the indigenous people survived during years of invisibility. It is in this way that the Fulni-ô show that there are indigenous people in Northeast Brazil with a living language (yaathe) and plural models of exercising territorial autonomy.

Paintings, cafurnas and handicrafts are shamanic ways the Fulni-ô present their tradition and a particular model of coexistence with the caatinga biome, stones and straw from the ouricouri coconut tree (Syagrus coronata), therefore, painting and braiding the straws has a meaning of dressing up in this territory that composes the sine qua non condition of ethnic identity and survival. Because, as the indigenous people sing: “Indians are land and no one will separate them!” Such an essay was produced in February 2019 during the ethnography of the doctoral research - Fulni-ô Communication Flows: territoriality, cosmology and performance, which demonstrates an articulation in the imagery production between researcher and indigenous people.