Modos de gestão em um sistema cultural: negociação, religiosidade popular e ecos romanizadores

Abstract

This study s main goal is - wihtin the context of June Festivities of the Saint John the Baptist Catholic Community of Jardim Bela Vista, city of Goiania, state of Goias - to understand how Catholicism, through the institution of a biblical-catholic culture influences the behavior of actors within the context of a traditional Saint John celebration. By recreating symbols an rituals and giving new meaning to others, the Church s agents move the true meaning away from the Saint John festivities the one in which folklore, popular Catholicism, symbols and pagan rituals prevail and introduce a new meaning based on the principles the official Catholicism. Then, it places Catholic masses as the most important rituals of the festivities, reducing the folklore to a very little expression in face to all the liturgy that occurs during the nine days of celebration. With a purifying speech, the Church s agents try to reduce the presence of popular Catholicism and folklore by selecting the few symbols and rituals that must remain in the festivities. The priest and the church pastoral representatives are the ones who define the limits of religion, determining popular events, which symbols and rites may be retained by the memory. In spite of the dispute between official and popular Catholicism (the later in the memory of the popular religion agents) and the hegemony of the first within the present context of the festivity, one can observe that it is not only a Church celebration although there are efforts to believe so but also a festivity popular Catholicism, which although shy, resists changes and survives in the minds of older people, searching for support in traces not destroyed by updated Catholics. And to understand how religion operates within this system of representations, beliefs and expressed values implies in dealing with speeches of different groups, rituals and symbols that are recreated until they reach a cultural system representing: a Romanized expression of a popular festivity.