O carreiro, a estrada e o santo: um estudo etnográfico sobre a romaria do Divino Pai Eterno

Abstract

This study analysis the relevance of the expressions of culture through the pilgrimage of the oxcart drives that leaves the city of Mossâmedes and the surrounding areas towards the Feast of the Eternal Divine Father, held at the shrine in Trindade, state of Goiás in the beginning of July, showing how their agents are articulated in their own way of construting, reinforcing and renewing their religious and social identity. Getting to know the cult the Holy Trinity or, as it is called by the pilgrims, the Divine Eternal Father , is to immerse oneself in a multifaceted complexity, encompassing all its meanings. Restoring part of this diversity through the yearly pilgrimage of the oxcart drives necessarily implies embracing the discourse of the different groups represented in the church, or on their way there: pilgrims, priests, the people in charge if managing the sacred. These presences restore and revitalize the memory of the saint, in order to do this, they immerse themselves in the diversified interplay between the historical fact and the myth. The ethnographic analysis of the pilgrimage explains certain aspects of the systems related to the representation, beliefs, values expressed not only through discourses of the oxcart drivers, but mainly through their ritual actions. The pilgrimage reveals itself as a contemporary purpose of continuing the elements of the rural tradicional culture and the popular Catholicism, and at the same time it is presented as a possibility of dialoguing with determined aspects of the urban culture.